Simon Hattenstone

Simon Hattenstone has written many powerful interviews over the last year, not least his encounter in March with Nick Cave. The singer-songwriter is also an author and artist – but, typically, Hattenstone was most interested in Cave the man, the father who had lost two sons in less than a decade. Their meeting was moving for Cave, for Hattenstone and for the reader. “Before I sit down,” Simon writes, “I ask if I can do something I have wanted to do for the best part of a decade. I reach over the desk and clumsily hug him.”

Rather than hobbling Hattenstone, this rapport freed him to probe painful subjects, such as whether Cave felt any guilt for his son Arthur’s drug-related death. It never felt intrusive or exploitative.

The piece reached an audience of more than 820,000.

There was a more upbeat mood in September, when Hattenstone met singer Paul Heaton. Not one to settle for a 45-minute chat in a hotel suite, Hattenstone joined Heaton on a five-hour pub crawl in Manchester. Every second counted, as Heaton talked about the remarkable ups and downs of his career, as well as his love of the British boozer. “We should talk about the new album,” Heaton kept reminding him, and eventually they did.

Online, this piece had more than 300,000 views and remarkably long attention times.

More sober, in every way, was Hattenstone’s chat with writer Hanif Kureishi, almost two years after the accident that left him a tetraplegic. “I wasn’t even pissed,” Kureishi told him, with Hattenstone commenting: “As if somehow that would have made it better.” This was typical of their conversation, with Kureishi blunt and wry, and Hattenstone avoiding any hint of mawkishness. Maybe because of his own childhood illness – three years of encephalitis – he knows just the right questions to ask, and from a place of genuine interest. It certainly speeds up the bonding process. “Over the morning, we’ve developed a curious, and rather lovely, intimacy,” Hattenstone writes. “As I stand over him, putting the straw [for his drinking water] to his lips, he tells me how much he misses being able to scratch his arse. I almost offer to do it for him.”

The article was read more that 260,000 times.