At Spin, writing the Singles column, you were sounding the horn about dance music. Did you go in there with that as a mission?
At the time that was definitely it. Nobody treated dance music seriously at all. Melody Maker was wall-to-wall rock ‘n’ roll when I arrived. It was only by a lot of fighting with editors – a lot of fighting – and by the fact that it soon became obvious, at least for a while, that it had legs. This was still, at this point, still singles music, 12-inch singles music. It was viewed as a fad. It was only when people started to see this was commercially viable that the fighting stopped.
Michaelangelo Matos interviews Frank Owen, a Melody Maker critic in the ’80s who (the way I know his work) eventually covered dance music frequently (and very well, from what I recall) in Spin.
