Our Johnny is the Only One Dancing in Time: Chapter 19
An occasional series of possibly true scenes from a perfectly normal life. Let's call it faction.
Chapter 19: The World’s Worst Interview Technique
(If you’re new to the book, you might want want to read the other chapters first. Links to each chapter are at the bottom)
I have, in my entire lifetime, taken part in exactly three job interviews.
When I was sixteen, and had quit school at the earliest possible opportunity, pausing only to set fire to my tie in the driveway and flick Vs in the general direction of the teachers’ office, I urgently needed somewhere to live. This, in turn, meant that I would need a job, not just so it could pay me so that I could afford to pay rent but also because landlords weren’t in the habit of renting out their properties to random sixteen year olds with no income. You could, once you were in a flat, immediately go on the dole and claim housing benefit. But you couldn’t get anyone to give you the keys if you told them that this was your masterplan for getting them their money.
Somehow, despite having less qualifications than almost every other school leaver in the whole of the South East area, I had secured two job interviews. The first was to be an apprentice for British Gas, at the time still a state owned behemoth who felt that they had a moral obligation to train up the otherwise unemployable youths of the nation. Everyone else at the interview seemed to have a detailed understanding of the exciting career they were there to get, coupled with a deep inside knowledge of the workings of British Gas. I just wanted any job that would pay me long enough to get somewhere to live. My answers to questions such as ‘where do you see yourself in the structure of our workforce in five years time?’ and ‘what type of employee would you aim to be for us in the long run?’ were therefore somewhat more limited than all the other candidates, consisting mostly of variations on ‘receiving a regular income with which I can pay my rent’ and ‘the type that gets paid money’. Bizarrely they offered me a job anyway, which says more about the other candidates than it does about my own interview capabilities.
The second was for a job in central London working for an obscure part of the architect and buildings industry doing something called Building Services Engineering. A Building Services Engineer, and you’ll want to fact check this because I wasn’t paying a lot of attention, apparently takes the architects plans and then draws lines on it to indicate where the wires, plumbing and communications cables go. The interview largely consisted of me being asked whether I might move to London, to which my answer that I might move anywhere that would pay me seemed to be an acceptable response. I was in.
I didn’t last long at the company, no more than about eight months. There were two driving reasons for my swift, and voluntary departure. The first was that I had decided at the age of thirteen to be a rock star, so there seemed little point learning to draw lines on architects’ plans because I wasn’t aware of anybody on Top of the Pops who did that as a sideline - although obviously it would later become Justine Frischmann’s raison d’etre. The wave of mass unemployment that Thatcher had engineered as a necessary precursor to her grander mission of stripping away worker’s rights and decimating the power of the unions was in full flow. Since even the Conservatives she had led to power couldn’t get away with letting teenagers starve in the streets, very generous terms of unemployment had been created. It’s difficult to imagine now, but these benefits started from the day you walked out of the school gates, and were consequently relied upon by most budding and aspiring musicians, in fact the whole creative sector, as a cultural subsidy. If you wanted to be an artist, the bizarre nature of the attack on the rest of the population by Thatcher, and her ideological driving force Keith Joseph, was actually a huge help. If you’ve got four million people with no employment, it’s actually quite difficult to spot the forty to fifty thousands of them secretly doing the work they want; learning how to be an artist. I intended, once I had secured somewhere to live, to avail myself of Margaret’s sterling financial support for my songwriting, bass playing, singing and rock-starring. An economic contribution to my well-being I intended to recognise by making all my songs about her.
The second, more pressing, cause for my early departure was that I simply could not do the drugs. The music industry, legend has it, is a positive snake-pit of drugs, debauchery and misbehaviour. In my experience it’s mostly consisted of people offering you brick dust and crushed up paracetamol in a toilet you’d be well advised not to take too many breaths in, but its legendary worst excesses, perhaps Lennon’s early seventies lost weekend or Pete Doherty’s determination to do himself harm in the early noughties, pale into insignificance compared to the bunch of wild and crazy stoners and speed freaks that worked in that office. One of my main duties during my brief period in Bedford Square was to wait in the hallway for a man to arrive on a scooter. This helpful chap would hand over a shopping bag full of white powder, which it would be my job to upend on to a flattened drawing board and then chop into lines, a task I had been trained in on my third day in the office. The senior building service engineers would then march over to the board, stuff as much of the powder up their nose as they could with a straw, then get straight back to work. This they would do once an hour for about 60 hours in a row, while I filled the time by turning a vinyl copy of Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell over from one side to the next so they could all sing along to it. I had read the work of Hunter S Thompson but I’d never actually seen it being actioned in real life before. I doubt even he had spent time watching a large room full of off-their-heads-not-quite-architects attempting to unify their impressions of a revving motorcycle into a coherent version of the breakdown in the middle of the title track of Jim Steinman’s masterwork.
After that experience, I kept well away from formal employment by anybody for the next forty years, bouncing from one freelance, self-employed, self-motivated, hare-brained scheme to another. But in 1999 I did do my third formal job interview using the world’s worst interview technique, which runs as follows:
Make sure you don’t think you’re going to get the job
Consider the possibility of the job being given to you to be almost zero
Identify the person in the waiting room who you are pretty sure is actually getting the job and that all this interview stuff is really just a compliance position in case anyone asks any questions
Confident you have nothing to lose, march into the interview room and tell them exactly what you think of their terrible project, providing extensive detail of why it won’t work
Refuse to answer any questions, but insist that, since you are getting the job anyway, it would be a useful 30 minutes if you told them what they should be doing
Thank them for their time, and be sure to be a bit rude on your way out
It is this technique, which I strongly urge you not to try, which I decide to employ while seeking a freelance position as the head of the newly formed Rhythmix Project.
The One had seen a job notice in the Guardian which she had cut out and brought home. I wasn’t really in the market actively looking for a job, but the Reading Alleycat debacle had recently unfolded, the Holy Toilet was still, despite us now owning it, not really making any money, and she thought I should see what was out there that she felt I could also do. Hidden among all the other jobs which would plainly send me round the bend, and for which any attempt to employ me would have a similar effect on my prospective manager, was the announcement that four local authority music services had put together a community based project and wanted to offer someone a freelance contract to lead it. It specifically mentioned knowledge of grant funding, which I’d been managing for three years, and that they were looking for someone integrated into the ‘contemporary live music scene’. I wasn’t so much integrated as a part of the furniture, so with no expectation of them having any reciprocal interest in meeting me I sent them a letter expressing an interest in meeting them.
Somehow something I said seemed to ring enough of a bell that I was summoned to a grand manor house in deepest Surrey for an interview, which is where my technique for not getting the job comes in. There were five people to be interviewed, and the first thing I noticed was that all of them were better dressed than me and had a briefcase. I mean, I hadn’t turned up dressed like I had just finished an eleven hour shift trying to make Ozric Tentacles sound good - which was, in fact, what I’d been doing - but I didn’t own a tie and my trouser options took in a wide range of jeans from the ‘holed at the knee’ to the ‘missing a full trouser leg’. I’ve got my best t-shirt on and I’ve had a shower, that’s about my limit.
Surveying the other applicants, it quickly becomes apparent that I am the wild card. They are all teachers, three of them actually already working for the people about to interview them. One particular candidate is so quietly confident and assured that it’s reasonably obvious that she’s been told she’s getting the job, but they have to go through an open and public recruiting service first, even letting that odd bloke from the toilet in Kent have a go at it. The vibe emanating from her is very much that this is a tiresome and time consuming formality.
The first three criteria of my perfect approach to interviews having been successfully achieved, I wait my turn then march into the interview room like a man without a care in the world. I’m not getting this role, so decide to spend an amusing 30 minutes telling them everything that’s wrong with what the job specification, their plans, local authorities, formal music education, the general state of the world and the universe. Somewhere in the middle of this diatribe I switch over to what they can usefully do with the £250,000 they’ve got, none of which, I confidently state, they will ever do, because they’ve obviously already decided to do the same thing they’ve been doing for years and which quite obviously hasn’t been working. I pause briefly to mention that classical music is the preserve of the terminally elitist and that ownership of a bassoon should be a hanging offence, then conclude with a flourish by announcing that Opera makes me want to kill someone and the best thing about violins is that they burn nicely.
The four gathered heads of four local authority music services, in my, at that time. ill informed and myopic view, are the very archetype of the formal education system that had so badly let me down some fifteen years earlier. They take all this in with some notes, politely thank me for my time, ask a couple of questions, then usher me out. As I’m closing the door behind me I remark that part of their problem when it comes to engaging the masses with the western classical music canon is that I never learned anything about music at all in school, the teacher’s sole interest being in having us mindlessly repeat the birth and death dates of composers who I’d never heard of at the time and hoped to never hear of again. I’ve gone full Johnny Rotten and am quite pleased with myself. Six for six on my interview technique plan.
I’m standing in the porch of the Manor House some five minutes later waiting for a torrential downpour to stop, yelling down the phone at The One that, come hell or high water, I shouldn’t ever try to do an interview ever again, it’s just not my thing, when a rushed clatter of footsteps from the grand staircase behind me announces the arrival of youngest of the four interviewers.
“Ah, good… caught you” he says. “Would you have time to pop back up?”
I follow him up the stairs, back into the interview room, where a bottle of wine and five glasses have appeared on the coffee table between them.
“That was quite an extraordinary 30 minutes” says the one with the American accent. “We were wondering if we could persuade you to take the job?”
They could.
Read the previous chapters of Our Johnny is the Only One Dancing in Time here:
“Ownership of a bassoon should be a hanging offence” is one of the most Mark things you’ve ever said.
Where had you been trying to make Ozric Tentacles sound good?