I only know of the NME as part of stories - how an NME article on Musician/Band X was a pivotal part of their emergence and growth.
Brits - how are you feeling about this?
Not a Brit, but it’s a little saddening. NME (and Melody Maker) were the background to my 80s-90s indie kid days. We (my brother and I) had a subscription back then. NME gave us C86! I know the website continues, but it’s not the same. Hell, it wasn’t the same since it went glossy and tabloid.
I read it faithfully every week for almost 25 years from the early 70s. Used to read it at school and devour all the news, the charts, the tour info. The crossword! Bought albums purely on the strength of reviews in it - Yello’s You Gotta Say Yes for instance. Became an instant fan.
Still remember some of the early covers though I threw out my collection decades ago.
Circumstances changed, and I stopped reading it quite abruptly in 1995. Frankly, the music they covered was changing and I was reading it purely of habit by the end.
It’s a shame that such an influential paper has finally disappeared from the newsagents although I admit I haven’t bought a copy for a very long time.
They tried to become a free-sheet a couple of years ago but the couple of issues I saw held no attraction for me at all…
I’d say more but I’m pushed for time…
I was really into music in the late 80s/early 90s, and it was hugely influential then. But I haven’t paid much attention to it in years.
I’m not a Brit but a couple years ago I read through a bunch of '60s through '90s issues of the various UK weeklies for a personal research project… I wasn’t all that impressed with the NME I’d heard so much about.
Even though I liked a fair number of the same bands that NME championed, the paper’s incessant self-righteousness, arrogance and penchant for cheap shots got pretty insufferable. Also too many writers trying too hard to be the next great star journalist with self-consciously flashy and provocative pieces - for a publication that made a big deal about authenticity it sure felt like a lot of its writers were themselves doing an ‘act’.
NME’s end-of-year top albums lists were consistently pretty good, though. Better than Rolling Stone’s lists with their quotas of dad rock for sure.
In some ways we read it for the over the top writing, the pull-no-punches reviews, the rants, the politics; and the writers involved went on to have long careers - Mick Farren, Charles Shaar Murray Barbara Ellen (just read her Observer piece on the NME yesterday), more I can’t remember offhand.
And, erk alors!- they had Th’ Lone Groover, a brilliant, scathing weekly cartoon by Tony Benyon which has pretty much faded into obscurity… The photography was great too, I think Gerad Mankowitz contributed a lot.
Maybe you had to be there.
Not that it matters much but I should have said that photographer Anton Corbijn contributed a lot, not Gerard Mankowitz.
Fair point about the visual look of the paper, I did notice that in the late '70s-early '80s NME had more adventurous layouts than the other weeklies did. Many clever pun headlines as well.
You know what they say, “With a friend like you, who needs NME.”
I’ll see myself out.
That was part of the attraction I suspect, for readers of a certain age, at least for a few mid-teen to early-twenties years. The writers, of course, tended to be a generation or so older.
Anyway, I was always a Melody Maker man.
I thought Melody Maker held up as the best UK paper during the mid-'80s through mid-'90s. They covered a lot of American alternative bands like the Pixies that weren’t getting written about much anywhere else, and I think they were also the first to mention Nirvana as a band to watch. Then in the late '90s they turned into much more of a pop paper and mercifully didn’t last much longer… At least MM was spared from the long painful death spiral that NME’s gone through.