Dave Rimmer Interview
Dave Rimmer is the author of Like Punk Never Happened: Culture Club and the New Pop, one of the finest chronicles of ’80s pop music ever written. Dave was a writer and editor for Smash Hits, The Face and an assortment of other publications in the early ’80s and had a front row seat to everything going on in UK pop music at the time. The book was recently re-released, with a new foreword by Neil Tennant.
Can you please briefly describe the book?
It’s a music journalist’s memoir, a pop biography and a description of a cultural ecosystem all rolled into a tight episodic narrative with a generous pinch of mischief.
How did you come to this subject for a book? What made the topic so interesting to you?
As a writer and editor for Smash Hits, The Face and an assortment of other publications in the early 1980s—writing, reviewing, interviewing—I had spent four years at the centre of the pop phenomenon that the book was conceived to describe. I’d interviewed all the important artists at various stages of their careers, had travelled with them, got to know them, seen them at their best and their worst. I had not only watched how the pop machine worked but had myself been part of the mechanism. Every music journalist is/was, of course, but not all of them think about it very much, and Smash Hits really did put you at the heart of pop music.
It was a relatively benign context from the artists’ point of view, and that bought you a lot of access. But that didn’t mean that the only things I learned from the explorations into pop music that it allowed me were Smash Hits kind of things. By the time I sat down to write this book, I was ready to move on, but before doing so I wanted to sum up the whole mess.
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
In my teens—late ’60s to mid-’70s—I read all the music papers and the underground press and thought, “I could do that!” I’d been fascinated by music since I heard “Please Please Me” at age seven and knew I was good with words. It wasn’t any kind of ambition, though; I expected to work in theatre. In 1978, I finished studying Drama and wandered around Europe for a while. Back in England I was thumbing it up north to see my parents when I got a ride from a guy who owned some record shops. I said I wouldn’t mind working in a record shop, and he said to come and see him when I got down to London. So I did.
For the next two years I was acting in a touring theatre group, but when I wasn’t rehearsing or on the road, I’d work in a record shop in Hackney, London. There was a chart return shop up the road, which got so much free stuff from record companies that we couldn’t compete on mainstream product. So we specialised in less mainstream fare—R&B and jazz funk imports from the US (the kind of stuff that today gets called Rare Groove), reggae (Janet Kay, Dennis Brown, Joe Gibbs), and independent post-punk (Gang of Four, Joy Division, Throbbing Gristle, Swell Maps). That two-year period of listening to everything and discussing it with colleagues and customers added a breadth of knowledge to the depth I already had, as a fan of certain artists and areas. Without it, I might never have had the confidence to start writing.
In May 1980, I found myself at a Berlin café table with my brother’s then girlfriend, a well-known actor from a famous family. She was complaining bitterly about the quality of a script that Truffaut had sent her. I made sympathetic noises and decided right there on Savigny-Platz to give up acting. I was a limited actor and knew it. Really, I wanted to direct theatre. But you need lots of other people willing to commit to your idea before you can get any work done at all. Writing, you could do on your own.
Back in London, I heard that someone I knew had got the backing for a weekly London music paper. So I persuaded him to let me write some stuff and that was my foot in the door. I observed how it all worked, made a few contacts, and my stuff got noticed. Soon I was writing for a bunch of mags—but from here on the story of my career as a music journalist is all splendidly recounted in the new afterword of Like Punk Never Happened!
I spent most of the ’80s as a freelance music journalist and feature writer based in London (solid relationships with Smash Hits, The Face, Time Out/City Limits and one- or two-night stands with dozens of other newspapers and magazines, from The Guardian to Harpers & Queen). In the late ’80s I relocated to Berlin, where I did a variety of things, including working for an annual music industry conference, getting involved in the techno scene, and writing another book: Once Upon a Time in the East, about adventures on both sides of the Wall in the last days of the Cold War. By the mid-1990s I was still contributing to mags such as The Wire, Mojo, and Mixmag, but mostly focused on travel journalism. I put together about two dozen city guides for Time Out—Berlin, Prague, Budapest, Lisbon, Marrakesh. For a while, I lugged a laptop as an early digital nomad, literally living out of a suitcase, which was exhilarating but exhausting. In the early 2000s, I decided to base myself in Berlin and not run around quite so much, though I carried on also working in London and Morocco for almost another 10 years.
And of course the money drained out of travel journalism, just had it had drained out of music journalism. So where I am today is living in Berlin, working as a production editor on business publications and occasionally doing a bit of documentary film work, which has been the only area where the music journalist me has survived. I was still travelling a lot, though on my own dime, until the pandemic put a stop to it.
Why did you decide to expand the book now? What was that process like?
Neil Tennant, a very old friend, as well as a colleague in the early ’80s, had acted as my agent and editor for the original edition. In 2018, Faber published his One Hundred Lyrics and a Poem. While he was in contact with them, he suggested they republish LPNH, and if they did he would write the foreword. The book had been more or less forgotten at Faber, but they looked at it and found that it was good. So here it is again, 37 years after its original publication. Writing the new afterword was hard, partly in finding a voice that would harmonize with the voice of the 29-year-old me, partly because it was difficult writing during lockdown. For a while I thought that was just my problem, and then I found a social media discussion among music journalist friends and colleagues, all describing the same difficulties I was having with lockdown’s lack of stimuli slowing down thought and reducing deadlines to mere abstraction. No one seemed to be getting anywhere with anything. Not just me. The experience left me with a huge respect for people who manage to write books in prison.
What are a few tracks / videos / films / books we should also look at, in addition to your book, to get a better sense of the topic?
Ha, Almost Famous? Simon Reynolds Rip It Up covered much of the same transitional territory, if rather more long-windedly. Boy George’s Take It Like a Man, excellently ghost-written by Spencer Bright, is a laugh-out-loud riposte from the other side of the divide. In Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres, Kelefa Sanneh frames his section on pop music as a response to Like Punk Never Happened and summarizes its arguments very well.
What’s one tip that you’d give someone looking to write a music book right now?
Don’t give up your day job.