Joe Jackson Interviewer

Leonard Cohen compelled me to become an interviewer. How so? He is one of my life-long heroes. And so, in 1985, when I heard that Leonard was co to Ireland to do a gig, I implored a magazine editor to commission me to do an interview, and after I did I felt positively transcendent. So much so, that on the same day I decided, to quote my diary, 'I feel that must go out in search of more of my heroes to talk with.' As such, my career as an interviewer was a quest, of a kind, even if I didn't define it as such, to begin with. Either way, I went on to interview roughly 1,400 world-famous celebrities - not all heroes of mine, I hasten to add - and one, absolutely a childhood hero, actor/singer/poet Richard Harris said to me, in 1993, "That interview you did with Bono was inner sanctum stuff. And that kind of in-depth interviewing is a dying art."