About those Adele interviews – with music critic Neil McCormick

I thought the Vogue interviews were brilliant; Neil thought the opposite. So what gives?

When the double Adele interview came out in British and US Vogue last month, I inhaled both pieces within an hour, tweeting how much I loved European Features Director Giles Hattersley’s in particular. 

For me, it did everything a celebrity profile should: transport the reader, for a few delicious minutes, inside the celebrity’s private world, where, like a nosy guest in a stranger’s bathroom, we might rifle through their shelves, looking for clues to their character. I found tiny moments particularly telling of how fame has altered the world’s most “down to earth” star – from Adele’s assistant magically appearing with a pair of flats to rest the singer's stilettoed feet and her look of fleeting irritation when Giles fumbled getting out of the cab, to Adele’s seeming nonchalance to an art gallery opening up just for her alone.

I also loved the way the piece captured the essence of Adele. So often these days, interviews reel off facts and statistics followed by a Wikipedia-style run-through of their subjects' life and career. Devoid of colour or movement, the subject is nothing more than a limp pile of quotes. But in Giles’ notably kinetic piece, in which everything from her posture to her accent and expression are conveyed and updated every few sentences, Adele practically walks off the page and shakes the reader’s hand. 

Then there’s her quotes, which I found so honest that sometimes I wondered, will she regret sharing that? In the US Vogue interview, she tells writer Abby Aguirre that her son Angelo asked if his mother could ‘see’ him, clearly so traumatised by his parents’ divorce that he wondered if he had become invisible. That’s a pretty brutal anecdote to hand over to millions of strangers for free. 

So I was surprised, and intrigued, when my colleague Neil McCormick – who has been the Telegraph’s music critic since 1996, and who has interviewed everyone from Adele and Amy Winehouse to Lady Gaga and Sir Paul McCartney – had tweeted almost the exact opposite.

“Worth reading both for an insight into the state of celebrity profiling, and the power of the artist. Probably best not to eat first though.

I love Adele. She's a great singer, a great songwriter, and fantastic to interview. Can't blame her & her team for their desire to control her exposure. But the cod intimacy, amateur pop psychology & abject sycophancy of those Vogue interviews does nobody any favours.”

I thought it could be interesting to have a chat with Neil and find out why we both reacted so differently to these two pieces, despite writing for the same newspaper and, I would have assumed, having a similar grasp of what constitutes a “good” piece of journalism. 

Below is our transcribed conversation, in which I also asked Neil about his own interviewing highlights from across his career and his own interviewing technique. 

EH: So, Neil, start off by telling me your beef.

NM: I am not saying they are bad pieces – I read them with avid interest too. And the reason they look interesting is because they suggest an access that we're no longer given. So they hint back at a kind of old style of very rich journalism when the journalist spent a lot of time with the subject and was given space to write about it at length. 

But it's all very much a PR coup, and to me these interviews represent everything that is wrong about celebrity journalism, or rather about the balance of power between the subject and the media, and how the power has shifted away from the publication.

Maybe they’ve bugged me so much because I’m just jealous. Vogue have struck a deal for exclusive access to the artist thereby cutting out every other publication essentially on the promise that Vogue will present her in the most glamorous and high-profile way possible, accompanied by gushing copy that might as well be a revved up version of a soft soap celebrity profile. It’s got the style but none of the substance of classic journalism. And these journalists are so utterly enthralled by the artist and their access they might as well be part of the PR team. I don’t know if Adele had copy approval but she may as well have – there’s nothing in there that can rub her up the wrong way. Adele’s mother could have written those articles. 

The crossover between the two interviews I think is also telling. The content they each got was the same. They each got a day with Adele and then they were allowed to hang around on the photoshoot and that’s it. And they both took away essentially the same piece, a wide-eyed depiction of the artist exactly as she would like to be portrayed: a perfect star with the common touch. The whole tone of the interviews bugged me. Not only do the writers tend to insert themselves far too much into the two pieces – without using that assertion of subjective personality to create any sharpened level of commentary, just a false sense of intimacy – there is no grit or gristle, only dazzled praise, with everything perfectly on message. The writers never challenge anything she says. They just tip toe around her. They present everything she says as if it’s a message from the oracle. 

I see your point. But also, now that social media has usurped the power of the publisher, what choice do publications have? Either they collaborate with their subjects and publish something they are going to promote on social media, and boost, and co-sign as a brand, or they don’t get anyone at all and their sales, traffic and cultural relevance fall further. I don’t really know, without the world deleting social media, how we get around this.

I don’t know either. That is where we are in the media ecosphere now. Things have fallen a long way from the days when artists or celebrities or indeed the big entertainment business needed the press as much as we needed them. Now any established star can talk directly to their audience and bypass the need to engage with any critical or objective voice altogether. It is probably why I was so incensed by what – let me try and be nice for a minute – were actually pretty entertaining pieces and much better written than I am giving them credit for. I mean, puff pieces, sure, but clever and compelling. But I am glad that I work for an old-fashioned paper that wouldn’t strike that kind of vanity publishing deal with a subject. Really the Vogue piece was all about the photoshoot. The copy was just wraparound.

So let’s talk about the content. You say there was no grit. What would you have liked to ask Adele?

To be honest, I would have asked Adele much more about her music and creativity which I think might have opened up different areas, and which is something that tends to get lost when musicians become the interest of mainstream celebrity journalism. But given that this is a gossipy piece about her life, I think a more challenging approach might have been warranted.

So I mean, Adele has blown up her whole life, which is her right, it’s her life, of course, but that’s what she’s done. She has left her husband and split up her marriage and then she just comes out with all this absolute guff about astrology, “Saturn return”, and lots of quite superficial therapy speak. She justifies all the pain and chaos her divorce has caused by saying "it’s better for my child if he sees me being loved." Now – as I understand it – almost all the statistics and research tell us the opposite, that actually parents should suck it up and stay together unless the relationship is particularly abusive or disastrous. People make their own choices of course, but I would have liked to see a follow-up question to her quotes on that. Or at least a comment upon them.

But do you think anyone could have really sat in front of Adele and said, “Don't you think you should have stayed with Simon for your child?” I mean, I’m not sure I would feel comfortable, or that it was my right, to ask anyone that question – even a friend. This may be a generational point of difference, as the nature of celebrity has changed so much as I’ve grown up, but I suppose I don’t really subscribe to the idea that because you’re famous you should offer yourself up for psychological examination, or cross-examination about your personal life, to a journalist. It’s not really in the public interest because they are not politicians. Although I am intrigued as to how you would have phrased it, had you asked it?

That’s a fair point. It's not necessarily your role to ask it or, indeed, for Adele to feel she has to answer it. It would be a tough question to throw in, but it’s OK, surely, to be a bit provocative? I’d probably have shifted it to an artistic themed question with something like “I hear what you’re saying, but most research suggests the opposite, that parents should stick together for the sake of the child. You said you made this album so that your child could one day understand, but is that really what motivated the songwriting, or was it much more personal, even selfish?” It’s just about prodding the area that has opened up, to see if she will say something more. But look, I’m not saying I’m right on this and honestly I don’t know what I would have done in that situation. A lot of the time you don’t know what you’ve got in an interview until you get back and transcribe it, by which time it's too late for a follow up question.  

And it might be true too that an obsequious and super friendly interview style encourages an atmosphere where she talks freely and gives more information than you might get from a more critical or challenging interview. But there was a passage in the British Vogue interview that made me embarrassed for our profession. When asked, “how long after you married did you end it?” and Adele says “I’m not gonna go into that detail…I’m embarrassed”, the interviewer writes “this is such a rare moment of non confession I fight the urge to hug her.” Adele is not your friend. You are not there to give her a hug! She avoids answering a question and the writer’s reaction is to gushingly take her side. Besides, imagine if a writer actually tried to give a celebrity a hug in the middle of an interview. It’s very indicative of the whole tone of those pieces and the deal struck beyond the journalists. 

I suppose for me, her revealing how embarrassed she was, and her silence as a result of that shame, was in itself, very honest, and told me a lot about her state of mind. And I really did find her quotes on not feeling like the best mother to her son, on her difficult relationship with alcohol, on playing her album to her dad on his death bed and not wanting to write another hit like Hello to avoid fame all pretty generous. 

The thing about Adele is she will always give great quotes, a bit like Robbie Williams, or Bruce Springsteen – some celebrities never give a bad interview, because they’re so witty, eloquent and self-aware. But the issue I had was with Vogue’s fawningness over her celebrity. My issue isn’t actually with the questions themselves, but with the way the writers present the information.

Back to whether we as journalists have a ‘right’ to ask about an artist’s personal choices. I suppose some might say that if she is releasing music and making money from said music all about her divorce, her son and her feelings as a mother, perhaps it is a journalist’s right to ask about it. Is that the approach you take with art?

We have a right to ask, they have a right not to answer. If you can frame your questions within the art, then I think it is fair. When coming up against a brick wall, I often say “to some extent, all art is autobiographical, because it stems from the imagination and experiences of the creator.” And generally people will agree with that, so then you can try and use some aspect of the art to prise open the conversation. You can probe in a friendly way. If they really don’t want to talk about something, I usually ask why that subject is off limits, and that can lead on to interesting areas in itself. But all being said, I’m not overly interested in the gossipy side of things myself, though I know publications tend to be. I often come away from encounters with musicians full of what I think is fascinating stuff about chord sequences and production choices and then my editor says “What did they say about their ménage à trois with a Hollywood A list couple?” and I think … oops.

Yes actually asking why a subject is off limits I find very effective and often much more interesting than asking directly about said subject. Do you ever care about artists sharing your work or worry about burning PR bridges?

No, I don’t believe you should let yourself worry about that kind of thing. And I actually think PRs – in Britain at least – are very pragmatic, they don’t hold grudges. I have a delicate act to juggle as I write criticism and I do interviews. Yes, I want to interview Duran Duran because I find them interesting, but I also happen to think they’re just about the shittest band in the history of mankind. So sometimes how I review their music might affect if we get the interview. But you can’t let that worry you or you would just neuter your critical voice entirely. I try to be fair, and really consider the artist’s voice and the fan’s perspective as well as my own, and anyway a feature interview is not at all the same as criticism and I think PRs understand that.

A feature interview should be a place for an artist to present their views as observed by the journalist. Besides, big in-demand artists (or the people who represent them) are always going to wield their perceived power, and limit access to reach the widest public for the minimum effort. I interviewed Adele and Lady Gaga before they were super famous, and I have been doing this long enough to think I will probably interview them again some day. When I was doing a show for a little channel called Vintage TV, I could scarcely believe the parade of former superstars who were wandering through this little studio to promote their latest work because they're back at the point where you have to sell your beast and you know the world's not coming to you anymore –  you have to come to the world. And most artists end back there eventually.

What are some of your interview highlights?

The first piece of mine that really made an impact in the UK was not a music piece. It was a story about a notorious Dublin gangster Martin Cahill, who later became the subject of a film called The General. People would always talk about him and say things like, “Ah he’s a lovely fella” then add something like “you know he nailed someone to the floor once.” If you lived in Dublin, you knew about him, and where he lived and the big robberies he was supposed to have masterminded. I mentioned it to an editor at GQ, who asked if I could get an interview and I thought, ‘Why not?’ I had done all kinds of other writing before – whilst spending years in a band trying to make a career as a musician – and I had come to the conclusion that everybody had a story to tell, and really was just waiting for a chance to tell it. So I went to his door, holding a notebook, shaking like a leaf, and asked for Mr Cahill.

I was half expecting to get run off by a bunch of gun-toting goons and rabid dogs but anyway this figure eventually came to the door and peered through a crack at me. I announced “Mr Cahill, a lot of people are talking about you and I wondered if you’d like to tell your side of the story.” And he just smiled at me. He said, “Are you nervous? Ah, now don’t believe everything you read.” And he invited me in, and he told me all about his criminal career – albeit in a kind of mischievously deniable language – and that piece led to me being offered a contract at GQ. He was a complicated man, as most people are. He was to some people a very bad man. But he was nice to me, and I wanted to convey that duality. He’s dead now. He was murdered by the IRA in 1994. But that’s another story, and I wrote that one too.

I’ve done so many interviews now, particularly in music, that it’d probably be easier to count the major stars I haven’t interviewed than the ones I have. The Nineties was really the last great era for all access journalism. I once spent a week in Tucson Arizona with Drew Barrymore. We went to the cinema, to restaurants, just hung out. She was filming a terrible Western – I can't remember what it's called. It’s really a one-horse town, and for a few days I was the most interesting thing around and had her undivided attention. I later heard she hated the piece though, so maybe that access didn’t work in her favour.

I practically got kidnapped by Keith Richards for two days in LA, cos he was bored making a video and just wanted somebody to talk to. Getting utterly trashed with Billy Joel in Detroit was also a ridiculous amount of fun. The next day his tour manager came up to me, complaining “You fucked my man!!’ Because Billy was meant to perform the next day at an Oscars ceremony and he had lost his voice after a night on the tiles with an Irish hack. It wouldn’t happen today, and not just because we are both more sober.

I started out as a teenager working for Hot Press, an Irish music magazine, in the very late Seventies and Eighties. Back in those days, bands admitted music journalists into their inner circles. You would go on tour with them for a few days, and stay in the same hotels, go to the parties, drink in the bar. And as far as I was concerned it was all fair game for the pieces I wrote. I took a photo of one member of an Irish band passed out in a urinal after a gig. He wasn’t particularly pleased but he actually loved the piece I wrote and we remained friendly.

I remember going out on the town in Tokyo with Joe Elliot of Def Leppard after a gig, and he wound up dancing topless on a bar with female fans writhing all over him.  He was a married man, and I duly noted that he eventually made his excuses and left. But it all went in the piece. But when we wrote that kind of stuff it didn’t go online or on social media so it wouldn’t go around the world and haunt them forever. They’d be pissed off for maximum a week. 

Who has been your favourite star to interview?

There’s so many to choose from, but I often think about my various encounters with Leonard Cohen. He was like a prophet, philosopher and stand-up comedian, all rolled into one. He does all the work. You just have to print what he says. What struck me particularly is that he was so gracious and kind to everybody we encountered, whether it was the photographer’s assistant or the person who brought the tea. He was a very impressive human being. Patti Smith has a similar kind of wise Buddha energy.

Have any interviews gone badly?

Well, yes, but you always end up having the last laugh, because you get to construct the piece. Sinéad O'Connor was my first ever serious interview for a big magazine – for the Sunday Times. She was so uncooperative, and I asked her to start the interview again and she said, “this isn’t an interview, this is like a conversation on a bus”. Which was probably a fair assessment of my early interview technique. She wound up wrestling with me for the tape because she didn’t want me to write it up. I was so worried after that interview because I was so green, I thought I’d fucked up my big break. Whereas now I would come away knowing I had the makings of a great piece. Experience counts for a lot. Mind you, I never worked for the Sunday Times again.

Do you have any tips and tricks?

I honestly don’t have any tricks. I never studied journalism, and I’ve had to make this up as I go along. My approach is friendly curiosity. That’s about it. But I make sure I do the research and identify four or five themes that we can talk about. And I try to think about how I can get to the stuff you really want to know, and construct a strategy for getting there in the allotted time. I also find nodding and smiling silently seems to work, to let them unspool a little, and let them know you are taking them seriously. But I can’t think too deeply about it – if you’re curious and polite and listen to what they are saying, and pick up threads in the conversation, you should be able to get good stuff. Most people love to talk about themselves, even celebrities. You just need to facilitate them. 

Finally, is there a piece of journalism you’d recommend all aspiring journalists read?

The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, by Tom Wolfe. I picked it up when I was 18, before I was a journalist, and his little vignettes of experiences interviewing people made me realise journalism could be literature, or a form of art. I still look at it occasionally when I’m stuck for an intro, and he inspires you to see how far you can go.

PS: I am now offering regular media training. If you are a publicist and have an artist/talent who needs help on crafting the best way to tell their story & present their brand to the media, email eleanorahalls@gmail.com

This week in links 

For more juice on the behind-the-scenes of celebrity interviews, listen to my most recent podcast episode in which Kathleen and I reminisce over some of the most mortifying moments working at British GQ.

I also really enjoyed former GQ editor Dylan Jones’ peek behind the curtain of the Men of the Year Awards in the Sunday Times last weekend. Amazingly, after one American star phoned him up to say she was too unwell to attend the evening’s awards (despite having been flown first class and put up for four nights in Claridges) and would only feel well again if she was delivered £5k in cash, a work experience dutifully ferried it over to the hotel in a brown envelope. 

What do Freud and Stalin have in common? The fine art of the Succession insult. Read Tom Nicholson’s excellent examination of why Jesse Armstrong’s writer’s room is so damn good.

And I can’t stop thinking about the Lost Daughter, the new Maggie Gyllenhaal film starring Olivia Colman and Dakota Johnson as “unnatural” mothers, exploring the taboo of not finding motherhood pleasurable. At one point, Dakota Johnson’s character asks Olivia Colman’s character how she felt, running away from her kids for three years. “Amazing”, she replies. It’s out on Netflix later this year.

Thanks, as always, for reading Pass the Aux! You can email me thoughts, feedback, or questions at eleanorahalls@gmaill.com, or find me on Twitter @eleanorhalls1 and Instagram @elliehalls1