The Word Magazine (from whence we came) is an increasingly distant memory, Mojo and Uncut are chasing each other around the ever-decreasing circles of ‘canonical Rock’, the NME is reduced to a glorified advertorial freesheet for clothing brands, and yet even in the racks of my smalltown WHSmith there appear to be…loads of music magazines. Q and Mojo now fight for space with Shindig, Vive Le Rock, Classic Pop, Classic Rock, Prog, Clash, as well as diehards like Kerrang!, the revitalised Record Collector and The Wire.
I bought two newish titles recently and they’re rather good, and interestingly both are paper versions of already well established online incarnations. John Robb’s ‘Louder Than War’ is quite charming and colourful, a throwback to Select Magazine or Vox – some of the writing is a bit wobbly (the Brian Jonestown interview is incomprehensible) and past issues have seemed a bit too in thrall to meat n’ potatoes Indie, but when did you last see Dinosaur Jr on the front of a music magazine? Best of the bunch is Electronic Sound, it is a thing of beauty – boldly putting Bob Moog on the cover and a list of acts that are hardly household names it may well be nailed to the shelves, but it’s worthy of your attention. Good writing, lovely paper stock, gorgeous design and photography and presented in a way that reminds you of the things magazines can do that the interweb can’t. It also smells nice. Unusually, for me, the covermount CD is a keeper too (Blancmange covering Can’s ‘I Want More’ and Jane Horrocks covering Joy Division – what’s not to like?).
Like the gradual return of Record Shops to provincial towns, this mini-revival I think is a sign of a growing realisation that maybe life isn’t necessarily better when framed through an Apple iDevice and that writing still deserves a place on the printed page, away from the retina frazzling, clickbait-infested monitor screen.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that most of these new/surviving mags are appealing to the – ahem – more mature demographic, i.e. those who have grown up with dead-tree media, and still value long-form writing, good design/layout/photography, and, well, something tangible…
Louder Than War isn’t my thing, but I was very impressed with Electronic Sound, certainly enough to go for the £4.99 3-month subscription offer… you’re definitely right about the paper stock, in that way it’s possibly the nicest music mag I’ve ever held (only those hyper-expensive design mags come close), though I found it a slightly quick read as the design (nice as it is) is so spaced-out at the expense of text-content…
Otherwise I still subscribe to Mojo and still find it a good read, despite revolving around the same old Beatles/Dylan/Floyd/Bowie axis… interestingly (inevitably?) their “canon” seems to have reached the early 80’s now, which suits me fine… and Mojo’s ABCs are still holding up at around 70k, whereas Uncut (48k) and Q (44k) are both showing signs of decline…
Interesting.
Alas down here on the wold’s largest island very few mags make it onto the shelves. Even in its heyday the Word was an elusive item.
You’ve got to take out a subscription which ended in tears with the Word. Mags for guitar nerds like @Twang and @johnny-concheroo sell well coz they are tragics. But generalist quality music mags often struggle.
I’ve subscribed to Prog which has a great deal of substance to it. It can be quite fun sitting with a copy and checking out the music referenced with Spotify. You also get the Team Rock online subscription which is not bad either. Year 1 subscription was ridiculously cheap. Not sure what year 2 will be asking for but so far so good.
I didn’t buy music mags for several years but was then tempted back to Record Collector – after some years under an awful editor who commissioned things then never used them/was impossible to get hold of – under Ian McCann’s editorship. Whatever he’s done, he’s really freshened it up and an amazingly good value subscription offer swung it a year or two back.
Word-ishly, in the last issue RC has three personality byline columns (full pages) where the authors can pick a subject and riff about it. Luke Haines’ one in the new issue, about Soft Machine, is very amusing – insulting and affectionate at the same time.
Shameless advert: it seems a piece I wrote last year on progressive British jazz circa 1970 will be in the next issue. It was delayed over the course of these past few months because, as Ian McCann said (and I knew what he meant), ‘George Martin keeps dying’.
“after some years under an awful editor who commissioned things then never used them/was impossible to get hold of”
That’s all too familiar Colin. I got on really well with said editor personally, but everything else you say is true, especially the “impossible to get hold of” part. The RC receptionist was under strict instructions not to put calls through and it was hard not to take it personally. But I met up with the chap years later and he apologised, explaining that the editorial team were under such pressure to get the mag to the printers that they didn’t have time to take calls from anybody.
And yet the bulk of the content in said mag needing to get to the printers was coming from the very people he was never taking calls from nor replying to emails from. I don’t care how busy he was, if he couldn’t keep his contributors on-side/at least vaguely in the loop, and couldn’t muster the courtesy to say even once in a year ‘Sorry, that piece we commissioned you to write and which you went to the trouble of interviewing various people for won’t be published, and you won’t get paid, and here’s the reason…’ he should not have been doing the job. I’ve no sympathy for him. Ian McCann is also manicly busy but has the courtesy to reply once in a while – and as a result, I’m sympathetic and pragmatic and open to writing the odd thing for him even if they do have to wait a few months to appear in print.
‘…they didn’t have time to take calls from anybody…’ Speaking as someone who has been in a similar situation (for which read: ‘has fallen so far behind with work that he’s hiding under his desk from all the people desperate for decisions’), I call bullshit on that one. Nobody was ever that busy, including me.
For the first decade or so I believe RC was put together by just three people – the ad guy, the designer/artwork guy and the editor, who also wrote many of the features. Hence the pressure. Everything else was commissioned from freelancers like muggins here.
It was the week before the mag went to the printers that the pressure got crazy and it was next to impossible to get the editor on the phone. I understand they got an assistant editor in the late 80s, but I don’t know if this made things much better.
The owner at that point was Sean O’Mahony who had built his publishing empire on the hugely successful Beatles Monthly magazine and Beat Instrumental. O’Mahony was a hard taskmaster and I never felt very welcome if he was around when I dropped in the RC offices. He made it clear there was no time to stand around and chat.
O’Mahony (writing as “Johnny Dean”) had unfettered access to the Beatles for years when the mag first started and he even gets a name check in a Let It Be outtake of Dig It
I forgot to add, between phone calls, the RC receptionist also typed out the reams of RC small ads which used to fill up the last 50 pages of the mag. That was no mean feat in those pre-computer days when the ads were submitted on hastily typed (or even hand-written) sheets of foolscap. The receptionist also typed up the articles, which explained the many typos.
I understand ‘Johnny Dean’ was a pain in the arse. He had some issues about people on his staff writing books so I believe one or two did so under assumed names. Idiot. Good for them.
Quite so.
And I’ve just remembered, that RC editorial assistant mentioned above was Mark Paytress, then just out of university, but later to write many rock books.
Yeah it’s a decent read RC these days and probably one of the most eclectic in its content. I like Luke Haines and Bob Stanley’s columns…his most recent one was on deep-catalogue David Essex…you don’t get that in Mojo
I have found myself becoming increasingly frustrated (bored?) with Mojo, and not always reading it fully.
Vive Le Rock is bought and read cover to cover, but I feel I’m missing something as it’s subject is quite narrow – much like Louder Than War. The two together would be a better mag for me.
Problem is I can’t find a mag that covers the breadth I’m looking for, but can’t stop myself Mojo-ing as there might be something really interesting in it the moment I don’t buy it.
Having said that, the Bob Marley/British Reggae articles this month were really good
And the Graham Bond article. I still think MOJO is the bees knees and am grateful it continues.
The louder than war was appealing until you said that the Brian Jonestown Massacre article was incomprehensible. Big fan of BJM.
I don’t think the good Dr was casting aspersions at Ver Massacre per se, more the massacre of the language in the interview.
Hi, yeah I got that. What I meant was would have liked to have got the mag because of BJM but if the article is rubbish then its a bit disappointing.
If you don’t mind digital magazines then check the Readly app. 8 quid a month (no contract) gets you Uncut, Mojo, Mojo’s History of rock, Billboard and and dozens of other magazine types. You can have the app on 5 devices as well and individual profiles for the wife/partner/kids etc.
I did a 2 week trial and got my first month for a pound.
Even better, if one of your local libraries has Zinio downloads you might be lucky enough to get one or two of them free. I have this month’s Q & Mojo on my tablet already for my holiday and they cost me nothing.
It’s all knitting a photography mags around my way. Well, not quite – I always download Viz and Fortean Times from the library, and the occasional science or history mag too, but they have no music publications in their catalogue. Time to drop them a line rather than moaning about it here I suppose.
I’m probably lucky that I’m a member of three libraries, all with a (slightly) different selection of Zinio magazines. Lots of photography and car mags as well as what seems to be a large number that only seem to be published for doctor’s waiting rooms so won’t work electronically at all, but also Viz, Computer mags (I think I read more of them than music ones!) and at one stage a few years back, along with Mojo & Q we even had Shindig!
I filled in the form and got a reply from a helpful librarian who said that requests go to a decision maker who regularly reviews the Zinio magazine offer based on demand and range. I pointed out that there were no popular music mags in their current offer, not since Rolling Stone stopped being updated, so here’s hoping.
sounds interesting -cheers
“Ever-decreasing circles of canonical rock?”
Just honing in on the 60s would suggest the circles are getting bigger not smaller.
Mojo 60s, Shindig, The History of Rock ’65-’69, and a whole host of one-off specials (Beatles, Stones, Who, Dylan etc.).
Tomorrow I’m getting the ‘Jimi’ Mojo 60s and the ‘Yardbirds’ Shindig.
I still rather like Mojo, and every 5/6 months or so the CD is terrific (this month’s blue beat one being a prime example).
Record Collector I’m less keen on. It was terrific 20-30 years ago, when it was really the only outlet (I never counted Q). Now I buy about 1 in 6 RCs. Positive articles telling me that ver kidz are buying up all the 1970s and 1980s Kinks’ albums do nothing for my opinion of either the magazine or ver kidz.
But Deram, articles suggesting that ‘ver anybody’ was buying *anything* recorded after 1966 would have your blood boiling!
After 1970, Colin, after 1970.
The Kinks’ mention refers to the guy out of St. Etienne’s article in a recent RC.
It was complete tosh.
Yes, I got the reference. I just thought you cut off point was more conservative!
It all got conservative AFTER my cut off point.
By 1971 they were all businessmen.
That’s when the tongue logo first appears…..from then on it’s ker-ching time.
Don’t get me wrong Deramdaze – I still buy Mojo – I was probably a little unfair on it – and yep you’re right there are a load more 60s related titles filling the racks –
I have a Mojo subscription. There’s usually something of interest every month. I skip the articles I’m not interested in (about 50%) but still reckon it’s reasonable value. The bluebeat cover CD is a scorcher. The Graham Bond and Brit Reggae articles were good and I like doing the crossword.
Uncut has it’s occasional good articles and cover discs too.
I have a subscription to Songlines too, mainly for the discs. The tone of the articles is a bit po-faced and worthy, although the occasional one does get read. The content seems to be increasingly advertorial, promoting their travel business. I have no interest in becoming a world music tourist.
I’ve just subscribed to Electronic Sound, as it looks interesting. Hopefully it won’t fold now…
Songlines is marginally less po-faced than FROOTS (nee Folk Roots) which I still find as insufferable as ever. I only bother now withthe on-line presence, albeit at only 3 or 4 reviews a month. Rock’n’Reel (R2R) is my favourite altho’ it’s a bugger to ever find, WH Smith seemingly th eonly stockist. The writing is often cack, but enthusiastic, which can make up for it, with apols to exception to the rule Colin H who pops up frrom time to time, as do various other ex-Word bloggers like Trevor Raggat.
Your very kind Retro – I think I’ve only ever contributed a couple of book tie-in things to R2, so I’m definitely not a writer for it, as such, but I’m grateful for the opportunity to provide content that fits their brief and helps make people aware of my books: a win-win, hopefully.
That description of “Electronic Sound” was intriguing so I picked up a copy at lunchtime.
The articles look good (Jack Dangers popping up as a writer was a nice surprise, and I enjoyed the onDeadWaves feature as I’ve been playing their album a lot recently) and the design is as lovely as you say.
The reviews all seemed a bit gushingly positive (which, having heard a couple of things that they’ve described as “brilliant”, doesn’t quite ring true) but there’re other releases I’d not seen reviewed anywhere else (at least not in this depth) so it’s good to have another perspective.
The CD is definitely worth a listen, which’d still be the case even if all it contained was KMFDM doing “Being Boiled”. Gazelle Twin covering Wire is another highlight.
The Three-Issues-For-A-Fiver subscription offer is too good to miss really so I’ve gone for that, and we’ll see if I can justify six quid a pop at that point. Anyway, thanks for pointing this out.
Bring back Disco 45 – best 5p I ever spent.
Shindig’s good this month, if you avoid their increased leaning towards the likes of Elton John and 10cc.
Side-stepping that, there’s 10 colourful pages on The Yardbirds and, best of all, 7 pages on a group who have almost been written out of history, The Equals. I’d prefer an Uncut special on them than Eric Clapton.
Reasonably priced too, £4.95.