Anyone who knows me personally also knows that I’m partially-sighted; a fact that only really causes problems when I meet someone for the first and sometimes only time, i.e. in an interview situation. I used not to mention my eyesight when meeting musicians, as I wasn’t always comfortable with that amount of self-disclosure, plus I didn’t want it to take up valuable interview time. But I’ve changed my tack, thanks mainly to Chuck D of Public Enemy. Because of the rap crew’s then radical political stance, I was very nervous about meeting him in 1992, and that made my attempts at eye contact even more erratic than usual. Chuck complained about this fact, saying that he was used to people looking him in the eye. I thought that his outburst would be the end of the interview, but in fact he became quite interested in my predicament, and the tone of the conversation lightened up considerably. So much so that he was in a decidedly buoyant mood by the time we parted. That encounter made me realise that mentioning my sight gave me an invaluable opportunity to make contact with interview partners by jolting them out of promotion stupor. These days, I bring my partially-sightedness up right at the beginning of my interviews, and people react to it in quite different ways. The Brits are usually very clued up and realise there’s something there before I say anything, Central Europeans are quite glad of the mention as eye contact is more important here than in the UK. And some people are kinder than they need be. David Bowie once tried to lead me from the door of a conference room to the table where we would be having our interview. Why am I mentioning all this? A few weeks back, I met Nina Hagen, German punk’s most enduring and colourful personality, a bit like Lotte Lenya on Ecstasy or Lene Lovich with a greater vocal range. Her first two albums “Nina Hagen Band” (1978) and “Unbehagen” (1979) still stand up as some of the best rock music to come out of Germany, as they combine new-wave aggressiveness with an almost Zappa-like sense of musical adventure. When I told Frau Hagen I had a problem with my eye-sight, her first response was to coo “how sweet” which I found a little patronising. But she redeemed herself quickly by adding: “If you’re partially-sighted, then you can see eternity, you’re not missing much by not seeing a lot of what’s happening in the here and now.” If she’s right, eternity looks pretty darn fuzzy. But perhaps that’s not really surprising.
