It is every critic's worst nightmare. You get a really great interview with someone – and then get home to find it hasn't recorded. This has happened to me more times than I care to remember. I once interviewed a rap band who thrilled me with two hours of blistering polemic and headline-worthy quotes, but my recording device captured two hours of silence.
When this happens, you have two options: cry or attempt to recall the best bits from memory. In practice, you'll be lucky to remember more than a handful of quotes. If you're very lucky, the artist will be kind enough to do the interview again. My rap band and I went to the same pub, sat in the same seats and re-did the same questions. It turned out that their apparently off the cuff political diatribes were so well-rehearsed they gave me exactly the same answers.
A journalist pal once flew all the way to Hawaii to interview Fun Lovin' Criminals, only to be foiled by a faulty Dictaphone. Singer Huey Morgan agreed to a take two the following morning – but, grumpy at having to miss his lie-in, was not nearly as forthcoming. And when I interviewed Deborah Curtis, wife of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, what had been a perfectly recorded interview mysteriously faded into silence at the precise moment she talked about his suicide. Spooky.
This sort of thing happens less now that digital recording machines have taken over from cassette-chewing ones, but recording a phone interview can still present a problem. I used to strap a microphone between the phone and my ear, which gave me a sore lughole for days. I've tried suction microphones that stick to the back of handset, and gadgets that plug directly into the phone socket, but these are prone to producing white noise. Lately, I thought I'd cracked it with a tiny mic that slips right into my ear, although to my horror a rap star's first interview in years didn't record. Frantic investigation identified the source of the problem: all the wonderful technology in the world is of no use if the hapless human doing the interview forgets to plug the bloody thing in.
