Music Critics # 4 David Cavanagh

In December 2018 Music Journalist David Cavanagh committed suicide by throwing himself in front of a train at Leagrave Station in Luton. He was 54 years old. Not perhaps the best known of writers, he nonetheless had a specific skill and insight into both music and life and his writing is certainly worth tracking down.

At one point an editor of Select, he also wrote for Q, Mojo, Uncut and Sounds. He wrote a sprawling 600 page plus history of Creation Records, My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry For The Prize, a terrific account of the egomania and delusional nature  of Indie 'stars in their eyes' wannabes where he treats The Loft as if they were The Velvet Underground.

The book was derided by Alan McGee as 'the accountant's tale'. McGee as an arch fabricator would have resented seeing Creation's myths and notoriety stripped to their grubby bones and himself represented 'in an inconveniently candid light.'  Cavanagh does a splendid job and it's a must read for anyone with personal memories of the Eighties and Nineties Independent music scenes as well as the changing society that informed them..

Cavanagh also writes a brilliant Bildungsroman piece in Love Is The Drug a collection of essays by writers about their formative musical loves. In a piece called Hell of a Summer, He writes about his student days as an impoverished and unloveable university student in the mid Eighties who discovers and befriends The Triffids in their early days in London.

It's a brutally honest and marvellouly detailed essay, describing the desperate melancholia, loneliness and emotional shallowness of youth. Cavanagh clearly never entirely lost the vulnerable core portrayed so wonderfully here. His writing was elegant and measured and he's a great loss.