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This episode of the intermittent Powerline podcast departs from the usual topics and style featuring mostly book authors on political and intellectual topics, and instead will offer a conversation about . . . rock and roll journalism, with a British rock journalist that I suspect almost no Americans know at all, except for the music-obsessed.
He is Chris Welch. Last month, while I was over on an idyll in Germany, and through a long train of circumstances I won't recount, I got to meet Welch. He has been arguably Britain's most influential rock journalist since he started out at Fleet Street at the impossibly young age of 16 back in the 1960s That fact alone was enough to perk up my interest, because that early a start is unheard of in media today. (And is there another rock music critic anywhere in the known universe who can brag of having been awarded a writing prize as a schoolboy by the legendary World War II General Bernard Montgomery? Talk about heavy metal. . .)
During his long years at Melody Maker magazine, he had a well-earned reputation of someone who could make—or break—a new band. And so, he often heard of now-legendary artists like Eric Clapton, or Pink Floyd, before anyone had heard of them, when he'd go to some small club in London to track down word-of-mouth about a new talent. A rave review from Welch offered a major boost to emerging artists, not to mention their album sales. And you name any rock icon from the last 50 years, and Welch knows them.
Special thanks to all the good people at Trading Boundaries, a really interesting arts and music enterprise in England that facilitated my meeting Chris and setting up our conversation.