From Friday the NME will no longer be available as a weekly magazine.
The final edition will bring to an end 66 years as one of the UK’s most iconic music publications.
I didn’t even know it had been free for over two years, so it won’t make a whole lot of difference to the current me, but the 17 year old me will miss it – sort of.
Where is NME paper?
* not true
It will still be available online
Dude, it’s just relocating to San Junipero. I hope to join it there someday…
I used to buy 3 weekly music papers when I were a young scamp: NME, Sounds and Record Mirror.
Try telling the kids today etc…
Me too.
I ended up with Sounds as my paper of choice after a couple of years.
No surprise, but a sad day. When I was about 21 it was highlight of my week when it came out. The joy of moving to London where I could go to Enfield Town station and pick it up a day early. (Tues eve). Read every word.
Oh my gosh, yes! When I was at college in the Elephant & Castle in the early eighties I was beside myself with glee at being able to get my hands on it a day early. I had completely forgotten doing that !
All of the above. It was the cool older sibling who shaped a lot of me whether by curating my taste, or making me reject received wisdom on “cool” and follow my own likes and dislikes. The recent freesheet was beyond a travesty, and was just a horrible waste of resources.
Interesting viewpoint. I always saw it as relentlessly obsessed with who was cool and who wasn’t, and boy did they make sure they told you. Largely based, I’d guess, on the width of trousers or who gave them the best drugs.
Dare I say good riddance? At least as long as I’ve been aware of it the magazine has been genuinely embarrassing. Of course, this doesn’t account for the legacy of the older, more respected years of the magazine’s life but at this point I don’t think many people will miss it.
I’ve thought it a triumph of brand over history. NME was late to the punk party, as I understand it, but somehow claimed that ground and was thereafter the weekly that was ‘down with the kids’. But Melody Maker – despite its title being naff, even in the 60s – was a towering publication in the 60s and 70s – a vast, rich historical resource now and full of a level of writing and breadth of coverage that the likes of NME, Record Mirror, Disc etc in the 60s couldn’t, and didn’t try to, compete with.
NME took control from about 77 onwards, and (generally) the standard of writing was better than the MM, which was still a decent publication. Amazing that there were so many weeklies covering pretty much the same ground. Sounds too, although that moved more to heavy metal and (shudder) the “Oi” movement.
NME was the first music paper to feature the Sex Pistols. Charles Shaar Murray wrote a very long article about the burgeoning New York punk scene in 1975. Hardly late to the party, although it was Sounds that really championed punk in 1976.
Melody Maker was aimed at an older readership than Disc or Record Mirror which were both mostly targeting fans of the singles charts.
From the early 70s to the late 80s I bought music papers every week, mainly to find out which bands were touring, which records I should be looking out for and which bands were up and coming and worth seeing. I liked NME best because it introduced me to more great music than the others.
I probably started reading the musical weeklies around 1971/2 and my preferences at that time were NME and Sounds and later just NME. I tried MM and although it was clear it had a more lauded history its writing always seemed stuffy compared to the NME. Edgy and Provocative to the staid approach of MM.
Still it stopped being relevant for me at least 30 years ago and the odd occasion when I chanced upon the magazine version it was clear it was the living dead.
The early to mid nineties were my era for reading the NME. I used to buy that and Melody Maker, and I didn’t notice a vast difference between them. They were both good. In-depth articles where needed (usually with decent original photoshoots), and a good overview of the whole music scene, touching on just about everything. I definitely felt well connected back then.
Used to pore over them for hours in the uni library on they day they came out (Wednesday, was it?) instead of studying like I was supposed to be doing.
Feels a bit like the end of an era, but of course the world has moved on.
Could live without Morley, Birchill et al (were they NME?) obviously, who wouldn’t?, but, it has to be said, the music press used to be cheap as chips and often very funny.
Circa 1992/3 I think you could still pick up both NME and MM and have change out of £1.50.
Great things to take into dodgy East-End boozers for the afternoon and proceed to give the bartender a great deal more!
Mark E. Smith’s recent death was a reminder that, whilst being in absolutely no danger of buying a Fall record, the fact that his interviews were brilliant and usually took place in equivalent dodgy boozers in Manchester made us strange bed-fellows (no, not in that sense).
The recent model was something to openly laugh at, which I did whenever I could find a copy. I was in London last weekend and did find a copy. If anything it was more shite than two years ago. I wouldn’t have thought that was humanly possible.
Dodgy East-End Boozers – weren’t they a third-division Oi! band championed by Gary Bushell?
Used to worship at the altar of NME. I spent two whole days in my university library reading back issues from the late 70s as a treat to myself after finishing my finals. Rock’n’roll, huh?
…. what university library is this? Can I get an associate reader’s card? Can I afford to buy a house nearby?
Seriously, the complete NMEs from 1970-1995 is my Desert Island luxury item. Quite apart from anything else, I could use the Morley pieces for toilet paper.
It’s equivalent to an announcement from a 40 year old professional footballer – formerly decent, but now non-league, chubby and bald – that they are now retiring from international football.
Although I bought it consistently for about 10 years (ages 16-26 roughly) as well as Melody Maker, Record Mirror and sometimes Sounds – I don’t find myself particularly reflective or sad.
Media types that keep employing Parsons, Burchill, Morely etc will doubtless claim that this team of writers were the voice of young Britain, in tune with the kids on the street. My recollection is of a paper that was slow on the uptake most of the time. You didn’t flick through the NME (or any of the other inkies for that matter) to see what’s coming up next or developing – more what is happening now, which they usually didn’t like unless they were feeling “delightfully irrational” and writing a long piece in Esperanto about Adam Ant with a big photo but without mentioning him or the music. With such pieces, you were meant to shake your head with astonished admiration at the audacity of the writing. Another triumph! Erm, OK.
To me, it was like the 80 year old toothless drunk at the pub who keeps beckoning you over to hear what he’s got to say. You give him a few minutes of your time but you quickly realise that it doesn’t matter whether you are there or not. He’s talking at you, not to you. Sometime you can simply walk way and they ramble on quite happily.
As an aside – Love him though I do, Danny Baker is not someone you consult if you want to know about up-and-coming musical acts or trends. He’s been roughly the same for his whole adult life – there’s a golden period in the early 70s which he considers sacred and that’s basically it. As a teenager in the early 80s, the contemporary music was sneered at and dismissed by the NME. Smash Hits also ridiculed much of it but they did it with a lighter touch, delivering an affectionate punch (cheers) rather than bitter are-you-all-right crucifixions.
As that old guard moved on, the NME became lighter and less up itself and was a good source of record and live gig reviews. An Andrew Collins article (cover story no less) about Vic Reeves got me into his world before I saw the TV show. I remember reading out a description of Les to my brother and deciding that, no matter what, we had to tape it and we were probably going to love it. The people from that period still seem to continue to do good stuff.
So, in the same way that post-punk was better than punk, NME post-post-punk was when it was at its height. When you read theMelody Maker as well, you could see the writers at the MM trying too hard to establish themselves as personalities as the NME writers became less so. In the MM, they referred to each other in reviews, developed in-jokes and had regular columns that didn’t quite hit the mark – but they’re all such good friends that no one had the heart to say.
Lots of [“it all went wrong in 19XX when they put Y on Cover/Interviewed Z” = When I lost interest in music I stopped buying it] going on elsewhere.
I was a big reader of the inkies when I was a student in the early 90s, although I grew very pissed off at the ridiculous front-page lauding of the Next Big Thing which was usually the Latest Shitty Hype (Birdland! Sleeper! the Rapture!). The flip side of the frantic frothing was the scribes’ mocking anything not seen by them as relevant, so in retrospect I missed out on quite a lot of my kind of thing (Crowded House, Semisonic, Aimee Mann) until a few years later.
This influence the inkies held was destroyed by the internet, where all the plaudits in the world by yer NME folk couldn’t stop you instantly clicking on a YouTube link and discovering that: oh, 50ft Dolls are shit.
That all said, I enjoyed a lot of it (the round table discussions with Mark E Smith etc were always fun) and liked the ‘clubbiness’ of it. And sometimes they got it right, and right up my alley (Grant Lee Buffalo and the Strokes). However, I grew up and graduated to monthlies, and thence to the Word.
Take me back…. take me way way back… inky fingers… Raw Lowry… RAY LOWRY’s Monty and Cherno Bill… the sound of C81 comin’ thru the ether… and Swells is giving Wayne Hussey a pasting… and Flux of Pink Indians at King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut in the Gig Guide… and some sad sack on the letters page is wittering about Fad Gadget… four guys standing in a graveyard being photographed by Anton Corbijn… and the live reviews are all about the audience’s hair and the audience’s hair and the audience’s hair… and a woman from an indie band has taken her top off but it can’t be sexist because it’s the NME… and if you don’t have a favourite reggae record of 1984 why are you even reading this paper?…and Nick Kent has written his Patti Smith article on 15 crisp packets… and I’m on Oxford Street at 4.00 on a Tuesday and here it is and my GOD Morrissey’s on the cover again.
They never used to reference The Beatles, always VU. It was years before I realised that The Beatles were more than just a Radio Two staple, and were actually kind of a big deal.
Oh yes, the elephant in the room.
“There it is over there, can’t you see it, a great big thing it is!”
My take on the thorny question of “The Beatles” was that if you don’t at least acknowledge that, I’m absolutely not going to acknowledge anything you do, think or say …
… and for that I am eternally grateful to the music press post-Golden Age – i.e. Gene Vincent/Little Richard to the end of the 60s.
The Beatles have outlived it.
I loved the NME in the mid-90s. It was a brilliant weekly guide to the Britpop soap opera, full of in-jokes and writers who did still seem to care about music first (they certainly weren’t doing it for the money). I’d lost interest by the end of the decade, but not necessarily because “it wasn’t what it used to be”, more that I’d grown out of it because I was no longer the target audience. It was always aimed at the cooler teenagers, and however hard you try, ultimately you’re not going to keep up with that.
It’s been caught in a perfect storm really – pop / rock is now just another branch of light entertainment, the internet means there’s a million other places to find out about new stuff, plus 6Music is effectively NME radio. In the 90s you only had the evening session or John Peel to listen to the stuff that was getting written about, and there was no catch up if you’d missed it. Now you can try before you buy, the opinion of a critic really doesn’t matter anymore.
I was staunchly, religiously, NME in the mid-seventies through to c. 1981 when life got in the way of reading a regular music paper. It reached us on a Thursday in Hartlepool and it was one of the highlights of my week for many years. I would sneer at anyone who even hinted at reading MM or Sounds.
Of course, its long been gone in reality and let’s face it it’s gone with a whimper, not a bang.
Curiously, that phrase was a headline in NME in March 1973 – ‘Pentangles goes out with a whimper, not a banf…’ But I imagine that kind of coverage wouldn’t sit well with its angsty teenager schtick from the late 70s onwards.
This again.
Reading the ‘ME in the late 80s I mainly remember how funny it was. Angst was put on the letters page and mercilessly pilloried. Steven Wells’s singles columns were like Robert Christgau writing for Viz.
Yeah I also reckon it all ended c. 1981. I have no idea what NME was after that, if anything.
I started as an avid reader of NME in 1974. You have no idea what an oasis it was in the cultural wasteland of apartheid SA. Nothing else came close; MM was still stuck in the morass of prog. In terms of music I remember NME from that period as being mostly post-prog. From NME I learned about Robert Wyatt, Kevin Ayers, Roxy Music, Can, John Cale, Bonzos, Gong and progressive jazz. I also absorbed proto-punk in the shape of Stooges, VU, Patti Smith, Dr Feelgood, the kinds of emerging sound and attitude that NME was already referring to as ‘punk’ as early as mid-1974. That was also the year of their famous 100 best albums list and the year Chrissie Hynde wrote for them.
Those were my mad music NME days and me I love them still.
That’ll teach them for giving my band a bad review nineteen years ago
I always thought it was a load of w*nk: pretentious show-off self-indulgent twaddle by people desperate to make a name for themselves. The BBC article accidentally hits the nail on the head about why this rag didn’t deserve its reputation: “the NME’s writers were idolised almost as much as the stars they wrote about.” Paul Morley? Julie Burchill? As annoying now as they ever were, not talented enough to be musicians or novelists, so stay in the stagnant waters in between.
The real problem with NME was they pioneered the “You must like this”, “you must not listen to that” approach to music. This was not a problem with more cheerfully pop-oriented titles like MM or Smash Hits, and (as I always feel I must point out, contrary to received “wisdom”) Sounds was not a “heavy metal mag” but instead was far more receptive to genuinely new and different music than NME would ever dream of, eg Dave Henderson’s fantastic Wild Planet features about industrial/electronic/experimental types in the early 1980s.
Fair comment, except I do think its readership (including this reader) needed to be beaten around the head with a typewriter – as it was throughout the early to late eighties – with a “you must like this” demand, specifically urging them to investigate black music..
It’s such a tired cliche to cite the usual suspects – Morley, Burchill, Parsons – as irrefutable evidence of the NME’S alleged pretension/crapness. Over the years, they’ve had some really good writers who were/are passionate about music and expressed as much through different forms of articulacy but mainly compelling and persuasive prose, from CSM and Ian McDonald in the 70s, through names such as Lynskey, Hoskyns, DuNoyer, Maconie, Quantick, Ellen (male and female versions), Kelly etc. in the 80s and 90s, all very decent writers in my opinion and very much the equal of the best representatives of the other inkies.
Folk buff Patrick Humphries is a bit like the Pete Best of those ‘hip young gunslingers’ whose names always get trotted out. He was hired in the same round as the self-mythologising berks aforementioned, but nobody ever mentions him.
I only mentioned Morley and Parsons as the most obvious egregious examples – I’m not going to trawl the archives and dig out the names of every journo in the mag. But I do know that whenever I did try (and I did, on various occasions) to read the NME I was left with an unremitting sense of being lectured at by 6th form schoolboys, desperate to impress me by declaring their superiority of opinion and knowledge. It was just so wearing and unconnected with actually listening to music. The one review which sticks in my mind is by PM* where he just listed all the things he did while listening to the record – “I made a cup of tea, I changed the cats litter tray, I masturbated …”
*of a Soft Cell LP, but it doesn’t really matter, in the same way as it clearly didn’t matter to him
Certainly a big part of my life from about 13-17 I remember circa 80 being put in my place by a sixth former who took my copy off me, removed the Crass centrefold article and gave it me back.
That was certainly Crass behaviour.
I’m pretty sure that was Sounds, not NME?
Edit- I’m thinking of the Crass centrefold picture poster
For about 3 or 4 years at the end of the 70’s/early 80’s I would have bought every copy and devoured every word. Can’t remember making a conscious decision to stop buying it, possibly one Ian Penman article that I didn’t understand too many, but like lots of us I suppose we moved onto the monthlies.
I was a MM man (sic) from about 13, believing it better than Record Mirror and/or Disc (inc. Musical Echo). But, at maybe 14 I started reading NME, diligently buying both for at leat a decade. Then came Q and I switched, via a pure folkie era of only Folk Roots. Coming out the other side it was, as is still, Mojo/Uncut, adding (the) Word for it’s earlier years, until it’s blog was better than it’s blurb. Rock’n’Roots comes and goes, currently in.
I love music mags!!!
When I was younger – so much much younger than today – my weekly (ordered and/or subscribed) NME fix was wonderful. Probably 1976 + 15 years.
I enjoyed many other publications then – Melody Maker, Record Mirror, The Face, The Guernsey Evening Press et al, but the NME influenced my listening and record-buying for what I still consider to be my halcyon days.
Amidst all of the tributes and eulogies, may I add a huge acknowledgement of the NME cassettes that were produced on at least an annual basis. They could/should be the subject of an appreciative thread in their own right…
The Guernsey Evening Press had some great covermount EPs – Benny and the Garglers, The Bumtrump Five, Ellie Bootfondle – all those Blue Cheese Scene artists.
This was sadly inevitable from the day they refused to print lyrics like Disco 45 did.
NME was never a big part of my life. In fact, I’m confident I’ve never bought a copy of it in my life. From what I’ve read of it, it use to irk me that they’d refer to people as ‘Richey Manic’ and such like, as though it thought their readers would be too stupid to realise who he was if they refered to him by his actual name.
Their refusal to cover the burgeoning lit-hop scene in Glossop was a disaster too.
I preferred Melody Maker 1987-1994ish: the best writers were good ( Stubbs, Reynolds, Roberts and co,.) and it seemed less hectoring. When I lost interest in indie music, I stopped, and now everyone under 30 seems to have lost interest as well.
I had a writer friend round last month who worked at NME in the 80s, still very much a ‘year zero’ man in his tastes and ethos. I happened to have a copy of the previous month’s ‘Prog’ on the kitchen table but I honestly didn’t have the heart to point it out to him, even for a bit of fun. Musicianship ‘won’ in the end.
Won what?
Which was year zero?
I’m not remotely surprised. The free sheet version bore little relation to the NME as was. I picked one up once and it was basically adverts for trainers disguised as ‘content’ and 10 word album “reviews”. The NME website is an eyesore of clickbait and celebrity gossip nonsense. All they’ve done is trash a “brand” to death which must surely now mean next to nothing to the millennial kids floating around in this atomised, nebulous thing called Pop Culture.
I do fondly remember NME and MM from the late 80s early 90s. Yes there was a lot of nonsense, but there was some great photography, genuinely interesting and inspiring long-form writing, and some genuinely funny stuff.
I switched off properly when Pete Dohertys dribblings and the hugely boring and overrated Strokes and landfill that followed were touted as the future of music.
However, I do miss the days of NME and the Maker properly raving and going OTT about stuff, inventing scenes that lasted a week or giving crap like The Levellers a much needed shoeing. I like the pretentious, pompous silly stuff they used to say for all the reasons a lot of you seemed to loathe it.
It was gross music snobbery but you know there is something to be said for that . Nowadays we have vast numbers of very competent, inoffensive new bands and every album review is 7/10, everybody likes “a bit of everything” and everything new on BBC 6 music is “Brilliant” and everything old is “Iconic”.
Need a bit of a fly in the ointment otherwise we end up In the kingdom of the bland and the soundtrack to match. It’s a shame there isn’t a music magazine about New and a bit of Old that sits somewhere between The Wire and Mojo…floating around orrible Websites like Pitchfork and social media for music news and all that just doesn’t do it for me. I suppose there’s the Quietus…Now if only they could afford to do a print version…