'A great writer'
Paul Weller
'A music journalist of integrity'
Billy Childish
**'**There's only one Ted Kessler!'
Liam Gallagher
PAPER CUTS is the inside story of the slow death of the British music
press. But it's also a love letter to it, the tale of how music
magazines saved one man's life. Ted Kessler left home and school around
his seventeenth birthday, determined 'to be someone who listened to
music professionally'. That dream appeared forlorn when he was later
arrested for theft behind the counter of the record shop he managed
during acid house's long hot summer of love. Paper Cuts tells how
Kessler found redemption through music and writing and takes us on a
journey alongside the stars he interviewed and the work-place dramas he
navigated as a senior staffer at NME through the boom-time '90s and on
to the monthly Q in 2004, where he worked for sixteen years before it
folded with him at its helm as editor in 2020.
We travel in time alongside musical heroes Paul Weller, Kevin
Rowland, Mark E Smith, and to Cuba twice, first with Shaun Ryder
and Bez, then with Manic Street Preachers. We spend long, mad
nights out with Oasis and The Strokes, quality time with Jeff
Buckley and Florence Welch, and watch Radiohead deliver cold
revenge upon Kessler in public. A story about love and death, about what
it's like when a music writer shacks up with a conflict of interest, and
what happens when your younger brother starts appearing on the cover of
the magazines you work for, this is the memoir of "a delinquent doofus"
whose life was both rescued and defined by music magazines.
