In conversation with Rick Sky: “Iggy Pop insisted on a nude interview”
From his chaotic warehouse, Rick Sky, 76, an eccentric kingpin and pioneer of showbiz journalism, tells all about his killer scoops of rock ‘n’ roll’s 20th century heyday.
“Iggy Pop insisted on chatting to me naked to show off his massive c*ck. It’s the only interview where I’ve looked a celebrity in the eye the whole time.”
A genie-like man, 76, in a fuchsia cardigan swings open the metal door to his Camden warehouse. He’s holding a coffee mug with his name on: Rick Sky. The glittery, turban he wears out to haute bohème drinking dens is stowed away until the evening. “I should start wearing it on the high street. I’m not getting enough attention.”
Sky is a kingpin of showbiz journalism. His tales hail from the 1980s, zigzagging from being sued by Michael Jackson for calling him the “Frankenstein of pop” and kicked out of a Lou Reed interview for asking about his “fascination with transsexuals”, to becoming one of the few journalists Freddie Mercury trusted.
Once the pop and rock gossip columnist of The Daily Star, later The Sun and finally The Daily Mirror, Sky now dwells in this haphazard industrial unit. Through a dusty room cluttered with clunky yellowing desktops, cables, stacks of newspapers and empty jars of sauerkraut, a back office hosting his celebrity news agency Bang Showbiz is typing away.
The rest of his magazine collection is hoarded in his flat overlooking Hampstead Heath. “I have about 50,000,” he says.
The son of second world war refugees, as a fresh graduate Sky worked as a waiter at his family’s Polish restaurant on the King’s Road. It sat opposite Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s boutique, so it naturally became a haunt of the two designers, alongside Led Zeppelin.
“Malcolm used to joke that I helped him invent punk, because I supplied him with chicken bones to sew onto his designs,” says Sky.
In those days, broadsheets “turned their nose up at pop culture”. The Times was not interested in Sky’s letter offering to write for them, but The Daily Star gave him free rein over a section. He never felt restricted by it being a tabloid, since “in the back of every popstar’s mind is ‘how do I sell records?’ and tabloids do exactly that.”
Sky’s night owl lifestyle entailed going out to the clubs every night with “a team of three beautiful girls called the ‘Rickettes’” with “huge breasts”. One was screenwriter Jane Goldman, who later married broadcaster Jonathan Ross. There, he would meet the PRs of the pop stars and wangle interviews. “Beautiful women are the trick,” he says with a spritely smile. “Pop stars can’t resist them.”
Following bands across the world was part of the job. David Bowie gave several interviews to Sky after recognising him at a club in Norway. “You’re Rick Sky, aren’t you?” the rockstar said before launching into a strategic tirade about his ex-wife Angela Bowie, hoping to plant it in the next day’s paper.
As for Sky’s own love life, he has never had his heart broken. “I’m still a bachelor. I’ve been very lucky in terms of romance. I went out with lots of Page 3 girls.”
But Sky didn’t always realise a journalism career was possible. As a dope-smoking, nude-protesting hippy at Keele University, he penned a cascade of features for the student magazine spreading rumours about “what professors were sleeping with which freshers.”
He fraternised with every friendship group – except the rugby lads “because they got drunk, whereas [he] did drugs.” He has a knack for chameleoning while staying true to his quirks. “A journalistic skill is infiltrating all kinds of groups,” he explains.
“Before I was a hippy, I was a mod,” he recalls about when he was aged 14, back when he was too young to dance the nights away at The Scotch of St. James.
“Mods as a youth subculture came after the Teddy Boys. They were sharp dressers—if you went to bed with a girl, first you would make sure your suit was hanging up properly with the trousers properly creased.”
The teen girls magazine Jackie was Sky’s very first writer job. “The interview was on Fleet Street. I was thrilled to break into this journalistic paradise. But then they wrote to me: ‘please report to our office in Dundee,’” he sighs.
He got sacked for writing for NME—a blessing in disguise, because when he returned to London his social butterfly nature lended a proclivity for getting killer scoops with real verve.
As a gossip columnist, rubbing people up the wrong way is a given. “Elton John’s manager once gave me a good whacking, and to this day I still don’t know what for,” he shrugs. Michael Jackson sued him for writing about how the cameraman on a video set could see his face melting through the camera. “His nose was somewhere it shouldn’t be.”
But times are different now. “Showbiz journalism changed when reality TV happened in a big way,” he says. And so his tales of rubbing shoulders with rock stars at clubs, instead of through the internet, echo from a lost era.
“Maybe this interview can be my obituary,” this vivacious man, his grey hair swept back into a bun, smiles.