The Cough What a gently entertaining half hour with Mr David Quantick this was. bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04m9tt0 The first encounter with Bjork was particularly amusing, producing a vivid image in my mind’s eye of this tiny woman climbing up on the . . . But I won’t spoil it for you. Anyway, I’m now going to turn the tables on Mr Q by telling you about my first encounter with him. In the year of our Orwell, 1984, Mr Q was the young gun sent by the NME to the Brixton Fridge to review my band The Remarkable Family. His review ended pleasingly enough with the words: ‘They are almost (cough) remarkable.’ For some reason that bracketed ‘cough’ tickled me and my fellow band member David Severn for days and eventually we came up with what we thought was a hilarious repost: we purchased a packet of Hacks cough sweets from the local newsagents and sent them off to Mr Q c/o the NME with the words: ‘Dear David Here is something for your ‘cough’. Love from The Remarkable Family.’ How witty we thought we were as we imagined Mr Q reeling at being taken down a peg or two from indirectly being called a hack by this upstart band, while simultaneously chuckling at the absurdity of being sent real cough sweets for a figure-of-speech cough. But I have to add that to our 20-something minds, ‘hack’ sounded terribly insulting, so we sincerely hoped he didn’t take our jibe to heart because he’d actually given us a favourable review and so we were grateful. A quarter of a century later I spot Mr Q at a book launch which - you dont need to know this but Ill tell you anyway - involved the roasting of a whole pig in a central London street. “You probably don’t recognise me,” I began. But he did, and we went for a pint. “I remember how shy you were,” I told him. “Yet obviously we were more intimidated by you than you should have been by us, given that you were the bloke from the NME and we were just an unsigned band playing our fourth of fifth London gig.” “Well, I was a naïve Yorkshire boy, not long in the Big City, so you might as well have been David Bowie as far as I was concerned,” said Mr Q, smiling his twinkling Mr Q smile. “By the way, did you get the cough sweets?” “Yes, I did.” We were a bit concerned you might take them as an insult.” “If you saw some of the stuff bands used to send me . . .” I laughed and winced simultaneously. “I had the idea of sending you the cough sweets first but then when I saw the Hacks packet I couldn’t resist,” I continued, unnecessarily explaining my thought processes. Then I realised Mr Q was looking at me blankly. “ ‘Hacks’ as in mediocre or jobbing journalist,” I continued, digging myself in deeper. Suddenly a light went on in Mr Q’s eyes and he laughed. “No, I didn’t get that at all. Brilliant!” So was this the longest interval there has ever been - in the history of Mankind - between the delivery of a joke and the recipient laughing at it? I would like to think so.
Posted on: Mon, 20 Oct 2014 10:17:24 +0000
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