THERE are various ways you can try to persuade straight society to buy weekly magazines from homeless people – free gifts, guilt trips, having a picture of Danger Mouse on the cover – but for a time at the Big Issue in the North, we decided to use instantly recognisable celebrities instead.
The idea to capitalise on the street-wise cachet a high-profile interview with the magazine could deliver came after people like the Stone Roses and Morrissey ignored Fleet Street and the music press to give us world exclusives on their post-hiatus returns to the limelight.
It worked for a while, but the emphasis on finding easily-recognisable faces week in week out led to us going for whatever pop culture dreck was ploughing their way through the grim regional press grind that particular week – telly, movies, music, the lowest common denominator stuff you could ever imagine.
Ultimately, it looked like we were just another celeb-focussed magazine, but crucially, unlike Heat or OK, you had to buy our magazine from someone who was very often a drug addict.
This Mis-Teeq interview dates from a period when I was commissioning interviews – and occasionally, as with this one, writing them myself – with the likes of various Spice Girls, Atomic Kitten, Hear Say and Westlife (as well as, in my defence, people like Macy Gray, Craig David and Amy Winehouse). It is nobody's finest moment.
IN A CLIMATE where brands like Carling and O2 bankroll festivals as a way of boosting their credibility with impressionable young consumers, Deeply Vale seems like some strange and exotic anachronism.
There was no corporate branding of the Deeply Vale festival, which took place in a secluded valley somewhere between Bury and Rochdale over the course of four years at the dog-end of the Seventies. There weren't even any toilets for the first couple of years.
Instead, the first festival was part funded by local progressive rock band Tractor, using royalties from their releases on John Peel's Dandelion label. The remainder of the budget came from a 50 pence surcharge levied on local pot-heads by community-minded dealers at a squat in Rochdale.
This motley crew of hippies, idealists and out-and-out freaks rented the valley during the long, hot summer of 1976, telling the landowner they were organising a camping holiday for about 10 people.
In the event, about 300 people turned up to see Tractor and various friends perform in Deeply Vale's natural amphitheatre through a PA system donated by an ever-benevolent John Peel. There was free food (bean stew, goat curry and egg butties) but no admission fee. Bands were paid in pot.
IT'S a delicious irony that the one thing that really sets 29-year-old singer songwriter Macy Gray apart from the rest of the crowd – her rough-hewn diamond of a voice – is the thing that made her subject of merciless persecution in the school yard all those years ago.
The habit paid off. Gray released her debut album, Macy Gray on How Life Is in July last year, and revealed a unique, singular talent: her scribbled notes had matured into prodigious, brave songwriting while her voice had deepened and strengthened beyond all recognition. She's got a voice that could stop traffic. And this time, no-one's laughing.