When Negative White turned ten years old in 2020, I wrote about our biggest failures. The centre-piece was my interview with Paul McCartney 14 years ago—for more than one reason.
First, I was only 21, highly inexperienced in interviews and journalism, and had no idea how to properly record a phone call. My setup: Connect the phone to a speaker and place a recording device nearby. But back then, technology wasn’t as sophisticated, and it resulted in a terrible echo, which McCartney complained about. Only realising it midway through, I disconnected the speakers.
The second failure came a couple of years later when I formatted my computer’s hard drive. Confident I had saved all critical data, I went ahead only to realise the recordings were gone. Only a small snippet and the published article seemingly remained. And as tragically as it was, it was frankly also a good story to tell.
But then, yesterday, a series of events began to unfold.