Ian Penman
For the producer and radio personality, see Ian Penman (producer).
Ian Penman began writing for the
NME in the fall of 1977, later contributing to various publications including
Uncut,
Arena,
Wire,
The Face,
The Guardian,
The Times,
The Sunday Times,
The Independent,
Screen and
German Vogue.
The resident intellectual provocateur at
NME in the early 1980s, Penman was never as interested in music as his
postmodernist rival,
Paul Morley, which makes his clippings more infuriating and less dated. Like Morley, he was
Wildean and superficial, enamoured of the process of writing for a music paper more than anything else. His elaborate syntax and stultifyingly self-centered prose were, with hindsight, the perfect critic's counterpoint and mirror to the
New Romantic wave. As Grahamwell has suggested elsewhere, Penman was the true test of
NME fidelity, to be contrasted with the earnest "muso" preoccupations of
Melody Maker and the proletarian philistinism of
Sounds.
Many of Penman's essays and reviews were collected in his book
Vital Signs: Music, Movies and Other Manias (Serpent's Tail, 1998), praised by critic Bhob Stewart in
Publishers Weekly::After a peripatetic childhood in the Middle East and the U.K., Penman was set to start art school in 1977. But during a year off, he began reviewing for the U.K.'s leading music paper,
New Musical Express, and became one of its star writers. In his first collection, Penman pulls together pieces from the back files of
NME, as well as
The Face,
The Sunday Times,
Ikon,
The Wire and
Sight and Sound. With more than 45 essays spanning from 1979 to 1995, Penman coasts over the full pop panoply from Amis to Warhol and Zappa, leaving quotable passages in his wake: Jackson Pollock "painted like he drank: messily, but with a secret logic in pursuit of the ultimate liquid line, the Big Slur." Norman Mailer "stood for that raw roller coaster feeling, the pure starburst energy of post-war American birth and becoming." Hunter S. Thompson: "The only person he caricatured convincingly now was himself." An interview with Harry Dean Stanton ("last of the great white Dharma bums") becomes a prismatic prose poem. A few pages on Quentin Tarantino turn into an all-out attack: "Despite their spitty hissy tom-cat woozy-Uzi male-violence malevolence these are real 'feel-good' movies... The only film he could convincingly make would be about the Film Festival circuit." These commentaries, profiles, reviews and interviews are packaged neither chronologically nor thematically; however, the closing taglines sometimes make a free-associational link to the opening paragraph of the next entertaining essay. Penman's pages have few wasted words, and amid his clever barbs are genuine insights.
Gordon Flagg, writing about
Vital Signs in
Booklist, noted, "He is a dextrous and invariably entertaining writer, but too many of the subjects herein are now either irrelevant (e.g., a dozen-year-old interview with rock duo Was (Not Was) or overfamiliar (profiles of overexposed celebs like Oliver Stone and Steve Martin)... The two pieces that bracket the collection, a firsthand essay on the drug scene and ruminations on underappreciated '70s U.S. singer-songwriter Tim Buckley, indicate, however, that the volume disserves Penman by not including more of this sort of offbeat commentary."
Julia Kenna reviewed the book for
Rolling Stone, commenting, "Full of contradictions and witty one-liners, Penman uses language as an art form, playing with puns, synonyms, repetition, and punctuation for added effect... Two decades of politics, music and pop culture with a whip-smart wit and wisdom that draws you in and doesn't let go."
*
Ian Penman's Blogspot*
Ian Penman chronology in Rock's Backpages*
Ian Penman on Diamanda Galás 
