Lucy O'Brien - Early Musical and Writing Career

Early Musical and Writing Career

In 1979, whilst attending a convent school in Southampton, she formed a punk band aptly named "the Catholic Girls". She left the band in 1980 to attend University in Leeds, and The Catholic Girls continued for a while under the name Almost Cruelty before splitting up.

At university she played with a number of bands before giving up performing to write instead. She became music editor of the University of Leeds magazine, Leeds Student, and after graduating in 1983, she submitted gig articles to the music paper the New Musical Express (NME), which then published Charles Shaar Murray and Nick Kent. She has since written about the "intimidating" office culture at NME in the eighties, and the extent to which female music journalists were ostracised and not taken seriously by the paper. Her best-known contribution to the paper may be the notorious "Youth Suicide" cover article.

Forming an alliance with fellow soul and socialism heads Stuart Cosgrove and Paolo Hewitt, O'Brien became part of a leftist faction at NME which was eventually discharged by incoming editor Alan Lewis — an IPC troubleshooter instructed to de-politicise the magazine and boost sales.

During her early years at NME, O'Brien also wrote for the feminist magazine, Spare Rib, whose offices she had first visited in 1980. In 1984 she co-wrote a cover story for them about women in the music industry. She was shocked to discover just how few women had record deals or were in the charts compared to men and this discovery would inspire her later work, particularly She Bop.

After leaving NME, O'Brien worked as Music Editor at the London listings magazine City Limits. It was here that she interviewed Dusty Springfield, an interview which led to her being contacted by the publishers Sidgwick & Jackson, and to her being offered the chance to write Springfield's biography.