David Cavanagh
Pop music writer who chronicled the rise of grunge and Britpop but incurred the wrath of Oasis
DAVID CAVANAGH, who has died suddenly aged 54, was an acclaimed rock writer whose work is best known for having forged links between Britain’s 1980s indie music scene and the international rise of grunge and Britpop in the following decade.
As well as filing pieces on the likes of David Bowie, Paul Weller and Radiohead for Q and other largeselling monthlies, including Mojo, Uncut and Select, Cavanagh applied his idiosyncratic, gently mocking style to writing heavyweight books on the BBC DJ John Peel and the hedonistic record company Creation Records.
This last work, My Magpie Eyes are Hungry for the Prize (named after a song by the little-known act the Loft), was as much a history of British music culture in the final decades of the 20th century as it was an examination of the maverick label that released hits by Oasis and Primal Scream.
The tone of the 570-page volume was set by its dust jacket showing a mound of cocaine next to a mocked-up credit card featuring a photograph of Creation’s sharp-elbowed boss Alan Mcgee observing Tony Blair shaking hands with Noel Gallagher. Mcgee did not emerge well from the telling, and branded the author’s warts-and-all observations “objectionable”.
As a commissioning editor at Select, Cavanagh encouraged the careers of a raft of writers who went on to make their mark, including Graham Linehan, co-creator of Father Ted,
Black Books and The IT Crowd.
Quietly spoken and with a spiky wit, Cavanagh was the antithesis of the archetypal freeloading music hack, preferring to coax revealing anecdotes by taking the back seat in interviews with larger-than-life characters like Courtney Love, and Damon Albarn of Blur, whose early career Cavanagh single-handedly championed.
The son of a classical musician, David Maurice Cavanagh was born in Dublin on December 7 1964 and brought up in Belfast, where he attended Methodist College grammar school before moving to London to study Russian with Serbo-croat at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies.
As Cavanagh described in his touching essay “Hell of a Summer” for John Aizlewood’s 1994 collection Love is the Drug, this was a period of unhappiness, exacerbated by adolescent anxiety, unrequited love and an aggressive form of psoriasis.
Solace arrived in the form of an infatuation with the Australian rock outfit the Triffids, who befriended the lonely 19-year-old. Cavanagh recorded his feelings when the group members bought him a birthday meal: “I didn’t eat much in those days – mad people like to stay thin – but reckoned I could handle this … When you’re as hopeless a case as I was, straightforward acts of friendliness seem uncommonly beautiful and harsh words crush you effortlessly.”
On leaving university Cavanagh filed concert reviews for the weekly Sounds, where he became a staff writer and spoke up for the British and American indie bands struggling on the capital’s grimly nicknamed “toilet circuit”. Among these was the soonto-be world-beating REM. Such was his influence that his negative verdict on REM’S 1994 LP Monster provoked the guitarist Peter Buck to sigh: “I hear Cavanagh didn’t like the album.”
On the closure of Sounds at the start of the 1990s, Cavanagh was appointed, first, reviews editor and then deputy editor of the newly launched Select, where his popular back-page column Closing Time helped boost sales beyond 100,000 copies a month. Switching to Q, one of his quirkier commissions was a 12-hour stint at the magazine’s local pub interviewing regulars about their choices on the newly installed CD jukebox.
Cavanagh’s career suffered after he savaged in print (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?, Oasis’s second LP, which became a multi-million seller.
“Suddenly it was No 1 and stayed there,” he recalled. “The readers went for it and voted them for the Q Awards. At that point Q phoned Creation and the band’s management and got the response: ‘We see. You want Liam and Noel [Gallagher] to come and get an award for an album which you said was no good.’ They were told: ‘One of our freelancers said it was no good. We love it.’ I didn’t get any work for three months.”
Cavanagh would return to Q, as well as Uncut and Mojo, and proved his capabilities beyond music with a series of fine articles for the monthly Empire – as exemplified by an essay on Powell and Pressburger which was featured in the anthology Movie Heaven.
Cavanagh’s books also included the 2003 novel Music for Boys, a fictionalised account of his musicobsessed youth in Ireland, while the critically acclaimed Good Night and Good Riddance, a survey of 250 BBC broadcasts by John Peel from 1967 to the DJ’S death in 2004, returned him to the spotlight in 2015.
David Cavanagh, born December 7 1964, died December 27 2018