Caroline Sullivan, music journalist

OK, so which hopeless wretch is in line for a musical pummeling this week? Well, this is the American journalist Caroline Sullivan.

Music has been Caroline's primary subject, and she started her career with the late British music weekly Melody Maker.

She has since written...

For The Guardian, The Times, Vogue and Cosmopolitan, she is a Sunday Times bestselling author.

And her book about her teenage years as a Bay City Rollers fan, Bye Bye Baby, was named one of the five best books about music by renowned music writer Grail Marcus.

She is the author of a number of biographies and guides about contemporary pop stars, including Ed Sheeran, Dua Lipa and Taylor Swift.

Her latest, Harry Styles, The Stories Behind the Songs, is out on October the 8th.

OK,

Caroline Sullivan, welcome to Hell.

Hello, thank you for having me.

It's our pleasure.

So why do you think you're here? What have you done to deserve being in Hell?

Well, in the eyes of a lot of my male pop journalist contemporaries, I have sinned for about 40 years now.

My main sin has been championing pop.

over serious, quote-unquote, I'm now wiggling my fingers at quote marks, instead of serious rock.

And so that's basically a hell of a fence, according to many of them.

But you have been doing it for such a long time, and you've been doing it for broadsheets, you've been doing it for serious newspapers.

Yeah.

Well, the annoying thing is that now they finally caught up with me and they've decided that pop is great.

Ever since around the time that Girls Aloud came out, who, by the way, I adored and still adore.

Suddenly, because their songs were so good and so undeniable, even the most boring male rock journalists couldn't deny how good they were.

And that has led to much more interest in what we used to call disposable pop.

I mean, for me, my Bible was smash hits.

And it really, it irritates me now that all of a sudden people like, oh, golly, I mean, K-pop, for example, that would have been my territory back then.

But I now have to share my territory with all sorts of more serious people.