Chris Welch was one of the star writers on music magazine ‘Melody Maker’ in the Sixties and as such, was right at the heart of Swinging London, meeting all the leading bands of the day. Read about how he first became a music journalist below:
I left school when I was 16 and I always wanted to be a writer. At school, they told me I had no chance of being a journalist - my ambition was far too high! But I went to the Youth Employment Office and they had a vacancy for a messenger at ‘The Scotsman’ in Fleet Street, so I was thrown into Fleet Street in the late Fifties, which was wonderful.
I went to all of the newspaper offices, delivering photographs, and I had to collect the weather forecast, because there were no fax machines in those days. The Air Ministry roof was in Kingsway, so I would go there and a gentleman in an RAF uniform with a handlebar moustache would come down in the elevator and present me with a Roneo’ed [early photocopy] weather report! I would take this incomprehensible, badly printed chart full of isobars back to ‘The Scotsman’, where they had some primitive electronic means of transmitting it to head office.
I also ran the switchboard, which was a recipe of chaos! It was a PBX switchboard, full of plugs and wires, and we had a hotline to the House Of Commons, which was fantastic.
It was a very exciting time. I was there for three years, ending up as Editorial Assistant, and I actually got to write some reviews. My first review was Louis Armstrong in London and it was a great thrill to see it in print. All these unsigned, highly personal reviews would appear in the national newspaper and little did they know, they were written by some 17-year-old office boy!
I left Fleet Street to be a reporter on a local newspaper, the ‘Kentish Times’, for three or four years. It was much quieter than Fleet Street, but they were all young staff, earning 20 pounds a week and buying second-hand cars, and it was one big party. I would cover courts, road accidents, robberies, bring and buy sales - all news stories. Then a local club started and bands like Zoot Money, Graham Bond and the Rolling Stones played there.
By the mid-Sixties, the music scene was getting very exciting and first I started writing about the local bands in the paper - Bern Elliott and the Fenmen, Sounds Incorporated - and then Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and the Stones. Everybody said, “You should write for a music paper”, so I wrote to the ‘NME’, but they didn’t have a vacancy. So I decided to try ‘Melody Maker’ and miraculously, they had one vacancy for a reporter.
Check back at the weekend to read Chris’ memories of his first days at ‘Melody Maker’.