Paper Cuts: How I Destroyed the British Music Press and Other Misadventures

Paper Cuts is the inside story of the slow demise of the British music press. However, it's also a heartfelt love letter to that world, detailing how music magazines ultimately saved one man's life. Ted Kessler left home and school around his seventeenth birthday, resolute in his determination 'to be someone who listened to music professionally'.

Paper Cuts recounts how Kessler found redemption through music and writing, taking us on a journey alongside the stars he interviewed and the workplace dramas he navigated as a senior staffer at NME through the boom-time Nineties. He then moved to the monthly Q in 2004, where he worked for sixteen years before it sadly folded with him at its helm as editor in 2020.

We travel through time alongside musical heroes such as Paul Weller, Kevin Rowland, and Mark E. Smith. We visit Cuba twice, first with Shaun Ryder and Bez, then with Manic Street Preachers. We experience long, mad nights out with Oasis and The Strokes, spend quality time with Jeff Buckley and Florence Welch, and witness Radiohead deliver cold revenge upon Kessler in public.

This memoir is a story about love and death, about what it's like when a music writer gets involved with a conflict of interest, and what happens when your younger brother starts appearing on the cover of the very magazines you work for. It's the compelling account of "a delinquent doofus" whose life was both rescued and profoundly defined by music magazines.