Paper Cuts by Ted Kessler

Ted Kessler, Editor of Q magazine when it folded in 2020, bears witness to the precarious, and often extreme, world of music publishing

Book Review by Alistair Braidwood | 18 Jul 2022
  • Paper Cuts - Ted Kessler
Book title: Paper Cuts: How I Destroyed The British Music Press and Other Misadventures
Author: Ted Kessler

Music magazines help to define their times, and books by music journalists often offer so much more than simply stories about your favourite bands and artists. You may buy them for the insider’s experiences with, and anecdotes about, the ‘talent’, but the best ones stay with you due to what they say about the precarious, and often extreme, world of music publishing. Ted Kessler’s Paper Cuts will be of interest not only to music lovers, but also magazine aficionados as it shows the challenges that music magazines faced as the publishing world in which they exist changed, shrank, and all but disappeared.

The book begins with Kessler’s early life, charting a challenging journey to a career in journalism, but the book only really gets going when he starts writing about that career. And that book title is telling. Kessler worked in the glory days of the NME in the 1990s, but was also editor of Q magazine when it folded in 2020, so there are few better placed to set out the decline of music journalism, at least in print. In terms of entertainment there are other memoirs written by music journalists that deliver more anecdotes and tales of extravagance, but they were mostly written in or about times when sales, and budgets, were huge. Ted Kessler bears witness to the end times, or near it, which makes Paper Cuts a fascinating document for readers today and in the future.


White Rabbit Books, 21 Jul