The NME provided good curatorship of music and popular culture for the first 10 years of my musical development (1972-1982). There was no YouTube, albums were expensive when you got 75p pocket money, and so the local music library helped me to discover, for example, old blues artists name-dropped in the mag. The ‘year zero tendencies’ of the punk years sometimes threw out the baby with the bathwater, but the year end charts and poll-winners generally showed the power of the group. Into the 80s, the tapes kept ears open, but the posturing, pushing, and politics led to some right bollocks, IMHO. “Birdland” as the future of rock n’roll? German metal bashing? (We had perfectly good British metal bashing in Test Dept).
What did the NME know?
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Worse if you live in the Antipodes – have to wait three months for the latest issue to arrive.
Mind you, record companies seemed to release stuff here a few months later than in the UK, so it sort of lined up chronologically.
Wednesday night gigs in London meant you got it a day early!
Oh!
(A small tear of nostalgia is wiped away)
Back in the day, I really liked Birdland
Weather Report or Manhattan Transfer?
As a Sounds man of the early 1980s I can’t really comment on the NME of the 1970s. But I can confirm that the music press pre-internet was indeed a valuable education, just not always in the way it intended.
The 3 main problems which the music press (let’s stick to NME & Sounds, for the purposes of this discussion) often posed were:
1. Ignoring genuinely new and interesting stuff.
2. Wilfully acting as the acceptable face of the record company PR machine, promoting acts who really weren’t worthy of anyone’s time and money.
3. Too blokey, susceptible to pretentiousness, never admitting to being genuinely moved by music etc.
The fact of competition meant that Number 1 was not so much of an issue, and indeed meant that 2 was the real problem. But a reader of average intelligence and critical faculties could quickly spot a Number 2 (ooer) easily enough, so again this didn’t cause us to buy too much crap, and indeed was a valuable life lesson.
The real issue was Number 3, so that you wondered if your adolescent emotional tendencies were somehow inappropriate or silly. The assumption that someone quoting literary references or using big words meant that their musical opinions were more valuable than yours?
Eventually I realised that Paul Morley, Dave McCullough and their ilk could shove their wanky self-centredness where the readers wouldn;t be subjected to it, and to this day I cannot take Mr M remotely seriously.
It sruck me at the time that Sounds was a lot less susceptible to that over-indulgent intennectualism than NME, and I do wonder whether huge swathes of (generally male) NME readers have never really recovered their own proper appreciation of music from the experience of reading this garbage in their formative years? OOAA.
All of the accusations levelled at the NME concerning pretentiousness etc.
may well be justified.
HOWEVER, the NME had D Baker Esq. doing singles reviews, which to this day gave me some of the best guffaws from reading I’ve ever had.
Sounds gave us Garry Bushell & the Oi phenomenon.
Your witness.
You’re right about GB – woeful. And Oi – woeful squared. And Sounds had Dave McCullough whose pretentiousness sometimes defied belief. Although he did pick up on the Smiths while they were a support act for the Sisters of Mercy, and correctly identified that they really were a band to watch. He did do it very pretentiously, mind.
For all his faults, GB could never be accued of prentiousness or art-wankery – his buffoonery was obvious even to my 16 year old self, so in a sense didn’t count.
Not sure where you’re going with this “too blokey” and “generally male” thing here, Douglas. At every level of the music business, there were, and still are, more blokey males than, er, lassie females. Do you think the music would have been better if the genders had been equally distributed? Do you think it was worse for being so (*shudder*) blokey? Was it a source of discomfort for you at the time? Did you yearn for more lassies (hey – you used the word “bloke”, right?) in the business, from creative artists through management to production to technical innovation and expertise to manufacturing to distribution to journalism?
As to pretentiousness – early to mid-seventies the NME wasn’t at all pretentious, and it was often very passionate, and brilliantly funny. It became pretentious toward the end of the decade, when the core group of writers who’d made it such a great read were replaced by floppy-fringed pets or rigorous skinheads in love with the sound of their own typing.
And Sounds? Are you kidding?
Fuck, the olden days, eh? Thank christ this site isn’t too blokey. Luckily we can deny any such as some of our best posters are wimmins. What better proof?
I enjoyed the NME and I think much of the artwank pretentiousness was very entertaining. I remember a long interview with David Sylvian that was very hard work, and then found that I had to give up at the question “What then, is Life?” Is saw too much text below that.
I liked Sounds too but only bought it if there was an interview in there with someone interesting. NME covered more ground – comedy, for instance. I’d never heard of Vic Reeves until NME had him on the cover. Andrew Collins wrote this enormous article on what was about to be shown in Channel 4 i.e. Vic Reeves Big Night Out. Writing about comedy is like yoghurting a wardrobe, but that article had me in stitches before I even watched the show.
And the NME was a bit political too. As an earnest teenager, I wanted to get into the issues of the day and the NME was up for that.
The Melody Maker was just awful. The writers thought they were famous.
Chris Welch used to get me tearing the rag to shreds. Didn’t like Hendrix or the Floyd – why was he there?
“What then, is Life?”
Afterword T-Shirt klaxon.
Well here’s a few that were also the future of rock n roll according to NME if I remember correctly…
Linoleum… I saw them, pish.
Tiger (not to be confused with the rather good Tigre)… ditto.
The Stupidz… skate punks who got a front page.
Those (these?) animal men
Smash… I think it was S*M*A*S*H … see what they did there?
Combat
That band with the massively fat bloke called Tiny (didn’t we laugh?)
Credit To The Nation… best of a very bad lot
But back in the day I would nod sagely at the mention of any of them… but as AE Housman said… ‘and we were young’.
Utter eyewash, Clive. Nobody at the NME ever said these bands were ‘the future of rock n roll’. They were just bands that the small coterie of inky writers happened to like.
“.That band with the massively fat bloke called Tiny (didn’t we laugh?)”
They were called Ultrasound and were very good .(I didn’t laugh)
You seem to be mainly name checking mid nineties indie acts, so who the hell are Combat? And quoting AE Housman? How very Paul Morley.
I have to say that I heard The Stupids on an old Peel show recently – 1987, I think. They weren’t bad. Probably not worth a front page – but they did have to do 51 a year of course.
Ultrasound were dreadful. A product of the “clutching at straws” fag-end of the 90s.
Still going and pretty good all told
Hmmm…. no.
Not forgetting Romo and Gay Dad.
Though I think they may have been MM hyped.
Looking back it’s fun to read through and see bands and massive cultural scenes explode without the inkies having a clue what was going on until they had crossed over. The revisionism was phenomenal. Punk, NWOBHM (Sounds caught on quickly there), Mod revival, The Mondays and the Roses, Acid House/Rave culture.
Joe Public at large didn’t care what Morley, Burchill, Jones or Penman pushed out. They just did their stuff
That ROMO Explosion in full
Yep, you’ve caught the essence of it there
Oh posting images on here used to be so simple, now it never works
Go to old WORD lag Forde’s pic of the muppets
http://twicsy.com/i/XrxpMd
Nope, that front page was mocked up by Chris Morris or Charlie Brooker.
Please.
Instead of a crossword they had a game of cock, muff, bumhole
I’d like to put on record that ‘Hobo Humpin Slobo Babe’ by Whale is/ was/ always will be a flippin TUNE
Hmm…not sure I agree with that. Evidence please. I remember The Stone Roses being on the cover of MM moths before they bothered the top twenty.
As regards to Joe Public doing their stuff, they were all wearing Frankie Says t-shirts in the Summer of 1984 conceived and designed by the much maligned Paul Morley.
Morley was amused to note that owing to FGTH merchandising in 1984 a lot of people were wearing scarves with Lenin on them.
Lenin scarf over Lenin tee was “double Lenin”.
Brilliant m8.
Other motorways are available
NME had Ray Lowry cartoons, The Lone Groover and spot illustrations by the likes of Barney Bubbles, Ian Wright, and even Ralph Steadman…that alone made it compulsory buying back in the day.
Have an ‘up’, Sniffity.
I still have a handful of yellowed Ray Lowry cartoons cut from the NME & his take on stuff still makes me smile.
His one-offs were great, but my fondest memories are from when he went off piste in the early 80s with the great ‘Note Oilskin Base’ strip, featuring IIRC Monty and His Monogamous Mountain Men & their adventures in the music biz.
As D Baker would put it, if this was France there would be parks & boulevards named in his honour.
A great talent, & still one of my favourite cartoonists.
It was nice to have Ray Lowry’s work on the inner sleeve of “London Calling”, too.
I love the Monty stuff – 78RPM was another one . “It’s Cherno Bill!” “‘Appen!” I’d go straight to it every week.
Very similar to Biff in style… maybe too much and that’s why he stopped doing it.
The Roses sold out the Empress Ballroom and Alexandra Palace before troubling the Top 20.
The NME gave the original album release a 6/10 before hastily revising this to an 8, some three months later. Winston Smith-esque.
I can’t recall them on the MM cover but didn’t buy that with the same discipline as the NME
7/10, that review. Jack Barron wrote it. “This is quite good…. just”
The live and single reviews of the time were rather gushing, though. When Andrew Collins saw them at the Hac in February he imagined telling his grandchildren about it. Just before the album came out was the interview where they declared themselves too be the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world. Which, unfortunately, every bleeding guitar group has felt obliged to do ever since.
I went to see them in ’89 with some friends in Stratford on Avon & they sounded so bad we left after half an hour.
According to The Official Received Wisdom Of Rock History, you and your friends simply do not exist.
Everyone knows that in 1989 The Stone Roses were simply the biggest thing in the world, selling billions of records and bestriding the world like a collosus… in flared trousers.
Replace ‘The Stone Roses’ with ‘Guns N Roses’ and flared trousers with ‘leather kecks’
Just as I miss the wee people in my radio being brought to 3D life by a TOTP appearance, I miss the scaffolding of context that the weekly music press gave to emerging acts.
And I got a kick out of the pretentiousness/ daftness.
The NME gave The Lexicon Of Love and Pop Will Eat Itself their names (yeah, I know – even a stopped clock yadda yadda twice a decade..) so probably earned their keep just for that..
You had a 3D television when TOTP was on??
Bloody hell, we didn’t even have colour telly. AND we were still on Town Gas.
You tell ’em that these days, and they won’t believe you.