I loved being a '90s rock journalist, but sometimes it was a boys' club nightmare

IN THE 1990s, I was a rock journalist striving to assert myself as a young woman, working at the heart of the United Kingdom's male-dominated music press. I loved my job. I met and interviewed all my favorite bands, and spent my twenties and early thirties in a whirl of parties, clubs, gigs and all-expenses trips to America and Europe.

- LIZ EVANS

I began my career through a combination of ignorance, bloody-mindedness, and good timing. With no idea about the protocol of editorial commissions, I was annoyed when a music paper failed to publish my unsolicited live review of a friend's band. Determined to succeed, I followed a tipoff from an artist who lived in a squat with a media contact (this was London in the 1980s), and soon found myself writing for a bimonthly heavy metal magazine.

The editor, Chris Welch, was a softly spoken, conservatively dressed man in his late forties whose office walls were lined with photos of himself hanging out with Marc Bolan, Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, and Eric Clapton, in his days as a young reporter. I rarely saw him during my year at the magazine, but I've never forgotten his gentle demeanor and the trust he placed in my inexperienced, 22-year-old self. Without his support, my life may have taken a very different turn.

Chris was one of a kind. Other than him, respectful, benevolent older men did not figure in my work for the music press.

By contrast, Kate Mossman is a British arts and music writer whose debut book is presented as "a meditation on the powerful archetype of the ageing rock star." Her fixation with rock's fading old guard provides a compelling premise for Men Of A Certain Age: My Encounters with Rock Royalty, but the blurb is a little misleading. This is essentially a collection of republished interviews and personal reflections, rather than an in-depth analysis.

That said, Mossman has produced a thoughtful and entertaining retrospective. Her conversations with the likes of Wilko Johnson, Terence Trent D'Arby, Ray Davies (The Kinks), Jeff Beck, and Kevin Ayers are humorous, perceptive and beautifully composed.