As Neil McCormick finally opens up about his relationship with U2, what other rock critic glitterati might see Tinsel Town calling?
Neil McCormick's reluctance to talk about his close friendship with U2 has long been a source of wonderment to his professional peer group. But the truth had to come out one day. And now the Daily Telegraph rock critic's star-studded back-story has finally reached the big screen, with the imminent release of an actual film about it starring actual actors (Killing Bono: in a cinema not far enough away from you for safety on 1 April, and we are all the April fools here, because this is actually happening) Hollywood's bandwagon-minded dream factory will no doubt be planning to capitalise on the burgeoning public appetite for music journalists' personal stories.
Numerous cinematic possibilities present themselves. Looming large among these is The Mulberry Empire ? an ill-thought out all-action update of Philip Hensher's 2002 novel of 19th-century Afghanistan, in which The Observer's Kitty Empire fights to establish a Kabul-wide chain of luxury leather-goods retailers in heroic defiance of the Taliban. Then there's A View to A Gill, in which Roger Moore might take on the once-in-a-lifetime role of long-serving Independent albums reviewer Andy Gill. (A yet more edge-of-the-seat sequel, A View to AA Gill ? in which Portia De Rossi plays a sexy lesbian assassin hell-bent on making the Sunday Times TV critic pay for his unacceptable attacks on Claire Balding ? may already be in development).
Finally, and with the best chance of Oscar recognition, how about Barton Funk? The Coen Brothers remake to end all Coen Brothers remakes, in which Joel and Ethan re-imagine their own classic film as a doomed attempt by the Guardian's Laura Barton to turn her debut novel into a 1970's Blaxploitation screenplay. Of course, any readers with hypothetical celluloid landmarks of their own to put forward are assured of an appreciative reception.
Journalism at the highest level is all about knowing your limits. Mariella Frostrup will dispense well-thought out advice with a welcome undertow of moral stringency, but she will not actually come and stay in your house to iron out the difficulties you're having with your mother-in-law's persistent early-morning phone calls. Robert Fisk will discuss tactics and ideology with Osama bin Laden, but not actually go to the pub with him. Similarly, it is not my place to pass critical judgement on Killing Bono, and even if it was, the psychological scars left by Cameron Crowe's rock-hack fantasia Almost Famous ? a moral and aesthetic travesty on a level only achievable by someone who was actually there at the time ? have not yet healed sufficiently to make that possible.
What I can do is bring to the attention of a wider audience an incident which seems tailormade for the attentions of Tinsel Town. On the face of it, last month's Wire magazine-facilitated Off the Page music journalism conference in the congenial north Kent seaside surroundings of Whitstable should have had little to offer the big screen. But beneath the calm surface of a successful and innovative event, which all those in attendance seem to have enjoyed, there lurked a sinister undercurrent.
Late on the first evening, Friday 11 February, guests at Whitstable's Continental hotel (where all the speakers were staying) awoke to the sounds of an unpleasant altercation. Ken Hollings, hoping for a good night's rest (or even just four minutes and 33 seconds of silence) before delivering his talk on "The Post Cageian Universe", summoned the night-porter to investigate. This dutiful individual knocked on the door of the room in question, only to get a nasty punch in the face for his pains. The row within continued to escalate to the point where a radiator was ripped off the wall and thrown out of the window, only to be followed, shortly afterwards, by an adult male, who ? having either jumped or been pushed out of the window concerned ? landed with a sickening (though mercifully non-fatal) crunch on the balcony below.
That this balcony belonged to the room next door to David Toop, whose scarily erudite but ultimately enthralling recent book Sinister Resonance answers to the capsule description "a literary celebration of things that go bump in the night" is just one of several details in this story that come under the heading of "you couldn't make it up". As it happened, the protagonists of the violent domestic dispute had nothing to do with The Wire, but think what fun a real master of the screenwriting game ? a Julian Fellowes say, or even the people who write Poirot ? could have by giving this promising raw material a couple of subtle tweaks.
Bump up the crime to an actual homicide and shift the action to one of those struggling rural piles Ruth Watson works so hard to keep open, and you have all the ingredients for a first-class country-house murder mystery. The list of suspects would be endless. There's a great role for Sean Bean as The Wire's editor-turned-publisher Tony Herrington ? a determinedly no-nonsense northerner with a redeeming weakness for the word "freighted". Richard Ayaode and Chiwetel Ejiyofor might both be in the running to play brilliant, but notoriously snooty Turner-prize nominee Kodwo Eshun, who used his Off the Page platform to propose a controversial ? and socially divisive ? new approach to pop history, whereby the significance of musical sub-cultures should be graded according to their ability to attract the attention of "Oxbridge graduates". And it's hard to imagine anyone other than Hollywood's own Anne Hathaway in the role of Nina Power, the idealistic young philosophy lecturer hovering on the brink of asking an awkward question about whether this event's big promise to throw questions open to the floor (thereby throwing over the old-school elitism of the printed page for the democratised debate of the blogosphere) was really being kept.
Fantasy film adaptations aside, the fascinating thing about the Whitstable Continental hotel brouhaha is that it was not referred to once (at least, not in the hearing of any of my network of poorly paid informers) by anyone on the podium over the next couple of days. A dramatic personal event embodying the extremes of human psychosis is exactly the kind of thing The Wire's employees are rigorously trained to overlook. Indeed, on the magazine's more ascetic fringes, there is a tendency to view any kind of individual charisma as somehow morally suspect. Why else should the work of Lester Bangs have come under fire at one round table discussion for being "too entertaining"?
In his Words of Advice to the Lonely Critic, published by The Wire in the run-up to the Off The Page event, Tony Herrington insisted that "the music critic must keep the musician at arm's length at all times". This almost monastically hands-off approach places the magazine firmly at the opposite end of the journalistic spectrum to Cameron Crowe and Neil McCormick's more explicitly self-indulgent friend-of-the-band strategy. In GCSE or university coursework, it would be traditional at this concluding moment to claim that "the correct path probably lies somewhere in between the two". Out here in the real world, we need all the entertainment we can get. With this in mind, let us hope these two comically irreconcilable parties continue to pursue their cosmically divergent strategies to the wildest extremes imaginable.
Melissa Joan Hart Bianca Kajlich Giulianna Ramirez Ashley Greene April Scott
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