Sliding doors: music writer Andrew McMillen on answering the call to join The Australian

The phone call that changed my life arrived in a darkened hotel room, and I was so spooked that I didn’t pick up.

Andrew McMillen describes joining a newsroom as like ‘grasping the door handle of a bullet train in motion’. Picture: Roy VanDerVegt

The phone call that changed my life arrived in a darkened hotel room, and I was so spooked that I didn’t pick up.

It was early November 2017 and I was visiting Portugal while working as a freelance journalist. The assignment was to report on a cryptocurrency conference for GQ magazine, and to interview the chief executive of a crypto-based social media platform named Steemit before a crowd of 300 geeks, freaks and the wannabe rich.

At that point I’d been working as a journalist for eight years, building a career from bit parts and hard-earned commissions from a disparate coterie of editors across Australia and abroad. Freelancing was hard but never boring, and I was good at it.

The Portugal gig was a curious one, centred on digital money and its ramifications, still somewhat nascent and little understood at the time, but it was far from the weirdest assignment I’d encountered as a writer.

That designation will be hard to best: travelling to Ukraine to report on a “summer romance tour” run by an online dating company, where dozens of desperate and dateless men – mostly Americans, mostly middle-aged – paid about $5000 apiece for the privilege of meeting hot young women on the other side of the world.

I had somehow convinced the dating company to send me and my girlfriend to accompany this caravan of lovely oddballs to several cities in southern Ukraine – all done “on spec”, as they say in the freelance business, without an editor’s agreement to publish the resulting story.

(It eventually ran in Maxim magazine, in short form across three pages, with Rachael’s photographs; I published a much longer travelogue on my blog to an audience that could be rounded down to zero.)

That was 2011, when I was 23; I can’t speak for whether any of those blokes found lasting love, but what happened in Ukraine didn’t stay in Ukraine – it solidified what Rachael and I felt for each other. We’ve now been married eight years and created a four-year-old boy. I digress.

Jet-lagged and newly arrived in Lisbon, at about 5am local time, I was staring out the window into an overcast sky when my phone buzzed to life, startling me from a reverie.

The name on the screen was one familiar to me: an editor with whom I’d first worked six years earlier, for a story reporting on the intersection of Hillsong Church and the music industry for a national newspaper.

Ashleigh Wilson was then arts editor at The Australian, and seeing his name was such a bolt from the blue in my groggy state that I opted to let it ring out rather than attempt a conversation. But a plan was in motion, and a door was being slid open, as he soon outlined in an email.

Ashleigh’s task was an impossible one, but the nature of daily journalism is to accomplish the impossible and then do it again tomorrow, so he was well-equipped.

His task was this: replacing Iain Shedden, the paper’s longtime music writer, who had died too young, at 60, a few weeks earlier. I had worked remotely with him since 2011, writing album reviews for the weekend paper.

On only three occasions did I file a five-star review – for releases by The War on Drugs, Health and Halfway, in 2014, 2015 and 2016, respectively – and Iain ran them all without further query, trusting my ears from afar.

His loss cut deeply across Australian music and Australian journalism. I travelled from Brisbane to Sydney to attend his funeral.

I stood at the back of Marrickville Town Hall and watched as scores of his colleagues filed in to farewell their Scottish mate. His daughter Molly sang Fall at Your Feet, and it was one of the most beautiful and moving performances I’ve ever witnessed.

Weeks later, Ashleigh confided that he was preparing a shortlist of names for consideration for the music writer role. “Firstly, I don’t suppose you’re at all interested?” he wrote. “I’m guessing not, given the breadth of great stuff you’ve been doing lately, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to ask.”

It didn’t hurt. I was interested. I stepped through the door.

Three weeks later, my appointment was announced in The Weekend Australian on November 25, 2017.

On January 2, I walked into the paper’s Brisbane bureau and met a glorious assortment of humans who became my colleagues, gig accomplices, confidants, drinking buddies, mentors, touch football teammates and friends.

To be a freelance journalist is to be an outsider. I had a way with words, but they had all been composed at a remove, at my own pace, while I sat in a variety of share-house home offices, always on my lonesome.

Joining a masthead that was printed six days a week, and published online at all hours, felt like grasping the door handle of a bullet train in motion.

I became an insider, working in a newsroom for the first time in my life. The whiplash initially was overwhelming, but I’m grateful that I was shown the time and patience from my editors to get up to speed.

It has now been six years in a role that has taken me to the far corners of this country to talk to musicians about their art. My love for the work has only deepened with time, in parallel with my understanding of storytelling. It is a privilege.

In an obituary for his colleague, Ashleigh wrote that Iain once said, over a drink late one night in Surry Hills, that it was the best job in the country. I could not agree more.

Sometimes I feel like what I write in these pages is frivolous when compared with the weightier, news-breaking, nation-shaping work of my colleagues.

But then I remind myself this is a false equivalence, and that music is the soundtrack to our lives, and that a staff of reporters is an orchestra, and that the news is endless, and that in the course of a year we all get an opportunity to step forward and perform a solo, so long as our instrument is in tune and our fingers move in time.

Andrew McMillen is The Australian’s national music writer.