I've Been Immortalised As An Idiot
Neil McCormick’s quest for rock and roll fame has been chronicled in the comedy rock movie Killing Bono. He talks to Roe McDermott about the making of the movie, why Bono told McCormick to kill him – and how naked women and goats played a part in his job interview for Hot Press…
Roe McDermott, 30 Mar 2011
Killing Bono is a rock movie with a difference. Rather than celebrating success, it centres on the idea of failure, with Neil McCormick and his brother Ivan – played by Ben Barnes and Robert Sheehan respectively – as the fall guys in a kind of tragi-comic tale of one band’s bizarre and often heroic misadventures. The twist is that Neil and Ivan were school mates of U2’s in Mount Temple and every step they take, and every stumble they make, is in the shadow of a band that is in the process of becoming the biggest rock band in the world.
In the film he may wear the garb of a chronic loser (who just happens to get lucky with the girl!), but in life Neil McCormick is anything but. Having started out with Hot Press in the late 1970s, he is currently the chief rock writer with the Daily Telegraph. The movie is based on his memoir I Was Bono’s Doppelgänger and he has other successful writing projects under his belt, most notably the enormous tome U2 on U2. But, inevitably, there is an extent to which Neil hankers after the success as a songwriter and a rock star that eluded him. Well, so far...
Chatty, gregarious and quick to laugh, the former Hot Press writer is pleased to tell me that the magazine wasn’t always the incredibly glamorous machine it is today… Okay, glamorous might be pushing it, but at least we don’t use the office as a farmyard...
“I was very young and very cocky and I read Hot Press because I was in a band and it was the only thing that was there,” he says. “And there was an ad looking for an art assistant and I applied, not knowing what to expect. And you know, before you actually work in journalism, you assume from the outside that magazines are all produced in these wonderfully sophisticated, glamorous locations. But it was just a house on Mount Street. What really threw me, though, was that there was a goat in the hall tethered to a stairs. That was the first and only time I encountered that at a job interview!”
Indeed – though there have been rumours that the goat story has an element of the apocryphal about it! Either way, all that McCormick needed to secure a job was a certain amount of bullshi…er, chutzpah.
Page 1/4 <Previous 1 2 3 4 Next>
©Hot Press 2011. Why be a member? | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy