Sylvia Patterson

Sylvia Patterson (born 8 March 1965) is a Scottish author and music journalist. A former contributor to Smash Hits and the NME, she is the author of the memoirs I'm Not With The Band(2016) and Same Old Girl (2023).

Patterson grew up in Perth, Scotland, the youngest of five children. Her father, an accountant, had been a Japanese prisoner of war on the Burma railway.^[1] Her mother worked as a psychiatric nurse.

Her writing career began straight from school. She worked on various magazines for Dundee publisher D.C. Thomson. In February 1986 she moved to London after successfully applying for a staff writer job on her favourite magazine, Smash Hits.^[2] Inspired by her mentor, Tom Hibbert, who interviewed her for the job,^[3] Patterson was a key contributor in shaping the magazine's much-celebrated irreverent, comic style during its mid- to late-1980s sales peak of a million copies a fortnight. By the early 1990s, Patterson had left Smash Hits to work freelance, going on to become a prolific contributor to the NME, The Face^[4] and, by the late 2000s, Q magazine, as well as writing for broadsheets and women’s magazines including Glamour,^[5] The Guardian, the Sunday Times and as a weekly columnist for Scotland’s Sunday Herald.

As one of the most prominent female pop journalists of her generation, Patterson is often cited as an inspiration by those who followed her, including Miranda Sawyer (who started at Smash Hits two years after Patterson in 1988), Caitlin Moran and Jude Rogers.^[6] Her radio and TV appearances include BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour ,^[7] BBC4's Top Of The Pops: The Story of 1986, and BBC1's The One Show as part of its 2018 retrospective Smash Hits celebration.

In 2016 she published her memoir I'm Not With The Band (its title a play on Pamela Des Barres’ I'm With The Band).^[8] It follows Patterson’s journalistic career from the 1980s to the present (revisiting her classic interviews with Madonna,^[9] Prince,^[10] Eminem, Beyonce, George Michael, Kylie Minogue, Richey Edwards, Amy Winehouse^[11] and others) as well as her personal experiences growing up as the child of an alcoholic parent, multiple miscarriages and financial insecurity in the face of the gradual collapse of the music magazine industry itself. The book was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award,^[12] the Penderyn Music Book Award^[13] and the NME Awards Best Book Of The Year, eventually winning BBC Radio 1 DJ Annie Nightingale's Book Of The Year.^[14]

Her second memoir, Same Old Girl, was published in April 2023. Triggered by Patterson's diagnosis of breast cancer in late 2019, it is described as an "unflinching, poignant and gallows-funny odyssey through the mid-life trials we all face".^[15]

Other than her own books, Patterson is also the ghostwriter of My Amy: The Life We Shared, the memoir of Amy Winehouse's best friend Tyler James, a 2021 Sunday Times Book of the Year.^[16]

• I'm Not With The Band: A Writer’s Life Lost in Music, (2016, Sphere)
• Same Old Girl: Staying Alive, Staying Sane, Staying Myself, (2023, Fleet)