Inky Fingers: The NME Story

"Inky fingers, I got inky fingers..."

haha i like how they stop it at the 90s.

bb-wise i am the legendary hamburglar-qesque silverback alpha male sandy

"America was clearly top nation, and so british music history came to a ."

Pehaps (pertaing to yr ilm thread that i was horrible on, sorry!) one of the contestants could be x moore, and they could make him review the redskins! hang on, er...

i'm not a betting man, but tonight i'm feeling lucky.

"acker bilk's scintillating recreation of the spirit of johnny dodds is a refreshing antidote to the new, dissonant jazz 'music' currently being purveyed by his coloured american counterparts such as sonny rollins and lionel hampton..."

---[don't know x don't know]
---king's reach tower (where logan had his EPISODE and the management-friendly replacement editor wz busted for coke on the day he took over, so n.spencer become ed instead HURRAH)
---carnaby street [moved out into hip exile bcz the likes of nick kent alarmed and menaced workers for other IPC titles by his HIDEOUS MEIN ALONE]
---weird diary cheese wedge-shaped building just off new oxford street (i.pye era); p.reel got drunk and defaced a building opposite w.trollish anti-pye graffiti and wz SHOPPED by pye and in the slammer for a while (height of hip-hop wars and probbly the nastiest incident) (i am fond of both parties in this particular v.regrettable silliness: the hip-hop wars were HORRIBLE and all management and senior editorial types involved at that time want their fkn HEADS smackin togrther for allowing them to run so far out control)
---king's reach tower again (till present day)

Someone write this!

me? i am the jackie mason of the inkies (i.e. unofficially blacklisted for 30 years then comes back at the 11th hour to hosannas of glory, except then i got blacklisted again so obv i'm the carl foreman of the inkies bah).

i just remembered: they got KICKED OUT of KRT first time not just bcz kent wore the same pair of ancient leather trousers - complete w.rips at the crotch and NO UNDERWEAR - for three years in a row, but they wd heave typewriters etc out of the 20th floor windows in order to GET evicted

did it cover the two ipc strikes?

all the best books start as ilx threads!!

you would have to speak to st*v* s*therl*nd

"In broad terms, the constellation that presided over the emergence of Framework was 'the national' British sector within the context of cultural-philosophical Marxism's dynamics in Western Europe since the end of World War 2. The specific role and production of the intelligentsia in Britain as the cement of the social fabric was described in 'The Breakup of Britain' by Tom Nairn, who outlined elsewhere both the function of and the reasons for the massive dominance of an English Ideology (Eng. Lit. and its Crit.) within that particular social group. Francis Mulhern's 'The Moment of Scrutiny' provides an invaluable account of the contradictions and struggles within the literary ideology at the core of the English Ideology: its oppositional aspects and the solid victory of Leavisism as the ruling set of discourses in academia since the fifties."

the possibilities are endless!

but in my dream he was rawther unlike the real SS: viz charming, elegant and be-loafered

and MM had mahogany furniture and was based in a library

post morley/penman it was all mostly abt NME the getting v leftie but no mention of strikes - putting kinnock on the cover/red wedge/red skins fella writing for 'em and the govt getting nervous (phone tapping).

but also the SUICIDE issue (how is that, btw?)- lucy o'brien got interviewed.

then post kinnock its madchester up to '92. jumps to present day.

xxxp

The Dairylea shaped building is just across the road. I can see it out of the window if I swivel round, mometarily taking my eyes of Bill Oddie. It appears to be called ONE new oxford street. There is a clock at the top, what I had never seen before. It looks kinda 30s.

Is this where the NME used to be? Or is it a different cheese building?

I know no one cares, I just wanted to join in. Beofre long I will be saying COR BLIMEY, I'm a Londoner.

"and oi lahv lahndahn tooooown-AH!!"

very interesting, mark, that you say how horrible the hip-hop wars were; the impression i got (which is basically what i said on the other thread) was, wow, the mid-eighties (albeit i meant "youth suicide" and kinnock etc) really were the absolute zenith of the NME, weren't they? even james brown seemed to admit that something wonderful was lost when they went back to being solely a "music" magazine. there was, i thought, very little about the personalities involved (apart from some sniping by logan and spencer) and ...

... yes, write the book. please.

i've just realised ... sutherland (s) wasn't interviewed, was he? isn't he almost entirely responsible for the corporate-friendly rebranding of the NME, or am i wrong there too?

I know they will NEVER show this in australia - by this do you mean that early 90s "mozza is a racist scumbag" thing Swells spearheaded?

nme -- not just swells but dele fadele, andrew collins, et al, cazalled him on it, which was odd because moz on the cover = high sales.

of course the oft-mentioned irony that suede and blur were 'allowed' to use the same imagery a mere year later was ignored (as in fact was the history of the nme during britpop and after).

the pretext for the cull was the "censorship" issue - which ran a v.small repro of h.r.giger's "penis landscape" (a dead kennedys LP cover, of course)

but i can't recall if this issue was pulled at the printers - and the censorship section removed - or if it ran? was this the issue with the notorious "motorcycle boy" cover? (ie a cover run right at the last moment bcz management had interfered?)

spencer had i think played a very smart long game w.management, keeping them at arms length: but it took its toll on him (i never got on very well w.him personally, but i tremendously admire his achievement at this time): pye, his successor, is a nice guy, but was a terrible editor, i think - the hiphop wars was dreadful man-management, letting the office turn into factions, and the censorship debacle was a stupid provocation, so as a result management could divide and rule, and got their way re purging the non-music dimension

HOWEVER the soul-cialistTM faction had been responsible for the culling of penman in 1985 (his own flakiness re copy delivery gave them a v.good excuse), and the banishment of "theory" (just in time for MM to pick up this baton): so the subsequent purge of "politics" wz poetic justice if nothing else

i put the zenith earlier (77-83) but it's v.hard to judge how good a paper is when yr on it, and every issue feels like a series of losses the reader doesn't know about

i assume this doc derives mostly from that book a few years back: quantick says he passed my name to its writer but the phone never rang :(

HI WILLIAM, U KNO I LOVE YOU!! EVERY TIME YOU SELF-GOOGLE GOD KILLS GREG KITTEN!!

Much as I hate the guy it ain't like SS is the only brand manager floating around the consumer magazines market. Truth be told: most editors have to be 'ambassadors' for the brand to the point that when they do assume the job mantle of their true title for old times' sake they inevitably express the views of the directors/advertising department. He did ask a friend of mine to write whatever she wanted as long as it was a good review for her coverage of the Brats about a decade ago WHEN HE HAD NEVER SPOKEN TO HER BEFORE OR SINCE. He threatened to sic lawyers on me if I 'misquoted' him in a piece about the union jack and racism for the Guarniad (Me: 'that's why I'm taping this, schmuck boy')

Any help would be greatfully received

there was a short clip of penman talking

he doesn't look like ian penman

Would have liked a bit more on the early days (1950's to 1969)

I remember having a book by Maurice Kinn, ex NME editor, but was amazed by the naffness...

what does it all mean?

when i was 17, my dream was to be a sub-editor on the NME. not a writer: a sub.

Watched most of this last night - a welcome distraction. Isabel was horrified and hilariated by Nick Kent and thought he should be on Big Brother. What was that on his head?? John Harris sounds like Dave Boyle! (who was also on TV last night of course) I hugely appreciated how they just completely skipped over the last 13 years with only a single glimpse Conor McNicholas explaining how making the NME shite when it had been good was the whole point, duh grandad.

(A minor gripe this I admit.)

It is kind of daft that people want their artciles to be as exciting as records.

I remember that T'Pau article being quite interesting.

as a reader (in the 70s) i wanted the reviews to be BETTER* than the records then i didn't have to buy the records!

*(better /= more exciting necessarily)

But thesedays, the paper needs to create a common identity with its readership to create the illusion that the NME is it's 'best mate', whereas the music used to do that before. Not that the music doesn't do that now, just that the paper's existance is more precarious (internet/sattelite/other news sources).

*(it's possible i just didn't notice, being mateless myself and botherd abt it)

I think the bands had the angle of "We're like you" during the NME's heyday, even to the point of "We're NOT like you" to deviate from the norm.

"Thesedays"? The NME seemed very matey when I read it ('89 - '93) during the Quantick, Collins, Maconie etc years where they co-opted all the Smash Hits style of in-jokes and knockabout irreverance and cheeky-to-pop-stars-ness. It became like a weekly update from the bezza mates club, and I would read thinking, haha "where is Beatles band?", brilliant!

(i left in 88 and only very sporadically read it after that)

it's nice that "where is beatles band" has become a deathless meme

My time at the NME was during Brown/Lamacq et al which was noticeable for the misogyny of the former and his office clique, who dodged every sexism complaint with 'what about racism?' while Dele glowered in the corner, truly looking as if his hands were searching for necks to wring.