Tom Dunne's Music & Me: Meeting your heroes isn't all it's cracked up to be 

I've met everyone from Paul McCartney and Beyoncé to Al Pacino and William Shatner.  It often wasn't what I'd dreamed of 

Not all interviewers have as much fun as William Miller (Patrick Fugit) in Almost Famous.

Interviewing famous people is not the craic you’d expected. I have interviewed Paul McCartney, Brian Wilson, Kylie, Blur, Oasis, Beyoncé, Nick Cave, Alanis Morrissette, Sir Bob, David Grohl – pauses to catch breath - Al Pacino, John Cleese and William Shatner and MANY more. 

I’m only stopping for modesty’s sake, It was good, but not as good as teenage Tom would have liked.

Teenage Tom would have liked to start each interview by whooping with joy and then pointing at each celebrity and telling them who they are: “You’re Paul McCartney! You ARE Paul McCartney.” 

He’d have liked to follow this with questions like, “So, in 1969,and this will go no further, were you actually dead, Paul?” 

For Pacino, I’d have liked to have chained myself to his leg while whispering ‘I can’t believe it’s you!” Later, waiting for the police, I’d have made a quick call and then passed him the mobile saying, “Go on Al, say hello to my little friend. His name is Derek.” 

 But no, I did none of these things. Any why? Well, because of that old buzz killer we in the industry call ‘professionalism'. 

It’s a word that is the opposite of fun, a word that requires you to pretend the person you are interviewing is normal and that you and they are just professionals doing a job. His name is John, you must tell yourself, It isn’t really Basil.

In the real world you will probably be vetted to ensure you have met A-listers before and haven’t bitten any of them. With Macca I was tortured by his PA. I’d been told to expect some type of call. 

It came while I was driving. When I answered a voice said playfully, “Hi Tom, this is Paul.” I almost crashed. But it was just his PA, also called Paul, toying with me.

Down the years, to break the ice, many PAs have decided to tell their charges that “Tom too is in a band.” Amazingly, many of the celebs have jumped on this in an ‘oh well, that’s different then', kind of way, ‘he’ll get this'. 

This has relaxed them in an unsettling way as they treat me as some kind of long lost band member. “I don’t need to tell you,” they will say, or “You know yourself.” They really do need to tell me and I don’t know myself but the end result of all this is to make the interview an odd out of body experience. You can see the very famous person opposite you, talking to you and laughing at if they know you. 

Painfully you can also see a list of ‘must cover topics’ on your lap and a clock somewhere counting down the carefully rationed time.

But you are briefly allowed to glimpse behind the curtain and I’m not sure this is always wise. You hear someone you regard as a pop god being chided by a PA, talked to as if they were a child. 

Or you see another man you regard as a punk god asking you to take a seat in his room as he patiently organises all the medications he is on, regarding you sadly and saying “I’m like a bloody chemist.”

Pretending they aren’t really who they are only works up to a point. With Al Green it worked whilst he talked about his pre-fame life. This he said had been a disaster stemming from not singing in his own voice. 

His manager had kept saying, “Al, you’ll never be a success until you sing in your own voice.” He sang me a line in this weird, fake American voice. It was awful. Then he looked at me and said “So I told him, okay, if that’s what you want.”

He then proceeded to sing a verse of 'Take Me To the River' in the voice of, well, Al Green. I was rooted to the spot, speechless. Time stood still. All I could hear was his singing and the beating of my heart. Teenage Tom started to get the upper hand. I wanted to point at him and say ‘you’re Al Green.’ 

I was a little giggly after that. I wanted an autograph and couldn’t remember the questions. Nothing mattered. Professionalism was long gone. It didn’t survive a skirmish with the reason you talk to these people in the first place: their talent. 

That little gift they have, and despite everything their PA might say, we don’t.