Journalists should not be reputation managers
On the defensive vanguard around The Last Dinner Party
“News is anything anybody wants to suppress; everything else is public relations.”
Whenever the BBC publishes an especially fawning piece about a musician, I remark that they should really send the subject’s PR team an invoice. It was, in my defence, a good joke the first time.
Entertainment hacks are not the only ones guilty of access journalism, but they are acutely vulnerable to its pitfalls. If you write something mean the risk is that flacks stop talking to you, and recent industry consolidation means there are fewer hands to feed you if you’ve a reputation for getting bitey.
That’s coupled with the fact that many who write about art are too smitten to attempt objectivity1. It may be said that real love entails a willingness to criticise, but this is easier in theory than practice.
The result is that much music writing is less journalism than free PR, a case in point being this recent piece by Mark Savage about new rock band The Last Dinner Party. A few excerpts: “The band are on fire.” “People know all the words, even to unreleased songs.” “Go and see them now if you can. Even if you have to catch a boat.”
I’ve long thought the features on the BBC website are especially poor, partly because the writing is so stilted. Worse than that is the tendency towards credulity, with writers taking interviewees exactly at their word. It’s fan service rather than journalism.
My working theory is that it’s part of the Beeb’s commitment to inclusivity, in the broad sense rather than that focusing on identity politics. You reach out to groups that are deemed underrepresented and write nice articles about them, often referring chummily to the subjects by their first names2.
These are general problems for the BBC’s features section. But Savage’s piece is also an example of the oddly defensive vanguard that hacks have formed around The Last Dinner Party since their first single release in April, Nothing Matters, catapulted them into mainstream success3.
My disclaimer is that I actually like the band. Darkness singer Justin Hawkins is right to say they are the most interesting new rock band to trouble the charts in a long time. (Arctic Monkeys strikes me as the obvious predecessor, and they emerged 20 years ago.)
The obvious quality has nonetheless been mired in an unusually speedy rise to prominence. Having formed shortly before the first lockdown in 2020, they played their first gig only in November 2021, with a follow-up performance in February the following year sparking industry interest.
Cynics have suggested that the band is the product of nepotism or some other nefarious doing. The boring explanation is more plausible: the music industry saw a product they could sell – an actually interesting rock band, and a young female one at that – and now they are selling it.
I think it’s fine, even a duty, for journalists to point this out. But the reaction from music hacks has if anything been a bit arrogant. “How else could an unknown quintet have generated such a buzz? Well, it’s the music, stupid,” says Savage.
Like others he notes that The Last Dinner Party has “spent more than a year slogging it out on the live circuit”, but this is not a long time. I’ve met plenty of acts, some of them very good, who have spent much longer gigging round London to much less effect.
You might argue that The Last Dinner Party are unusually good, and I think this is true. But it’s conceivable that the band could have slogged it round London for several years to no avail. They got lucky, as I suspect the band members might admit.
The conspiracy theories that surround the band are therefore of a piece with conspiracy theories on other topics: people want to find a design in a world that is chaotic. Deliberate shenanigans are a more comfortable explanation for many than random chance.
Journalistically this is a tougher story to sell than presenting success as a natural, perhaps even deserved, conclusion. But it’s not a journalist’s job to buttress other people’s reputations. Quite the opposite, actually.
As you asked, I do have a band. We are not as good as The Last Dinner Party. But you can listen to Chameleon Inc here nonetheless.
Objectivity in news is unattainable, but moreso for some than others.
It’s not a coincidence that calling interviewees by their first names is often a practice reserved for children in other publications. A surname on second mention puts a healthy distance between subject and observer.
An aside: Savage describes Nothing Matters as “an unbridled declaration of lust”, while singer Abigail Morris says it’s about “unbridled, untamed love”. To me the effect of the opening lines (“I have my sentence now”) and the chorus (“And you can hold me like he held her/And I will fuck you like nothing matters”) seems considerably more detached, even suggestive of a rebound relationship after being cheated on. The AI agrees with me, at least.