She's not with the band: music journalist Sylvia Patterson talks about her hilarious, star-spangled new memoir

“But it might not have been,” she adds, still wanting to believe in the dream. “It might have been inner fabulousness as well.”

Sylvia Patterson, one-time columnist of this parish, is a pop romantic who perhaps more than most knows about the fantasy and reality of the music industry. She worked at Smash Hits when the magazine was selling a zillion copies a fortnight. She’s interviewed everyone from Amy Winehouse to Diana Ross. She’s angered Shaun Ryder and New Order’s Bernard Sumner, asked Madonna if she ate Lourdes’s placenta and prompted Eminem to impersonate her Scottish accent and shake a very large hammer in the direction of her head. She has enjoyed the hedonistic highs and the minimum-wage lows of working in the music press and she has watched it wither and die in her lifetime.

And now she has written a book about all of this. I’m Not With The Band is a joy of a thing: glorious, often hilarious, very candid. I came away from it thinking better of Bono and Oasis (there’s a chapter in which she interviews Noel and Liam the day after 9/11 that quite honestly may be the funniest thing I’ve read in years).

But it’s also a book in which real life keeps invading pop life (as Prince might have had it). There is damage here and there is loss. Oh, and Bono takes a right slagging.

If anything, he seems to have enjoyed the process. “It’s true,” Patterson says. “Some of them really respond to that rather than the reverence. They get very bored with the reverence. Bono was certainly up for me ribbing him about his ridiculous hair, his horrendous spectacles and all the other things you’d like to have a go at U2 about, certainly back then. But he had thought of everything long before he saw you coming along the corridor. He knows he’s preposterous and I really liked that about him. He understood it’s a preposterous thing to be a rock star.”

What does it say about her that she liked the verbal sparring with the great, the good and Gary Barlow? “I think you’ve got to go for the jokes, haven’t you? These people do live in elevated worlds and if they can’t find a sense of humour about the position they find themselves in then it’s a sad scenario for them. No-one wants to be a megalomaniac really.”

Well, she says that. But Patterson had her moments too. Now and again back in the 1990s she’d be approached in the Good Mixer pub in Camden, unofficial Britpop central, by some little indie kid whose record she had savaged in that week’s NME singles review page. “We’d take great joy in decimating some poor 21-year-old indie kid,” she admits.

We all mellow. Today Patterson is sitting in her flat having just come back from speaking on BBC Radio 4's Woman’s Hour. “One of the most grown-up things I’ve ever done,” she says.

If she looks around she can see lots of books and lots of vinyl. As we speak she is looking at an Adam And The Ants 35th anniversary box set (“a thing of absolutely stunning beauty,” she says) and a picture of Joe Strummer with a fag in his mouth. She is, even now in her sixth decade on this planet, a pop kid. That’s never changed.

Let's ask Sylvia Patterson some of the questions she once asked pop stars.

Sylvia, have you ever been humiliated by a conjurer? (Originally asked of Bernard Sumner.)

“I can’t believe I don’t have an answer for that. How annoying. I would have been rubbish at being a pop star. It’s a difficult thing to do a Smash Hits interview. You had to be quick.”

What did you get picked on for as a kid? (Beyonce.)

“I got picked on because I was so weedy. I was a massive weed. We’re talking 10 or 11 and I would be the one with sappy socks when all the cool girls were already wearing tights. And also because I had a ‘long, slidey nose’, as my friend Jill called it. I would be called Gonzo. Various nose-related quips. I survived.”

The first picture Sylvia Patterson had on her wall in Perth back in the 1970s when she was a kid was Jimmy Osmond. Her sister had already claimed Donny. It didn’t last long. When she moved to Dundee to work for DC Thomson on a magazine called Etcetra (a job she utterly hated) she would take spreads out of the music press and pin them up. “All the Goth heroes. Killing Joke. Bauhaus. Alien Sex Fiend.”

Aztec Camera’s Roddy Frame was up there too. “He was my special crush. I actually had his photo above my bed. I interviewed him in about 1988 for Smash Hits and I told him he was the only man who had ever had his photograph above my bed and he was so mortified that he ordered a bottle of wine even though he was supposedly back on the wagon at that point. And then we got slaughtered and smoked loads of fags.”

Pop music was always an escape route then. She had a lot to escape from.

Patterson was the youngest in a family of five. Her father, born in 1919. was “practically Edwardian”, she points out. He was also a survivor of the Japanese POW camps. He had a Dutch friend and fellow prisoner shot in front of him. Not that he ever talked about any of this stuff.

Her mother was a psychiatric nurse. She was also an alcoholic. Childhood was lived out, Patterson writes at one point, in an atmosphere of fear.

“Not knowing who you were going home to was a very, very frightening thing,” Patterson recalls now. “She was not violent. That wasn’t the thing. They would lock themselves away more than anything else. The door was shut anyway and by the time an evening’s drinking had been gone through I would be in my bed and I would hear wailing and braying and the dreadful things she used to say to my father. And you would just have to lie there and do the ‘la, la, la, I can’t hear you’.

“It was like an alien had infiltrated the home. It was horrendous to see what it did to my dad. He was a very stoical person. He just took it and tried to make the best of it.

“My poor mum, God bless her, she had a job she really loved and she did her job. She wasn’t lying in a heap 24 hours a day, far from it. But she turned out to have a really disastrous alcohol problem.”

Eventually, a widow in her 60s, her mother would end up in Cornton Vale. It was only then that she sought help.

“No-one chooses that life," says Patterson. "You don’t choose to bring all that fear and chaos into your family environment. She absolutely loved us all. We all understood that we were never in any real danger. But she was very volatile … She became an alien. I’m sure anyone who has any experience of alcoholism will understand what I mean by that.”

Perhaps understandably then, when she was old enough, Patterson would get out of the house as much as she could. She ran away to be her with her mates. (“They saved me. Look after your friendships, people, they will save you in the end.”) And to lose herself in music.

Music was her conduit to the world beyond Perth. She would listen to John Peel on Radio 1 religiously, read the music press avidly. Pop became a prism through which to see everything. “You got from that source almost everything else – all the other arts, your ideologies were set through the music you were listening to.”

It might be difficult to remember now quite how central the music press was to the culture back in the 1970s and 1980s, how it shaped the world view of so many of its readers. In her recent book Respectable, the author Lynsey Hanley wrote of how important both Smash Hits and the NME were to her intellectual development. "Without there being both to consult," she writes, "there's no way I'd have been able even to edge towards an understanding of the possibilities of a culture beyond the purely popular."

Patterson went further and became part of the thing she loved. After the misery of working for DC Thomson she wangled a job at London-based music magazine, Smash Hits, in the mid-1980s.

Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive. “The Smash Hits were chaos and joy and the most editorial freedom that there might ever have been on any magazine in history.

“We were just a bunch of indie kids with our silly haircuts and our stupid shoes making things up every day and trying to make each other laugh.”

And there were no rules, that’s the glorious thing, she says. “I sometimes think to myself, did I dream this? Am I over-romanticising it? But absolutely not. It was young people creating for other young people and I think the bigwigs just sat back and said, ‘Whatever they’re doing they’re doing it right.’ There was never any question of it being dumbed down. It was very much the opposite.”

Smash Hits is misremembered, she says. It did politics just as much as the NME and the like. “We weren’t going heavy on the Marxism but we were doing interviews with Billy Bragg, we were talking to the Housemartins. We’d be writing about Red Wedge. We would do features on – should we ban the bomb, should the monarchy be abolished? These things ran right through Smash Hits as well, which people don’t realise. They think it was all about, ‘What was your favourite colour?’ It was so much more.”

I suspect those were some of Patterson’s happiest times. She would later work for the NME as a freelance and pretty much every music mag in the years between then and now but nothing seems to have been as much fun as her Smash Hits years.

Life outside the office wasn’t always as enjoyable. She did get herself mixed up with some terrible men. And then there was always the fear that she would follow her mother into a bottle. “I think there isn’t any child of an alcoholic who isn’t damaged somewhere along the line. I always used to think, ‘I’m going to be next, the baton is going to be passed to me.’ I was frightened of that for a very long time.

“I was an escapist, there’s no doubt about that. I was someone who absolutely embraced the escape that drink will give you. But I didn’t actually create the kind of chaos that I saw.”

She wasn’t alone, of course. The 1990s in particular were wild years in and around the music business when money was still plentiful. “Everyone was the same. We were all pressing hard on what looked like a self-destruct button. But it was just hedonism to be honest.

“Sometimes I would go into the blackout zone and think, ‘This is not good. I’ve got to knock this on the head.’ I’ve had to learn to temper that and I’ve been able to do that. I think I’ve come out of it after some pretty hectic years there. I feel normal.”

Perhaps it helped that, as she says, she was rubbish at doing drugs. “Hopeless,” she laughs. Possibly a good thing in the long run, I suggest. “Absolutely. I was easily led. There are many revelations to be had. But I’m too highly strung. Drugs to me just equals a fast track to paranoia and feeling very vulnerable. Why would you do that to your night out?”

All the while, of course, she was speaking to pop stars, making them laugh, pissing them off, asking them the meaning of life, doing anything but asking them train-spottery questions about guitar riffs.

It was all on the basis that pop music, pop stars, the music press mattered. She’s not sure that is the case any more. Towards the end, the book becomes something of a lament for what we’ve lost. Accountants who understand nothing but the bottom line have killed the music press for a start. And as for the music …

“It’s been a long time now since music was even at the centre of youth culture. The young are far more interested in what their phones can do. And who can blame them? They are extraordinary.

“Pop music is one part of what they’re doing with their phones but they would rather take photos of their fantastic new outfit and put it up on Instagram. That’s their world.

"Music is not giving them a way of life any more. It is not a route to your world view because no-one’s giving them a world view any more. That’s been snuffed out by people’s scepticism about the whole process of being in the media.”

And anyway when you have the whole of music’s history at your digital fingertips, why do you need new music? This is the first generation, she suggests, that doesn’t hate their parents’ musical tastes. They’re even quite partial to that of their grandparents. “I’ve even had teenagers talk to me about Slim Whitman,” she says, incredulous.

As for pop stars, proper mega pop stars, she says, they don’t need to do interviews any more. “You’ll probably find increasingly that big stars, especially the Americans, will go Beyonce’s way. She will probably never do an interview again. Because why would she? She doesn’t have to.”

A way of life has gone then. But as I'm Not With The Band proves, it's fun to remember it.

Two final questions taken from the Sylvia Patterson big book of questions for pop stars.

Sylvia, Is there anything you want to apologise for? (U2.)

Reader, she snorts at me.

“I’d probably want to apologise to all the little indie boys for those dreadful reviews in the 1990s when I thought I was oh so amusing and destroyed all their dreams. I couldn’t do that now.”

One final question. It’s the question Patterson always wanted the answer to. Sylvia, what is the meaning of it all?

“That no-one knows about anything. That’s the truth. This is all a giant accident of physics. How fabulous. So enjoy your accident because it will probably be over quicker than you think … Said the inner Goth.”

Alien Sex Fiend would be proud of her.

I’m Not With The Band by Sylvia Patterson is published by Sphere, priced £18.99.