It is heartening to get so many
Facebook likes for observing the last rites of NME, heartening because it reflects the affection with which the
UK’s weekly press, be it New Musical
Express or Melody Maker or any of
the rest, are still held by those who used to read them. Then again, maybe it’s
not that surprising really because – staggering as it seems today – in their
heyday, when MM was top of the heap
selling 200,000 copies a week, NME
wasn’t that far behind, on 180,000 I think, Sounds
third with 100,000 and the two also-rans, Disc
& Music Echo and Record Mirror,
on 50,000 each. That’s 580,000 music papers sold every week in this little
island of ours, over 30 million a year, and you can be sure that they were read
by many more than that as they were passed around in colleges, offices, clubs,
pubs, maybe even doctors’ waiting rooms. There were so many readers that it
stands to reason that many of them will this week mourn not just NME but the weekly music press culture
that was unique to the UK.
This mega-circulation
era was around 1972, when MM was in
its pomp, so much so that its publisher IPC Business Press was prepared to
stump up for a staff member to live in New York (in an apartment paid for by
them, inclusive of all utility and phone bills plus a living allowance exclusive of salary, same as foreign correspondents on the national press) and report back on what was happening in America, an expense that would
cause bean-counters apoplexy today. Three of us got that wondrous gig, Roy
Hollingworth, Michael Watts and myself, and I still believe it was the best job
in the world in music journalism, better than any editorship, just absolute rock'n'roll nirvana regardless of the perks. MM’s success in the first
half of the 1970s forged a bond between the staff that lasts to this day:
Richard Williams, Chris Welch, Michael, Geoff Brown and myself meet for lunch
about twice a year to relive old times, and most of us have been amongst the
mourners at the funerals of those we have lost: Roy, our editor Ray Coleman,
Carole Clerk and Rob Partridge. I liken it to having played together on a
football team that long ago won the league title.
By the time the
US job ended, in 1977, MM’s crown had
slipped and NME was top dog,
deservedly so under the editorship of Nick Logan with Charlie Murray, Nick Kent,
Ian MacDonald and the rest carrying the torch that I like to think we had lit
earlier in the decade. Nevertheless the combined circulation of the music
weeklies, now joined by Kerrang!
(surviving still) was still around half a million a week. (Any rivalry was
strictly corporate. We were on friendly terms with the writers from other papers and one NME
writer and I were ‘an item’ for a while.) This culture of weekly music
magazines was exclusive to the UK; no other country saw anything like it. There
were no national music weeklies to cater to fans in the US, only Lisa
Robinson’s breathless New York weekly Rock
Scene, dry weekly music business publications like Billboard and Cashbox and
biweekly Rolling Stone. Elsewhere in
Europe some countries boasted a single weekly or monthly paper, and in
Australia there was Go-Set which
syndicated articles from MM, as did
one in Sweden. Only the UK had such a thriving weekly music press, and the competition
between the titles was what kept us lively and on our toes.
It was an era way
before computers or even commercial radio. Televised pop consisted only of Top Of The Pops and The Old Grey Whistle Test. Acts had fan clubs that circulated
newsletters but the only way to find out what your favourite act was up to, if
they were going to release a new single or album or go out on tour, or if they
were splitting up or changing personnel, was to read the music press. With
those acts like Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, who demurred from appearing on TV
or using photographs of themselves on their album sleeves, the only way to
found out what they actually looked like was to go and see them, not always an
option, or look at the photographs of them in the music press.
Even though I
lost touch with the ups and downs of the fortunes of NME and MM during the
eighties I continued to read them. I began to think that NME was becoming too political for its own good, losing its way
amidst an editorial policy that promoted left-wing ideology over music. I agreed
with the ideology – it was the Thatcher era after all – but felt music
magazines should cover music and political magazines politics. Meanwhile, MM seemed desperate to outdo A&R men
by finding the next big thing before they did, which was admirable enough but
resulted in a few sub-par acts appearing on the front page and being hailed as
saviours when they were anything but. Both papers tended to ignore the really
popular acts, the ones that were selling out arenas, because they were insufficiently
hip in the eyes of their staff, and this had a detrimental effect on their
circulation, giving rise to monthly magazines that treated musicians on the
wrong side of 30 with more respect, in some cases probably more than they
deserved. All of this coincided with the CD era in which music became a
soundtrack to a certain lifestyle in which the participants didn’t care that
much about the musicians whose user-friendly little silver discs they played as
background music to dinner parties or in their cars and as a result weren’t
much interested in reading about them. Then came the internet.
In the meantime I
began to suspect, wrongly as it turned out, that the generation of young MM writers after my own might not
welcome the company of those who’d gone before. I felt they might be envious of
the largesse we’d enjoyed (that US job, the fairly outrageous record industry
hospitality), that they might feel we had been too benign towards the acts
compared to their more confrontational approach, and that they wouldn’t want to
listen to any ‘in my day’ litanies so redolent of sports commentators who were
once players themselves. Happily, this assumption was proved wrong after I
commissioned a 90s-era MM writer to
write a book for Omnibus Press and was invited to his wedding. Assuming that no
one would be discourteous to me if I was accompanied by a 12-year-old girl I
took my daughter Olivia along, but there I was, surrounded by the MM generation I thought might snub me, all
of them eager to hear about the days when we sold 200,000 copies a week.
Now, that golden
era of the weekly music press is a distant memory. As for myself, back in 1977,
after seven years on MM I knew my
time was up. When I turned 30 I thought I was too old to continue – which
sounds ridiculous now – but I got out because I felt I couldn’t sustain the required
enthusiasm in my writing. I wanted to try something else in music, which I did.
Many years passed until, three years ago, I launched this blog at the suggestion
of that same daughter. A
few years earlier, aged 19, she’d worn a rare Keith Moon t-shirt of mine to a
party and was surrounded by boys her own age wanting to know where she got it.
When she explained that her dad used to know him and that he had been
associated with The Who professionally, she was pestered with questions about
me to the point where she wished she’d never worn the damn t-shirt. When Olivia
told me this I figured it was time to start a blog and when, with her
encouragement, I did so I rediscovered that
same enthusiasm for writing about music and musicians that I had in the early
seventies, though I’m not sure how long it’ll last.
But I digress.
The loss of NME on top of all the
rest is the final nail in the coffin of a culture that I mourn deeply because I
was lucky enough to play a small role in it, and that makes me doubly sad.