There aren’t all that many audio interviews from the Gunman period.
So it was quite an exciting day when my usual Ebay scan – not so diligent as it has been, as my attention has been elsewhere – turned up a “unique cassette”. Which turned out to be an interview with Paddy from 2001. The seller was listing quite a lot of other interviews from the period, I guess he had picked them up from some sort of clearout, because he wasn’t the interviewer as it turned out. Anyway I bought it, with apologies to whoever it was who was the underbidder. And here it is.
After a bit of cross checking here and there, I figured out that the interviewer was Mark Edwards, and this was the basis of the Times piece, June 24th, 2001, though in truth very little of it was included.
It was recorded at an airport with a bit of background noise, there’s a tape flip, but in essence this is more than an interview and essentially an hour of conversation between Mark Edwards and Paddy, covering quite a lot of ground. Some great material about Visconti and Bowie, and some revelations about music journalists’ guilty secrets. I’ve also included a download link so it’s available for podcast use.