I've finally found my passion

Apart from family and football, of course.

In March 1979 Graham Parker put out a song called “Passion Is No Ordinary Word”.

Those were the last days of Jim Callaghan’s Labour government, when you could still smoke on the London Underground and it would never have entered a potential employer’s head to enquire what a job applicant was passionate about.

Not so forty-five years later. Seems that everybody must have a passion these days. particularly if they’re looking for a job. The most heavily-used adjective on Linked In is not honest or reliable; it’s passionate.

I’m not sure this word tells you very much.

I spent thirty years working in magazines. I did quite well. So well, in fact, that people used to say I had a passion for magazines. Did I really have a passion for magazines or did I develop a passionate attachment to being good at something, which happened in this case to be magazines but could just as easily have been radio or the record business or something else entirely? I knew lots of people in that business who appeared passionate about magazines but only a minority made a success of it. Maybe what makes people successful at work is actually being passionate about the work, regardless of what the work involves.

At this point, I want to share something I heard Tom Hanks say recently. A theatre director from his distant past impressed on him the importance of three things in the working environment. The first was you should turn up on time; the second was you should be prepared; the third, and here I must lapse into initial capital letters to stress just how important this is, was you should Have An Idea. The director urged his actors to come to work with this last because, he said, “I can’t do this on my own.” Those three points are the best working advice I’ve heard in recent years.

I’ve always turned up with an idea, even if not all of them have been brilliant. It's alright for you, my kids say, because your career involved something you were passionate about. Certainly, I’ve been connected to pop music since 1960, I have a head full of fragments of information about same and this has led some people to describe me as passionate about music. I’m not sure that I am or that these people, who are only trying to be kind, know what they mean when they describe me as such.

I’ve thought a lot about the nature of my attachment to music and the conclusion I’ve come to is best explained via my posts on Instagram. These posts are short reels about old records, often on the occasion of the anniversary of the record’s release. Despite what people like to assume, I’m not always passionate about them. Some of these are records that mean a good deal to me; others I can take or leave. What they have in common is there’s a story of some kind attached to them. There’s something about their making that I find amusing or illuminating, an aspect of a record’s unpredictable journey through the world which is somehow noteworthy or maybe it’s just the latest opportunity to reflect on the unique life experiences of the musicians who made them. Sometimes I think the thing I like best about the music is the excuse it gives me to tell the stories.