From Perth to pop’s innercircle

They’ve quizzed everyone from Prince to Madonna. Now Sylvia Patterson and Stuart Cosgrove tell Michael Alexander they’re taking on The Boss for a top writing prize

Liverpool, Detroit, Berlin, Nashville, Seattle... you’ll probably run through a good few more of the great popular music capitals of the world before you hit on Perth, Scotland. Yet, this respectable, some might say conservative, little city by the Tay has spawned not one but two of the most critically acclaimed music writers in modern Britain and now both are in the running for one of the top honours in their field.

Hoping to pip Bruce Springsteen and Johnny Marr to the Penderyn Music Prize 2017 when it’s announced next month are Stuart Cosgrove and Sylvia Patterson.

Stuart, formerly of NME, The Face, Channel 4 and a diehard St Johnstone fan, is nominated for his memoir Young Soul Rebels, which tells the story of the northern soul scene from the perspective of his own journey from Perth’s Letham housing estate to the legendary all-nighters in the north of England.

Fellow finalist Sylvia Patterson grew up just across town on the Dunkeld Road and spills the beans on her time at Smash Hits in I’m Not With the Band: A Writer’s Life Lost in Music.

The pair’s path never crossed in Perth but she remembers sitting in the pop magazine’s office three days after joining in 1986 when an older man, who would later turn out to be Stuart, said: “Welcome to London. It’s all going to be all right!”

“He seemed very sweet and friendly,” she recalls. “And then I met him again maybe a decade later and it was like bloody hell – we’re fae Perth!”

The former Perth Grammar pupil had been a regular at the clubs in her home town and Dundee, swaying moodily to Echo and the Bunnymen, Siouxsie and the Banshees and “people with the most ridiculous haircuts”.

From her early teens, she read the music press obsessively and landed the Smash Hits job aged 20 while working on women’s magazines with The Courier publisher DC Thomson.

Arriving in London was an eye opener for the “very green” young Scot. Yet the move gave her the opportunity to strike out on her own and take stock after a difficult upbringing in which music offered a way out.

“I talk about this in the book,” she says, hesitating slightly.

“I had a kind of a chaotic scenario with my mum – bless her. She had a dreadful alcohol problem, which became increasingly so as I was growing up.

“As anyone knows who’s ever grown up with an alcoholic parent, it’s very alienating, it’s very frightening, and you just kind of take yourself away from the source of the pain really, and I guess that’s why I became even more obsessional with music than even my friends and peers, because I needed somewhere to escape to.”

Much like the 60s, it seems if you remember what happened at the height of Smash Hits you weren’t really there.

I became even more obsessional with music than even my friends and peers, because I needed somewhere to escape to