Writer Jon Hotten has been on both sides of the review fence. Here he reveals the extraordinary disconnect between being a reviewer and a reviewee…
My friend and estimable rock music writer (amongst other things) Paul Elliott has been asking everyone he interviews if they can remember their worst review. They all can, in great detail, no matter how long ago it was – and it’s usually a long time.
One irony here is is that the reviewer has probably long since forgotten about it. I’ve been writing them since 1988, several hundred of them. Quite often, back in the day, I’d be talking to someone at a gig or lig or bash of one kind or another and they’d say, ‘You reviewed our album’ – a sentence to chill the blood of course, but one that’s probably karmically due, or at least deserved. ‘Oh, did I,’ I’d say, with a sickly smile…
The first time I realised the effect that reviews had came when the manager of Cinderella, a long departed hair metal band who I’m now quite partial to, phoned and told me that the album I’d just slaughtered (in shamefully po-faced manner, I recall) had shipped 50,000 copies and he was coming round to ‘shove each one of them up your ass’.
I’ve been on both sides of the fence now. The experience of being reviewed is utterly disproportionate to that of writing one. No matter how transparent the act is to you (here are the usual thought processes of the reviewer: ‘oh shit, is that due tomorrow/thursday/whenever’; ‘that’s a funny line, I’ll get that in somehow’; ‘how good does this review, as the reviewer, make me look?’) it’s still impossible to be blase about it. When I knew that the Guardian was reviewing my book Muscle, I stayed up until midnight, obsessively updating the website until it came on there. Oh yeah. That’s what being reviewed is like. Forget all that stuff about it not ruining your lunch. You won’t be eating any.
What really hurts is when the reviewer hits that sore spot, the part that you know in your heart is true. The worst I’ve ever had was when Rachel Cooke reviewed Muscle in the New Statesman. I looked at it in Smiths on the concourse at Waterloo Station. Ruin my lunch? More like count my balls. I’ve read it once. Never again… ‘Don’t worry,’ my editor said cheerily. ‘No-one reads the New Statesman’. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But I’ve read it…’
You can laugh about it eventually, and I imagine if you’ve written American Psycho or Money, your victory is absolute. But there’s still that bit of you that sees yourself saying, ‘Oh hi, yes Rachel, lovely to meet you. You reviewed one of my books once…’
The best story that Paul Elliott’s been told so far comes from Paul Rodgers, singer in Free and Bad Company, a man with perhaps the most effortlessly brilliant voice in rock. Bad Company had just released Rock n Roll Fantasy, a song that Rodgers felt recaptured the early, freewheeling excellence of their first few years. ‘I opened up Sounds,’ he said, ‘got to the singles page, and there it was: ‘Bad Company, Rock n Roll Fantasy’. Great, I thought. The first line said, ‘The coffin lid creaked open…’
That review came out in 1979, but still. ‘The coffin lid creaked open’. There’s no recovering from that.
Quite right, Jon. It’s all very disproportionate. And I’ve received many more than I’ve given. Good, not so good, ones that merely ruin my day and of course that special category: those that my friends have been ever so keen to tell me about, and equally keen to add the kind proviso ‘but I don’t think you ought to read it.’ The problem with reviews is that of belief. If you believe ‘unrivalled expertise’ then you must also believe ‘knuckle-dragging semi-literate’. But you do have the choice of placing them side-by-side and thus rendering both reverence and disdain as a nil-all draw. There is another choice: ignore the lot, but for all that some do boast such self-denial, is even the greatest of us really immune to…wondering?
I try to ignore reviews, but if I wonder, and give in, or if one is pushed under my nose, I try to remember the words of Jeffrey Lewis, ‘And you get a good review and then you get a bad review, but don’t get suckered either way because none of them know you.’ The lines come from the song ‘Don’t let the record label take you out to lunch’, a title which is also good, if hard-to-follow, advice.
Of course, some of us would be grateful for the mere fact of a review, good, bad or indifferent (at least outside Amazon – by the way, looking for an e-book Christmas present? Look no further: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Region-of-Sin-ebook/dp/B0058NX9N4).
Cunningly done there Mr Gaw! 😀
It is slightly scary how much power a reviewer might wield in the sense that any spotty herbert can go online and, in a quickly dashed off sentence, say ‘this book is rubbish’ and possibly undo a few years of fanatically hard work and research on behalf of the writer
Careful Mr Worm, you may be giving people ideas…
incidentally, I do note that your own book ‘Region of Sin’ does have a collection of excellent reviews on amazon, due to it being rather good
JG – yes, the ones your friends tell you about… Someone I know once rang especially to tell me that they’d seen my book in a charity shop. They seemed to think I’d be pleased.
The consolation I spose is that I’ve never not bought anything because it’s had a bad review.
I’ve only ever received glowing reviews. Firstly for my performance in Hamlet at the National in the mid-90s and then for my brilliance in the lead at the Chicago Theatre back in 2004. Of course I was in neither and in both instances it was a case of mistaken identity by the people who stopped me in the street. I did love being loved though. Would be just awful to be stopped in the street and told that I was completely crap.