No Rock And Roll Fun

WEAR HIGH HEELS, AND GET A RECORD DEAL: We've just had Street Signs [pdf download] brought to our attention, notable for an article on the mighty Kenickie written by someone who knows the story from within: Emma Jackson. Now she's an undergraduate; back then, she was Emma Kate-Montrose. It's a too-familiar tale of a record company that doesn't know what to do with what it's got, and the tendency to treat anywhere north of Hatfield as terribly exotic by London-based writers:

There is a tendency in the music press sometimes to write the speech of people from ‘Oop North’ phonetically - I have never heard anyone say ‘oop’. This was matched with the annoying habit of following a quote from one of us, with the something like ‘squealed Marie’ or ‘screamed Lauren’. Whilst we were very noisy, we did not squeal. This had the power to totally transform an accurate quote into something quite different. When these two journalistic devices were used together, what had seemed to be a successful interview could be transformed into a slightly embarrassing feature. Although our status as ‘northern lasses’ was a novelty for the media, it became a problem for the record company.