Andrew Dubber     

A name that I hadn’t given any thought to for — ooh… perhaps 20 years or more — is Dominic Roskrow. You probably won’t have heard of him, but these days he describes drinks for a living.

He doesn’t know this, but as a late teen finding my way in the deepest suburbs of Auckland, New Zealand, he was my nemesis. Honest.

Thanks to my high school English teacher, Peter Thomson, I wrote the occasional piece for a free music magazine called Rip It Up and had aspirations to know a thing or two about the rock scene. Roskrow was a seasoned music journalist for the New Zealand Herald (our only national newspaper which blended the politics of the Times with the spelling of the Guardian).

While Graham Reid had always made me feel a little under-educated with his urbane nods to what were probably widely understood references at the time, that was nothing compared to the ire that Roskrow could inspire in me.

Nobody in my experience of all of music journalism was able to so consistently appraise a rock record and come to the complete opposite position to the one I had adopted as he could.

It was absolutely uncanny.

It got to the point that for quite a few years I was able to buy a record entirely unheard simply because Dominic Roskrow had hated it. Anything he loved, I despised on principle.

There he would sit in his (presumably) unreachable and lofty place in the towers of Granny Herald passing false judgement on all manner of musical outpourings that would cross his desk and enter his auditory world. And I would sit and seethe at just how wrong one man could be.

Now, all these years later, I do a search on whisky reviews, and I find that my childhood nemesis has found his way into another nascent passion of mine. He is one of the names that comes up most often when you go looking for writing about whisky.

As yet, I haven’t read enough of his reviews or sampled enough of the whiskies that he’s written about to form any sort of opinion as to the reliability of his recommendation. But once again, he knows far more about it than I do — and his opinions are both valued and printed in a publication that people pay for, while I tap away at the keyboard for another freebie.

I’m fervently hoping that he’s remained as monumentally wrong in this new endeavour as he always was about music back in New Zealand. But since I’ve somewhat lost much of my adolescent desire to mark myself out as different from the views expressed in the mainstream media, I suspect that he’s probably going to be mostly right.

He still writes as if he’s composing a solo oratory piece to be delivered in a large auditorium (and I quote: “…fate has intervened to guarantee that for the time at least their paths are going on very separate routes, one uncertain and directionless, the other ever upwards”), but I’m guessing he knows his malts.

Just wait till I know a thing or two, and I’ll be happy to cross imaginary swords with Dominic Roskrow again. And he will no doubt continue to be oblivious to my fist shaking and cursing. And all will once again be right with the world.

Cheers.