The interview that still haunts me

After 20 years of celebrity chit-chats, this is the one that still gives me shudders.

“Ahh.” That’s how he answered the phone. It wasn’t a good start, but it was about to get worse. An almighty yawn came next. I thought the operator screwed up and put me through to the wrong person. But no. “Fuck,” he spat at me. “Do we really have to do this?”

Ricky Wilson, the front man for boozy British rock act Kaiser Chiefs, spent the next 15 minutes complaining. He’d been woken up, was hungover, and clearly didn’t want to talk to this New Zealand reporter. He showed his contempt for the situation by yawning. He yawned a lot. I counted them all up. They numbered into the 60s. The high 60s. That’s a lot of yawns. I couldn’t yawn that much if I tried.

Interviews can go wrong for any number of reasons. Bad moods. Terrible connections. An iffy question that raises heckles. When you’re talking to actors or musicians or semi-famous people, egos are involved. Working for Stuff.co.nz and the NZ Herald for the past 20 years means I’ve done hundreds, maybe thousands, of these kinds of interviews. Sometimes I’d juggle up to five a day. Maybe there’d be a yawn from me after that.

Usually, phone interviews have a particular rhythm to them. An international operator, music label staffer or movie studio lackey calls you, puts you on hold, then connects you to the talent. With no eye contact or body language, everything relies on your questions. You try and make the banter light and loose so there’s something to talk about besides the thing you’re supposed to talk about. Hopefully, everyone emerges with their dignity intact. Then you go write something about it.

Doing that many of them for so long means I’ve had plenty of good ones, as well as a fair few bad ones. Some of them weren’t my fault. I spent six full minutes listening to Black Eyed Peas rapper will.i.am chew on a Mars bar in otherwise silence. Courtney Love wouldn’t stop reminiscing about the one time she cut off a sheep’s testicles in New Zealand. A chat with Coldplay got interrupted by a health emergency on their end. Four hours later, after a quick trip to the hospital, they called me back. They didn’t need to, but Coldplay always were too bloody polite.

Sometimes, though, it’s my fault. Billy Corgan didn’t like it when I mentioned D’arcy Wretzky, Smashing Pumpkins’ former bassist. Harrison Ford left me so star struck I barely managed to squeak a question out. When I asked the Pixies if life in the band was fraught, the interview got scary, and I ended up running - literally running - out of there. Five minutes before I was due to meet Spider-Man stars Emma Stone and Andrew Garfield, I was throwing up on the lawn in front of their Sydney hotel thanks to a woeful stomach bug.

For some reason, smelling of vomit in front of Emma Stone doesn’t stand out as much as my interview with Wilson. I think about it more than I should, replaying it over in my mind. I woke up this morning thinking about it. I don’t know why. It was 10 years ago. Kaiser Chiefs weren’t a big band, and the interview wasn’t a big deal. The stakes weren’t high. Wilson was supposed to be discussing the band’s new album, and upcoming tour. Instead, he complained about his hangover. And yawned.

It should have been no big deal. It was their third album. They were only playing the Powerstation. It was just a small story for a news website. It wasn’t going to print. Only a few thousand people would probably have read it. When I said yes to the interview offer, I didn’t give it much thought at all.

But it was excruciating, a 15-minute exercise in journalism torture. Remembering it now still makes me shudder. I’d ask a question, and he’d yawn and complain. I’d ask another, and he’d swear at me. He gave me nothing. Literally - nothing. It was the longest 15 minutes of my life. How I stayed on the phone for that long is in impressive feat of endurance. I don’t think I even ended up writing a story about it. I looked, and I can’t find it.

So why am I thinking about it so much? It was ages ago. I’ve never been one to look back. The future is always more interesting than the past. There’s always new music to focus on, new TV shows to talk about, new movies to obsess over. Are you watching Devs? Listening to Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters? Bingeing What We Do in the Shadows? Checking out One Lane Bridge? Repeat watching Tom Sainsbury’s Instagram cover songs? You should. They’re all excellent isolation timewasters.

Maybe that’s the reason. Right now, we’re all on pause. There’s only the present to deal with, the past to reckon with. Maybe it makes sense I’m obsessing about something so stupid and silly, a tense and intensely awful interview with a hungover rock star. It was inconsequential. It didn’t matter. None of it really mattered.

After all, when was the last time you heard a Kaiser Chiefs song?

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