Journalists? Scum of the earth!

The majority of people don't know many, if any, journalists. This is one of the greatest advantages in life.

Everyone presumes for some reason that journalism is an interesting and exciting job/lifestyle which, in all honesty, it isn't.

If it was, then I imagine that most of the journalists, for the music press anyway, would not be the bunch of cringingly boring, pathetic old hippies that they are, myself and selected others exempt from this wildly unjust generalisation of course.

Picture, for example, an expensive restaurant in Camden, everything paid for by a large record company, lots of free food and booze. So, you ask yourselves, what's wrong with that?

I'll tell you what. BLOODY JOURNALISTS!! This fairly idyllic scene is ruined by the fact that the aforementioned types drone on for hours about how the Waterboys have just changed their sock designer or how they saw Sigue Sigue Sputnik's guitarist (whom they know intimately — after all he wouldn't have spat at just anybody, would he?) coming out of a toilet in Regent Street.

This incredibly tedious conversation invariably continues until someone notices that there is no more wine left and then the conversation is turned to 'ligging'.

This is where they talk about the most recent, biggest, best, most exotic and hippest lig that they've been to.

In case you don't know, a lig is anywhere that they don't pay for the drinks and drinking has a vague connection with some form of business, though this is not essential.

Being hip is very important and so they play at being hipper than thou by shamelessly name-dropping and by inferring some clandestine relationship between themselves and somebody extremely secret which shouldn't be mentioned to anyone, even though they didn't actually tell you anything. Even if they did, as they had already broadcast it to a packed restaurant, secrecy hardly seems a major issue anymore.

Just when you think that this subject has been done to death the 'lig' becomes a 'blag'. A 'blag' is something like a book, record, tickets, backstage pass and so on that is obtained by lies and/or blackmail from anyone who can possibly be convinced that you are important enough to have whatever it is you are after for nothing.

You never pay for a blag. People blag to obtain items that will give them 'credibility'. 'Credibility' of course is what distinguishes the hip from the wilf.

Journalists being probably the single biggest bunch of wilfs on the planet, they need all they can get.

By this point in the evening the record company PR is slowly trying to oust the assorted hacks out of the restaurant and to the gig of whatever totally and completely no-hope band the frontal lobotomy patients, otherwise known as the A&R Department, has decided to sign up and turn into mega-stars.

Only about half of the journalists invited will actually get to the gig, the other half having gone to the pub, home or to a nightclub for the remainder of the evening.

If the band are any good then once they start playing, one of the writers for the pop columns invariably says something like "Oh well, I at least expected a melody but then I must be getting old".

This is reasonably funny, as the majority of these columnists are much too old to know anything about music and are really there to write about any possible smut that will soon be on the market.

But this is fairly irrelevant anyway as ninety-nine point nine per cent of the time the band is gutless, saccharine slop that's about as interesting as the scribes that are watching them.

After the gig a plastic bag is shoved in your hand containing the band's biography and soon-to-be-released LP. All very boring, but at least you sell the LP, and the biogs are always good for a laugh, being written by record company press officers who are almost always failed journalists.

Well what more can I say? If that doesn't put you off having anything to do with journalism then nothing will.

The Editor has just informed me that I am extremely boring and that this piece of drivel just proves the fact. But then what does he know, he's a journalist...

Chris Holland-Hill, 17, has been a journalist (to use the term loosely) for some ten minutes. Before that he was a juvenile offender and guitarist with a selection of noisy and obnoxious bands. He firmly believes he is in the Romanes.