David Cavanagh had a brief go at Twitter, then stopped. He didn’t use Facebook. No one thought to write him a Wikipedia page. Four days after Christmas, when news came of his death, his former colleagues and readers paid him no end of tributes, all of which were suffused with both a deep sense of shock and a fitting sense of someone who had lived and worked outside the ephemeral cycles of the modern media.
Anyone who spent time with him would recognise most of the following: the fact that he could be introverted and silent, but also talkative and extremely funny; his fondness for the unfashionable pleasure of a couple of lunchtime beers; his astounding brilliance at pub quizzes. I still don’t know the year he was born (1965, at an informed guess), but I am reasonably certain he was brought up in Belfast, had a violinist father who became the leader of the BBC’s Northern Ireland orchestra, and had a degree in Russian. His key biographical detail, however, was absolutely certain: as someone said on social media in the wake of his death, he was “the best music writer of his times”, which stretched from the late 1980s to the present day and saw him write for the music weekly Sounds, Select (where he was also an editor), Q, Uncut and Mojo.
Along the way, I was both a fellow writer who absorbed his influence and one of the people who commissioned him. His writing was measured and elegant, yet clearly the work of someone with an unquenchable passion for his subject. He had a brilliant eye for the small details of human behaviour. Whether as a critic or feature writer, his work fulfilled George Orwell’s insistence that good prose should be “transparent, like a window pane”, shining much more light on music and musicians than any number of flashier writers.
Going through a stack of magazines smattered with his pieces, I happened to find a run of stuff about Radiohead. When he reviewed OK Computer, Cavanagh said it was a record set in a place that was “unfamiliar and ominous, but also beautiful and unspoiled”. On Let Down, he said Thom Yorke’s singing “has the terrible shiver of a toddler who can’t for the life of him stop crying”. Of The Tourist, he wrote: “It’s not easy to play a waltz with anxiety, let alone the panic felt by Yorke’s hyperventilating traveller, but they do.”
When he directly encountered musicians, his interviews and reportage were no less acute. For the 100th issue of Q in 1994, for example, he was despatched to Japan with Paul Weller, who allowed him all-areas access but declined to be interviewed. The resulting piece actually benefited from the absence of quotes, because it gave Cavanagh’s eye for detail the space it deserved, and vividly evoked Weller’s milieu: his guitarist, Steve Cradock, endlessly playing Nina Simone’s version of Mr Bojangles on a ghetto blaster until a roadie threatened to “shove a broom-handle right up your arsehole”; a running sub-plot about the imminent dismissal of Weller’s bass player.
The accidental openings and endless downtime of the stereotypical on-the-road piece were a perfect fit with his personality. His brief diversion into film journalism, by contrast, came to grief when he went on a promotional junket for Bernardo Bertolucci’s film Stealing Beauty in 1996, and when confronted with the inanities of a round-table interview with the director – several journalists jostling for his attention, to no one’s benefit – simply walked out.
Of late, Cavanagh had written a superb up-close profile of Ian McCulloch of Echo and the Bunnymen for Mojo, capturing the tragedy and pathos of a former star fading into late middle age, and another brilliant Weller story, this time not just full of vivid observations, but quotes. But perhaps his most accomplished recent(ish) piece had been his farewell to David Bowie in Uncut, which pointed out that the finite nature of life had been a theme streaked through Bowie’s music.
“Aged only 25, he gave the Earth just five years to survive in The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Six months earlier (Changes), he’d warned the insouciant exemplars of teenage virility (“look out, you rock’n’rollers”) that the ageing process would begin sooner than they expected … In 1971, in Kooks, he counselled his son Zowie, newly born and in his crib, to blow his trumpet and face down his bullies while he still had the power of innocence in his lungs. ‘Soon you’ll grow …’”
His history of Creation records, published in 2000 and titled My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry for the Prize – after a lyric by the Loft, whose story was told as if they were the Velvet Underground – was nearly 600 pages long, and obsessed him for well over two years: a reviewer in the Guardian correctly said it was “the greatest book ever written on British independent music”. An equally exhaustive book about the late DJ John Peel, Good Night and Good Riddance (2015), was a chronological account of 265 of his programmes and the records therein, and a kind of shadow history of post-Beatles music. A solitary novel, Music for Boys (2003), evoked Cavanagh’s early adolescence in Northern Ireland – but perhaps the most revealing thing he ever wrote was the standout piece in an anthology about fandom titled Love Is the Drug, edited by his Q colleague John Aizlewood and published in 1994. Cavanagh’s contribution was a look back at his life in the London of the mid 1980s: anxiety, melancholia and his unrequited love for a woman who lived in Clapham, and the way that he found redemption in the form of the Australian band the Triffids, led by David McComb: first, their via their music, then their company.
In one of the piece’s most memorable passages, the band take him out to dinner to celebrate his 20th birthday. “The restaurant was lovely and warm inside,” he wrote. “My cold life rubbed up against the heat and enjoyed the sensation. When you’re as hopeless a case as I was, straightforward acts of friendliness seem uncommonly beautiful and harsh words crush you effortlessly.”
One example of each followed. The Triffids paid for his meal, which amazed him because as far as he knew, “they had even less money than I had”. But midway through the evening, McComb derided Cavanagh’s love of REM (“I don’t listen to Byrds rip-off bands”), and thereby left him silent for the rest of the meal. But the singer also gave him a birthday present: “an Australian 7-inch single of Beautiful Waste, one of their prettiest songs, with Property Is Condemned on the B-side.”
Cavanagh wrote on: “Later, at home, I studied my gift. ‘Beautiful waste,’ David sang over perfect drum tattoos and peals of trumpet. ‘Terrible fever of love / Stupid feeling, making fools out of us.’ I looked up from my map of the Clapham area. Did he know?”
