A Journalist Wanting Words

In my career I have interviewed Oscar winners and 15-minute pop stars, political heavyweights and hip comedians. Down the wire and in smoke-choked bars, I have filled notebooks with scratchy field recordings. From heroes like Bill Hicks to Serbian warlord villains, I have asked questions, stolen quotes.

More than 20 years of interrogating have given me good technique. I research. I charm. Give me 30 minutes and a couple of drinks and I will always get more than the usual tired procession of recycled anecdotes.

However, I am not used to being the interviewee. Hundreds of hours of professional questioning make it feel uncomfortable when it is time for role reversal. Being grilled on the BBC One O’ Clock News holds none of the terror of meeting an unknown journalist for beers and a personal probing.

Beyond contractual obligations, I do not turn down today’s interview because all that experience means there is too much empathy for a journalist wanting words. Given our career trajectories, Matt and I run deep with respect for regional media, the hard slog of provincial press. Having been there and dealt with too many no-listers with egos the size of planets makes you want to be better.

Come lunch, I stop work. Take a break from writing tomorrow’s speech, walk along the canal to my primary local. Buy a strawberry beer, sit in the pub’s library corner and wait on the journo. The strangeness of speaking to inland Oz via a meeting a hundred yards from my home is not lost on me.

The editor of You Magazine is funny and clever, good at what she does. Almost instantly she has me talking about curries with Matt, the black humour of newsrooms and invocating the Cosmic Joker. Both of us ruminate on God’s penchant for fatal punchlines. She offers up the comforting thought that by writing 1001 Ridiculous Ways To Die, instead of dying in some absurd accident, I have probably guaranteed a death 50 years in the future: “Grandchildren around the hospice bed.”

Bonding over Underbelly leads to questions on canalside life and the Lady Love. They do not get dodged. I bore on the spatial shock and casual splendour of Australia. Drift from stories of my lifelong llama curse to views on religious hubris and the evil of hippos. We discuss the interconnectedness of all action, the loneliness of solo authoring and what Matt and I might write next. The paranoiac bible gets a big thumbs up. I just hope when it gets written up, she uses my words on mayfly days and eating the extra chocolate biscuit.

One of the marks of a good interview is it feels like this one – conversation, not interrogation. At the end of it, I come out respecting and liking my questioner. I am even sufficiently charmed to agree to being photographed on the blue bridge. With my narrowboat neighbours behind me, I look into the massive lens and surprise myself with a smile.

‘I am not a Morbid Man’

There is a full page in today’s Sunday Express on the new book. Allegedly written by me, it starts with the wonderful line: ‘I am not a morbid man.’ A disparate brigade of former acquaintances would argue with the ferocity of blood-frenzied sharks against that claim, but they would be wrong. The worst I could be called these is occasionally melancholic. My life now is about love and laughter. Mayfly days ripple throughout everything I do.

The feature generated one vitriolic email talking of ‘absolute DISGUST’ and ‘sick journalism’. Everyone is entitled to an opinion. I always have several. They include facts are facts and up for reporting; if you do not like something, do not buy it and while I would never wish to sadden anyone, on any topic I am entitled to think different, very different.

The Power of The Sun

I have often secured coverage for those I represent in The Sun. Although rightly detested by anyone who remembers Wapping, Hillsborough or the days when they used to call gay members of the clergy ‘pulpit poofs’, it is still the largest English-language newspaper in the world. More than that, it is a place to run and win heart and mind lobbying campaigns. If you want to defeat some ridiculous piece of legislation, you use The Sun.

There is a case for saying that if left-wing campaign groups could put aside their prejudice and cannily construct stories which The Sun would feature, they could see some real successes. The complex dance of articulation between the title’s journalists and their audience is both pull and push. Be as snide as you want to be about the paper, but never underestimate its readership or its readers.

If upon landing in America I was ‘detained’ thanks to the little bit of trouble I got into with the CIA when writing Secrets & Lies, I would bloody well want The Sun campaigning for my release. Yes a lead in The Independent is nice when you are up shit creek, but the firepower of Murdoch is actually more useful. Especially when it is combined with The Sun galvanising an English mob to raise a fighting fund and ensuring pub conversations feature the line: ‘Those CIA are bastards, nabbing that writer just because he wrote about them sinking a ship in the Thames’.

Even though 1001 Ridiculous Ways To Die was always intended primarily as a book for Australia and Matt and I were not doing any publicity in Britain, The Sun decided to cover our publication. Under the headline: ‘Way to go!’ the story started:

‘Some people have had such bizarre deaths there’s a danger you could die laughing just reading about them.

A new book has rounded up hilarious true stories of people kicking the bucket in truly crazy fashion.

In 1001 Ridiculous Ways To Die by David Southwell and Matt Adams you’ll find tales such as …’

Before going on to use 15 entries from our book to make a feature.

The power of The Sun is such that from this single bit of coverage, suddenly Matt and I were suddenly appearing in papers across the globe. Our names echoing across titles in India, Thailand, Australia and the United States. There has been a nice bump in sales and the analytics for English Dreaming, English Rain are even more interesting than usual. Not exactly a case of ‘It’s The Sun Wot Won It’, but neither of us are complaining.