Generations of student music pseuds weep. When was its help day? !975 – 85 I think. Many of the present generation of style Journalists and media pundit rentagob learnt their stuff there and then.
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Bargepole says
Surely 1970 – 75, Nick Kent, Charlie Murray et al……
Timbar says
I downloaded it & it’s dreadful. There’s nothing in it. The paper version you’d get before you catch the tube & it would last you about 6 stops.
Chris says
Rihanna on the cover pretty much sums up where the NME has gone.
Sewer Robot says
Jeeziz yeah – a woman. A black woman. Who is actually popular. Hardly Birdland, is it?
deramdaze says
I’m not doing too much weeping.
I was reminded about this yesterday afternoon, and so went to one of the designated ‘selling’ points, a tube station in London, and…..no NME anywhere.
In a month’s time I’m moving to a place were the nearest point will be an hour by train and presumably if I’m not there on Friday at 8.00 a.m. on the dot I’ve had it.
I give the physical product till Christmas and quite who will single out the NME for information online after that is beyond me, but maybe some will.
I wouldn’t bank on it though.
Chickens coming home to roost and all that.
Colin H says
I never understand why people bang on about this magazine. The Melody Maker from the mid 60s to the mid 70s was the apogee of print coverage of music, certainly in Britain. Both the breadth and depth of coverage is staggering and also the quality of much of the writing. Its legacy to writers of music history books is immense.
Even if one talks about all this ‘year zero’ stuff, Sounds was there first. NME, as far as I can see, is a triumph of brand over truth. Which is a bit like the year zero idea itself. Would anyone be lionising it if it were still called ‘Musical Express & Accordion Times’? I think not. It’s purely down to the funky abbreviation.
Vulpes Vulpes says
Agreed. Went downhill fast in the late seventies. Style over substance. Parsons, Burchill, Swells etc. Bunch of twats. Sorry, iconoclasts. Used to enjoy The Lone Groover mind, but he was from the older school. I liked their early stuff best.
Colin H says
Early stuff? You mean the accordion columns?
ianess says
MM was a deadly dull read. The NME from the early to late ’70s had excellent, witty, interesting writers.
Colin H says
I can’t comment from an as-it-happened perspective. You might be right when talking about readerly pizzazz by the late 70s. I’m talking about reading these papers decades later, as an historian looking for content.
The MM in the later 60s and early 70s was sublime. It had fun and pizzazz but it also locked down huge amounts of interesting information from interviewees and reviews spanning pop, ‘underground’, folk, jazz, free jazz, soul, blues and whatever else. It didn’t need to be ironic or apologetic about any of this coverage – genres co-existed happily and artists were given space to say what they had to say, at a time when a readership made such a publication more than viable (it was the market leader at the time; NME was still trying to elevate itself from the Disc & Music Echo-ish ‘pop lightweight’ position it had occupied in the 60s – which was fine, because MM had the ‘serious stuff’ totally locked down.
And that stuff still stands up 40+ years later, not only for its richness of content and honesty of old-school reportage (without the writer imposing their pseuds corner, self-important stance on everything, which seemed to become the norm by the 1980s when I was, for a while, a buyer of weekly music papers).
That being said, I went out of my way to license in from the maestro himself, as an ebook appendix to my John McLaughlin book, a 6000 word festival report from Charles S Murray from NME in 1975. Not only was it brilliant writing in itself but it captured so much about the era, like vintage war reportage.
And, unintentionally balancing that out, I made a point of licensing in two similarly evocative and well-written Colin Irwin MM pieces (from 1976 and 1979) as appendices in my current Irish piping book.
I’ll always doff my hat at the greats of the past, but for the era in which I’m interested (60s and early 70s), the MM was awash with greats and a rare equality of respect to all genres, even as they were first emerging, like free jazz or 50s rock revivalism. In that era, the NME and Sounds couldn’t touch it.
ianess says
I’d agree with most of that, Colin. I started buying music papers in ’67 and MM was, indisputably, the best out there. I started buying ‘Sounds’ and ‘NME’ a couple of years later. The NME transformed itself from about ’69, IIRC, and romped ahead of MM from then on. It was a terrifically entertaining read from then to the mid-70s at least.
Unfortunately, it then disappeared up its own arse in the late ’70s when Morley and Penman were inflicting their unreadable pseudery on
Lodestone of Wrongness says
Jings – a complete post of yours with which I agree every single word….
Martin Horsfield says
As suspected, it has gone more mainstream to suit its wider audience. It’s also, refreshingly, unshackled itself from its own history, and doesn’t feel the need to keep reminding you that it’s THE NME. That heritage rock thing was getting a bit tiresome, even for me.
I have no issue with Rihanna being on the cover, and it’s nice to see Peter Robinson back there and Versus John Lydon (bit short, though). Chvvrches are another entirely appropriate feature, and in defence of The Big Bang Theory piece, NME has always covered TV, though perhaps nothing quite so shit.
My main bugbear is the design. I’m guessing the art director was told he/she couldn’t do anything with the logo, save for adding the kind of 3D perspective I used to draw on my geography book. But none of the other elements (Agenda, Radar) in their colourful chunky Smash Hits type, match at all. Combined with some horrible furniture for the sidebars, some of the pages must have upwards of five fonts, clashing dreadfully.
As a result of being aimed at a commuter audience and read on the move, the point sizes are also really big, and there’s a preponderance of takeaway, list-y stuff: you could never say there’s too much to read.
My only other two niggles are the paucity of original ideas (Good week, bad week; Like this, try this; What’s on your headphones – really?), and the total absence of humour. The folk that I still know at NME must despair at those boring, straight headlines and captions they now have to write. And they must yearn for the idiosyncratic copy of a Swells, Quantick or Sylvia Patterson.
I’m not so bothered that there are only three album reviews, but ditching live reviews for pics of the top 10 live shows of the week is a humiliating dereliction of duty. In order to convince readers that it knows more about pop than us, NME needs to be getting dirt under its fingernails, and breathlessly shooting/reporting on new acts in far-flung outposts. The best live music experiences are just not the ones you get from O2 Priority booking.
Still, there are adverts for sofas and cars which would never have happened before, so it looks like NME’s future has been secured, and it’s producing a magazine that’s of some value to its new audience. I’d expect to see Ed Sheeran and Adele on the cover before the end of the year.
It’s a shame that the little guys who produce all the interesting music have been squeezed out, but I’d hope that said sofa-buying demographic will tell Time Inc’s focus groups that they’re considerably more open-minded than they’re given credit for, and would like the NME to match.
(Full disclosure: I was chief sub there, 2000-2005)
David Kendal says
What always seems odd about it’s older title is that it shows that the accordion was popular enough to sell a magazine. It’s a part of popular music history which seems to get forgotten. There are probably others as well – I once read an interview with Gary Brooker in which he said his father was also a musician, playing in “Hawaiian” bands in the forties. The pre-rock and roll era was possibly as varied as what came later.
Colin H says
I’m currently reading Peter Doggett’s ‘Electric Shock’, about 125 years of popular music – by which he means the music that was genuinely popular over that time span – what people actually listened to. Heartily recommended. One thing I noticed, similar to the Hawaiian example you mention, when working on my book about Irish uilleann piping was that there was a huge proliferation of (highland) pipe bands across Belfast in the era between the wars. A lot of these things – like The Twist, as Peter explains – are to day with society as much as music, if not more so.
ernietothecentreoftheearth says
The immediately pre-Beatles era was arguably much more varied. The CD sets from a few years back that contained every UK hit for 1960 and 1961 ranged from classical to country, trad and more modern jazz, rock n roll, crooners and puppets ( yes, puppets). Whether or not it was any good is a matter of opinion, but varied it most certainly was.
Now, where’s my copy of ‘Lonely pup in a Christmas Shop’
Vulpes Vulpes says
*loads shotgun, breaks into cold sweat*
Those pig puppets gave me the creeps; scared the living whatsit out of me when I was small. Those pig puppets still GIVE me the creeps to this day. If anyone mentions those pigs by name, they are toast.