Neil Kulkarni [on Wookie]: The crowd’s response to it shows you it’s skill, they’re loving it and they’re dancing and singing along to it […]
Al Needham: Were you entertained when you saw him [Robbie Williams], Neil?
Neil Kulkarni: I wasn’t… I mean, I’ve always been entertained by my own simmering loathing…!
Chart Music: the Top of the Pops Podcast, #37 (2019)
While I was his friend on Facebook, I didn’t ever meet or speak to Neil Kulkarni in-person, so I’m far from qualified to offer the deepest of tributes. But as part of a loose grouping of writers – at the Melody Maker, with Simon Reynolds, Simon Price, David Stubbs and Taylor Parkes, and online, joined by the varied likes of Rhian E. Jones, Marcello Carlin, Mark Fisher, Tom Ewing and Robin Carmody – he was an unrepentantly raucous and erudite writer who made a deep impression on how I appreciate music and life.
Neil Kulkarni was an elegant, Coventry-centred colossus of music writing, who, for a time, was prominent in a culture which could have benefited from heeding his passionate and complex words about a vast range of music into the 2000s.
He came into prominence in autumn 1993 through writing an articulate and irrefutable letter to the Melody Maker about its elision of Black musicians’ work. Thereafter, he was invited to work on the paper in a move showing the relative openness of the music press at that time, which, in its Allan Jones edited era, could still claim with some credibility to be a focal point for the counterculture in Britain. For the next half decade or so, Kulkarni was a fearless and trenchant music critic, interviewer and, curiously, gossip columnist, initially as a permanent staff member at the Maker.
Kulkarni was also latterly a regular guest on the Chart Music podcast. The crucial episode #37 ‘ITV Digital and Chill’ provided an analysis of an August 2000 Top of the Pops episode which was full of love and insight. For instance, there are incredibly layered dissections of Craig David and Mansun, a humanely damning account of Reef and a sterling paean to UK Garage star Wookie. Kulkarni, who waxed humorously about practically anything, also extolled rare “thrilling” moments in the TOTP archive where you see “weird noises exciting people!”, where strange sonic moments in MJ Cole or Sparks visibly affect people in the audience.
However, this is rightly most remembered for Kulkarni and fellow ex-Melody Maker writer Sarah Bee’s account of how the magazine’s ethos was destroyed, its genial, combative pluralism filleted by a range of Marks who mostly came in from the NME and reduced the paper’s audience and reach with a bizarre tunnel-visioned pitch for limited and laddish guitar rock bands, and an “Alternative Nation” which was clearly anything but. Bee and Kulkarni detail, in an extended therapy session mixed with dramatic tirade, the dismal, misbegotten editorial reign of Mark Sutherland, which led to the paper being discontinued and merged with NME at the end of 2000. His angry instantaneous reactions to the very mention of certain bands or journalists come from a place of love for what is good, exciting and generous in life and music.
There is the necessity in certain extreme cases for calling a cunt a cunt. Especially when a magazine which had provided a focal point for disparate genres, people, weirdos, pop fans and all to converge in a benign space with each other was unceremoniously turned into its opposite. Namely, a sneering, exclusive space for white male rock bands, which was, as Kulkarni said, was “separatist” and actively denigrated anything which deviated from this pattern and betrayed certain racist tendencies. Ultimately, Sutherland was patronising to his readership, treating them as idiots – Kulkarni quotes the gauche bracketed clause added in by Sutherland to his own copy which actually assumed readers would not get the cultural reference “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy”. The tirades reach a righteous crescendo when Bee and Kulkarni reach the Sutherland MM‘s ’50 Reasons the Alternative Nation is Fighting Back’, a bullshit litany if ever there was one and one of the dumbest, neediest morsels of prose ever published.
There was a loss of spaces like Melody Maker and indeed Top of the Pops where different tribes and demographics would coexist happily enough. All of which tied into the increasingly nasty public sphere (or bear pit) of the Noughties, which is increasingly recognised by a range of writers. Kulkarni turned to writing for specialist publications pertaining to heavy metal and hip hop, which was a sign of cultural atomisation and silos and how few were being allowed to deploy a pantheistic, inclusive philosophy of music – barring perhaps John Peel until 2004 and Annie Nightingale long after.
Kulkarni’s writings online for The Quietus and various blogs could often be richly entertaining and deeply moving, as in the case of his tribute to the late Terry Hall from one of his favourite bands, Coventry’s The Specials. What struck me most in the last five years or so, as a subscriber to The Wire magazine, was his prolific and wide-ranging reviews and interviews, which gadded freely from genre to genre. Rightly, his friend and colleague David Stubbs has mooted a collection of Kulkarni’s finest, most vital writings. I’d say his interview with Cleveland, Ohio’s mighty Mourning [A] BLKstr to coincide with the release of their extraordinary The Cycle in September 2020 should be a shoe-in.
Following on from the sad departures of Annie Nightingale (1940-2024) and Roy Battersby (1936-2024), Neil Kulkarni’s premature passing leaves British culture immeasurably poorer. Who else could range from discussing fashion to crisps, hip hop to BBC radio 3, Carry On movies to historian Edward Gibbon’s prose style? For David Lichfield, the loss of a good social media friend has meant Facebook now feels ‘pointless’.
But we can donate to this fund to help support his bereaved children, set up by David Stubbs and which 1,550 people have contributed to. We can also return to Neil’s words, which deserve collecting within at least one book, and learn, act and be.
I’m never going to get a tattoo, but if I did, it would be a Melody Maker tattoo. I fucking loved that magazine. I don’t feel cleansed, Sarah, I still feel upset.
Chart Music #37 (2019), op. cit.
Sometimes I think that music is the only prism we have left through which we can process pain, and that’s why in 2020 it has taken on an extra radiant significance, an even more intimate connection with our reasons to be. […] Before we rush back to the usual cycle of auteurist, individualist music made by lauded and pampered artists, we’d do well to listen deep to the communal act of love that is The Cycle.
Neil Kulkarni, The Wire #439 (September 2020)
May's Britain... 