This has certainly been the case for Kathy
McCabe, a 25 year veteran of the Australia music business as an award winning
journalist, one-time A&R manager and favoured confidant musicians around
the world. Speaking at a packed Women In Music event last week, News Corp
Australia’s National Music Writer talked about her lifelong love affair with
music and her best loved songs and artists.
Describing it as being “branded on my DNA”,
music was “omnipresent” in the McCabe household during Kathy’s childhood, with
a stereo in every room and fights regularly breaking out over who would get
creative control.
“Silence meant something bad was going to
happen [but] if there was music it was going to be alright.”
One song that stood out from these early
years was Stevie Wright’s Evie Part 1,
on a compilation album which was the first record Kathy’s parents bought her.
Infatuated, she ended up playing the album “literally to death” and it became
the initial spark for a career in music journalism.
“The drama of it, the story of it, just sucked
me in.”
Starting out as a court reporter, Kathy
eventually managed to move into music writing but found it difficult working
alongside a “legendary” and “scary as fuck” fellow arts critic who, apparently
seeing her younger colleague as “an enemy” put Kathy into situations where she
would have to fight hard for assignments.
Although it shaped her into the journalist
she is today, by forcing her to continually improve her work, Kathy describes this
older colleague as having made her life “horrible for a long time”.
As Kathy established herself, that
competition disappeared and music journalism became more of a labour of love. She
connects this period with her love for Australian band, The Cruel Sea, fronted
by Tex Perkins, and their song, The
Honeymoon Is Over.
When assigned to interview bass guitarist
Ken Gormly, Kathy remembers feeling distinctly starstruck at the idea of
interacting with a band that “represented the unattainable” by appearing
smarter and cooler than anyone else the young journalist had previously had
access to.
Running into Ken at the ARIA Awards later
that year, Kathy congratulated the band on their nomination. Ken responded by thanking
her for her article, telling her “My mother still has your story on her
fridge.”
The interview ended up being a personal
turning point for Kathy, who realised “I’m not shit at this.”
Kathy’s status as one of Australia’s
premier music critics suggests that she is indeed not shit at this. She has
“been lucky enough to meet most of my heroes”, from interviewing U2 and David
Bowie to spending five days in London with P!nk, who Kathy describes as the
“most unfiltered, human artist”.
Some of her most rewarding interviews have
been with Australian women.
“Every conversation with Bertie Blackman,
Megan Washington, Jessica Mauboy and Kasey Chambers is amazing and the best.”
Kathy is now in the enviable position of
being able to choose who to interview and which releases to review, asking
herself “has it got a beautiful story that needs to be told?” But in a changing
media landscape, she is aware of the importance of her choices given the limited
space, especially with News Corp recently removing the entertainment lift out
from its national newspapers.
With so little space to work in, Kathy says
that “50% of my day is saying no”, but there are some things she would say yes
to immediately. On her bucket list are Patti Smith (“I wish Patti Smith would
write something every day of the week”), Troye Sivan and Bruce Springsteen.
“[Bruce] I will get you if it kills me”.
