Word Magazine

sob,
m.

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jesus thats a grim list
its like a more conservative uncut

Hepworth & Ellen = classic rock dullards.

Hello Mr Hepworth it's NOT 1985 anymore and this is [NOT] Britain 2004.

I agree with what Neil Tennant said this week about the Smash Hits ethic having been taken over by Q: "they took the framework but left the commitment behind." In other words, sarky, WRY "humour" without any great belief in new music or belief in anything other than servicing their ready-made demographic who find the current format of Q "for kids."

There are some good writers at WORD; Peter Paphides, Jim "Arundel" Irvin, but it isn't Melody Maker exactly, but then neither is UNCUT...

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/observermusic/2008/03/inky_fingers_2.html

unusually, a piece of writing from omm that has some critical heft and perspective. naturally it's anonymous.

Anonymous? I bet Quantick wrote it!

hah. it's hard to place among omm writers. it lacks their usual superficiality and desperation to please.

I'm pretty sure it's Ben Thompson that does those music press bits...

ok, i don't want to be all 'lol old people' but...

word magazine this month has a feature introducing little-known auteur judd apatow. the films may be bawdy, but they are soft-at-heart, don't be put off by the swears.

I actually think this mag is better-written and more engaging, whatever its focus (and however out of it the eds may be), than any other U.K. rock mag right now.

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n12/n63518.jpg

"I actually think this mag is better-written and more engaging, whatever its focus (and however out of it the eds may be), than any other U.K. rock mag right now."

Agreed. It's certainly more readable than Uncut.

I will say that it has visibly gotten worse the past couple years--if I were brand new to it I might not still be buying it. and their focus isn't mine by any means, musically speaking. I do like how un-top-down it seems; the writers seem to be encouraged to write in their own voices and not in some neutered quasi-omniscient way. but I suspect because I'm American this is more appealing to me at this late date than it would be for someone who'd grown up reading Smash Hits and Select (the latter I came to very late, via a stack of used copies I found at a record shop a few years ago--quite enjoyable, and it's probably not a coincidence that The Word was less impressive to me after reading those.)

^^ yeah basically what is good in word is like an echo of what was good in select. which is not really a surprise coz a fair number of their writers wrote for it.

but their younger writers are pretty lame imo.

which reminds me 'MONDEO POP: POPPIN OFF IN 09' has to get happened.

Pitchfork need to stop trying to make indie rock and dancehall happen and stick with proven formulas like Mondeo Pop, imo.

Saw the latest issue today. It's lost its binding and gained staples. The beginning of the end?

I've never read it because the cover features and lead stories seemed to make MOJO and Uncut look edgy. Gives a similar bland feel that Paste does, not sure if I'm correct though. I've been picking up Uncut lately, drawn to the cover features on Orange Juice, Kate Bush and "Lost Albums," but the magazine as a whole is just not worth the $10. I read Filter for the first time in a while, but it continues to lack depth. I might just have to try The Word. A look at their covers:

Featured on cover 3 or more times: Morrissey, Elvis Costello, Nick Cave, Tom Waits, Keith Richards.

2 times: John Peel, Beatles/Lennon, John Martyn, Robert Plant, Leonard Cohen, Pet Shop Boys, Dylan, Roger Waters, Bruce Springsteen, Joni Mitchell, David Bowie, Paul Weller,

60s-80s: Ian Dury, Robert Wyatt, Bono, Iggy, Kate Bush, Lemmy, Gilmour, Johnny Marr, Van Morrison, Jim Morrison, Joe Strummer, Neil Young, Johnny Cash, Mick Jones, Ry Cooder, Eric Clapton, Prince,

90s-00s: Elbow, Radiohead, Rufus Wainwright, Amy Winehouse, Killers, Jack Johnson, KT Turnstall, Noel Gallagher, Pete Doherty, White Stripes, Jeff Buckley, Franz Ferdinand, Travis, Dido, Björk, Blur.

I'm so bored with the tradition of covers obsessed with 60s & 70s icons, it's pathetically refreshing to see a feature on a lesser known 80s group like Orange Juice. Why the relative lack of bands on covers? As the boomers reach retirement age and care less and less about music, will any of these magazines shift to 80s-00s before they close shop? And if so, will the relative lack of unifying blockbuster sellers from more recent eras mean they'll never feature anything like XTC, Sonic Youth, Fugazi, MBV, Talk Talk, PJ Harvey, Orbital, Disco Inferno, Massive Attack, Laika, Labradford, Tricky, DJ Shadow, etc.?

i think word is for younger-than-boomer people

idk i haven't read it, but the writers are mostly people i recognize from the 90s

so i guess you'll see a transition from articles about 70s weller to articles about 90s weller

and people younger than me are still interested in the smiths &c. there's plenty of unifying nineties shit.

> idk i haven't read it, but the writers are mostly people i recognize from the 90s

http://www.wordmagazine.co.uk/

hepworth was born in 1950 = 60, mark ellen was editor of smash hits in '83.

they is well old.

They got me name wrong.

The Word magazine folds..

(url)http://www.wordmagazine.co.uk(url)

Sad, cos it had some good writing and string ideas – more interesting at heart than any of the other UK music mags. But it was hamstrung by
a) Budgets
b) Inability to compete for topline interviews
c) This illustrations-on-the-cover business that made it reliably the least attractive publication in the newsagent
d) The Eeyoreish worldview of David Hepworth hanging over everything. Why would you want to read about modern music in a mag where one of the founders is telling you that music can be scientifically proven to have been getting worse every year since 1971?

Strong ideas. Probably had some string ideas too.

The articles were fine.

The 'funnies' were very hit/miss

the free CDs were immediate landfill afaiwc

and the general music policy was "nick lowe is our god" which I'd have agreed with back in 1978 or something, but.

RIP, I hardly read ye

wonder if the Rocking Vicar mailout will start back up again

rip 40 quid man

True, true: I rolled my eyes at the endless Nick Lowe references, and the CDs were bloody awful, and allowances had to be made for certain aspects of the editorial worldview... but I still read each and every issue cover to cover. Very sorry to see it go.

And they published my "Ella/Ele Guru/garoo" fridge magnet pic

d) The Eeyoreish worldview of David Hepworth hanging over everything. Why would you want to read about modern music in a mag where one of the founders is telling you that music can be scientifically proven to have been getting worse every year since 1971?

^^^^ this. Also Hepworth once did a Weekend Magazine Q&A for the Guardian in which he said the thing he despised most in the world was "liberals." In addition he used to have a show on the old GLR station on Sunday evenings called "Executive Drivetime."

He and his chums destroyed decent music writing in the eighties with Q and now it's payback time.

Perhaps if they had actually APPROACHED writers rather than relying on them to "submit their own pocket reviews" then they wouldn't have ended up like this.

He always reminded me of someone I met once, who when asked what kind of music he was into would always reply "I like all music".

Except if you asked him specifically about any band that wasn't Rush, would say "well, I don't consider that music"

(maybe that's unfair, but.)

guess i should not be tempted by this that hit my inbox then :

------------SOMETHING FOR THE WEEKEND #228------------

SFTW 228: 28 June 2012

-------------------------------------------

* Subscribe to The Word
@ [ http://www.wordmagazine.co.uk/buy ]

i only ever picked up issue #1.

a fatal error IMHO was deciding that you could only hear their funny, warm, inclusive podcasts if you subscribed. they'd been doing them for about 5 years and when that happened, suddenly you were shut out from their world unless you gave them £30 a year. i didn't realise it at the time but it effectively ended my interest in and affection for the mag. hadn't even ocurred to me that i hadn't read an issue for a year until i saw this thread.

mm, when a mag starts trying really hard to get subscribers, they be havin dar cash flo probs, right?

kind of assumed Word was relatively safe by the standards of Our Dying Industry (partially BECAUSE of it's old-music-is-where-it's-at air, ie selling to people willing to spend £££ on magazines). don't think their taste and my taste intersected even slightly but it's depressing to realise that wasn't the case.

i'm always slightly surprised to realise that people have affection for podcasts. podcast commenters tend to be the MEANEST though.

To be fair, it wasn't just Nick Lowe they venerated. It was Robyn Hitchcock as well.

Wow, Lex … You never look at ABCs? Miracle is it lasted this long.

i never even heard of this magazine?

RobHitch I could understand...

hmm, why is that?

probably because NLowe looks older than my dad (and I am old enough already), whereas RHitch is wearing slightly better.

My dad was school chums with Nick Lowe and any mention of his name would throw him into a state of fond remembrance. Maybe I should have I bought him a subscription?

kevin rowland in fine form re the news :

'i wish it had ended before they reviewed our new album'

take it that the review wasn't as gushing as the rest of the gang ?

I don't think I ever actually read it although I was vaguely aware it was meant to be better than the rest of its market. It never seemed sufficiently differentiated from Uncut and the fogier bits of Q and maybe that was part of its problem?

Massive ditto on that.

Never picked it up because it just looked and felt like stuffy old music for stuffy old white men.

had a bit more of a literary bent, I think, but yeah, not suitably differentiated. I would buy it occasionally for train journeys etc., it had some good writers writing for it quite often.

So seeing as this announcement is far enough ahead of publication date, will there be lots of "farewell" type articles, and "best of Word" summations?

Hope not.

The Eeyoreish worldview of David Hepworth hanging over everything. Why would you want to read about modern music in a mag where one of the founders is telling you that music can be scientifically proven to have been getting worse every year since 1971?

Hepworth hated prog though. I remember an article he wrote for Q about Genesis in which he bemoaned the fact that it had taken them twenty-odd years to finally write a decent pop song.

was given a sub to this as a birthday present once, it was like Q but occasionally had some interesting interviews with people outside of music - writers, actors, eccentrics etc. didn't really care for the music they covered though, CDs were 99% garbage.

He always reminded me of someone I met once, who when asked what kind of music he was into would always reply "I like all music".

Here is what would actually go on in his head if you asked him that. Dull man.

xpost Never said he liked prog. But he did, genuinely, write a piece about how 1971 was scientifically proven to be music's best year. And every single column he wrote was about how music is shit now but was great when he was young. Couple of months ago there was one about "Why would anyone listen to new music when old music is so much better and you can hear it all now". Right: way to tell people a music magazine is pointless, David.

i think it's a bit harsh to say that DH's '1971-was-best' type spiel was in any way dominant. they put on gigs all year round, often with new bands, they covered Spotify LONG before i'd heard about it from anywhere else (even ILM) and they'd had a big 'thing' for plenty of recent rock stars and had Lady GaGa on the cover 4 issues back. people might not like the stuff they covered particularly but i never felt it was fogeyish at all.

That's the thing though - the mag did do all this stuff, but then it was undercut every single month by Hepworth's baleful column which, in effect said: Most of what we're covering is fucking worthless. If he was an occasional contributor, fine – but he was mag's founder, with a monthly platform to say that.

Must say, that for all their undoubted magazine production excellence – and they are excellent. Word was much cleverer and sharper than the other mainstream monthlies – the combined personas of Hepworth (grumpy old man) and Ellen (Hail fellow! public schoolboy heartiness) don't half grate. They should have let Andrew Harrison edit the thing rather than making him the third, junior partner.

Big drop off in Word's funniness came when AH had to leave cos they couldn't afford to carry on paying him a salary.

He and his chums destroyed decent music writing in the eighties with Q and now it's payback time.

Oh you petty little prick Marcello.

Needless to say, I loved writing for this magazine, flaws and all (yes, those illustrated covers were horrible and I never enjoyed the CDs). Even if I had no connection to it I don't think that the closure of a magazine that foregrounded longform writing and strong individual voices is to be celebrated, unless you have some shitty personal axe to grind.

"petty little prick"

(a) tautology
(b) how would you know?

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ what everyone except for vested interests said above.

The trouble with The Word is that it foregrounded longform writing and strong individual voices, but unfortunately its founder had some shitty personal axe to grind.

yessss they're replaying Nadal/Rosol

uhhh wrong thread, gah

also that it had no writing that I couldn't speed read in Sainsbury's or resonated with me in any way after I read it.

"strong individual voices" = Hepworth's old eighties chums.

it's also worth pointing out that Simon Price's 'toff takeover of rock' piece in WORD was one of the most talked-about articles in a UK music mag/paper for years; it's been quoted and referenced everywhere.

"petty little prick"

(a) tautology
(b) how would you know?

Haha wow this is like the Platonic ideal of the defiant Marcello post.

It's typical DL projection.

yessss they're replaying Nadal/Rosol

― bitch I'm on the 242 (lex pretend), Friday, June 29, 2012 11:12 AM (2 minutes ago)

Thanks for the heads up, tbh.

RIP Word, I suppose I'll have to buy something else to read in my coffee breaks now. So, anyway, how exactly is Uncut still going and not this?

The occasional decent free CD?

Also, I think it's improved recently.

The CDs make a difference? I don't even look to see what's on them anymore, I just sling 'em straight in the bin.

tbf there aren't any glossy music monthlies that currently warrant anything more than speed reading in the supermarket. scared of the internet? well, do better then!

Genuinely surprised that any magazine gives away free CDs these days.

Or more to the point, I'm surprised it's still considered to make economic sense.

The Word was always hard to find in newsagents; I'm only aware of two stockists in Nottingham city centre. Limited resources, I suppose.

Are any magazine markets still a serious concern? Women's glossy monthlies?

New issue of Uncut is out today...NEIL YOUNG ON THE COVER!!!! THE 2012 INTERVIEW!!!!! FUCKING LOVE UNCUT!!!!

I've bought more cycling magazines (1) and camera magazines (2) in the last... 5? 6? 7? years than music magazines (0).

Are any magazine markets still a serious concern? Women's glossy monthlies?

TV listings. Some women's glossies. Men's Health, the Economist, Private Eye. Saga and probably some history and heritage type titles. Magazines that have been canny enough to give you stuff that just doesn't work as well on the internet.

xp Apologies for my poor phrasing Marcello. What I meant to say is that you're a bitter old fuck who can't get arrested in journalism. Is that clearer?

That word "bitter" again, used as shorthand for "don't agree with me."

Don't know why DL keeps banging on at me about "journalism"; I'm not a journalist. I could have been; I had an offer of traineeship with the Herald when I was 16 but going to university was at the time seen (possibly only by me) as a priority. tbh I'd have been in a better position now if I'd taken the Herald's offer, 'cos I would have been a properly trained journalist, and all that.

But one fundamental principle I do know is that, when faced with differing opinions on the same topic, it is the task of the journalist to assess these objectively and address the issue in question rather than resorting to ad hominem attacks.

And yes, DNFTT, so I won't.

whatever this is it's not trolling.

When Word started I was convinced it wouldn't last a year. There didn't seem to be anything in it to differentiate it that greatly from Mojo / Uncut. It was always worth a speed read in the supermarket but never saw any article I wanted to pay actual money for. The more literary basis of it seemed more like very early Q, which makes sense as it was the same people (wasn't it?) behind both - early Q would interview Alan Moore for instance. There was nothing special about the mag, and I won't really miss it.
It was the magazine equivalent of "Grumpy old men".

I thought Uncut had died tbh, the Patti Smith issue seemed to be in the racks for almost two months. Uncut's recent rejig has made it better, I think. Maybe Mojo needs a revamp. And Q needs to get out of Ian Brown's backside. In fact, everyone does, except the photographers who aren't there at all.

(xp) what it is is somebody who wrote for The Word slagging me off personally for being less than enthusiastic about the Word. Since virtually everyone else on this thread has been similarly less than enthusiastic I assume it's a case of ad hominem cyberbullying by someone who thinks I'm an easy target. All very sad (in all senses of The Word).

Really, if The Word published what "everyone" wanted to read, why's it closing down? I agree it's tough on those who are going to be thrown out of a job but the people in charge had opportunities to keep it going, to make punters want to keep reading it. Niche curative magazines like Record Collector keep going so it's a case of The Word not knowing their market, or creating an interesting new gap in the market.

sp: for "curative" read "curatorial."

It's a drag, but Music Magazines close.

Just like bands, there are one or two that last forever, and a bunch that look like they were going to but stop.

Lots of magazines that contained excellent writing and exciting journos, all gone.

It was going a fairly long time, so hey.

xp It's not trolling. That would imply that (a) I did this routinely and (b) I do it for kicks. This is just old-fashioned dislike, going back years, as you well know. But I am enjoying your "innocent me" bit. Maybe I have the wrong Marcello Carlin.

It's a different Marcello thesedays, yes.

stepping aside the dl vs mc flamewar for a moment, i was somewhat shocked re this blog post from the bossman :

http://whatsheonaboutnow.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/hip-hop-is-just-noise.html

Hip hop, if we can call it that, certainly features a lot of words but it isn't about words so much as sound and that sound comes from the way it's done. This music and all the variants that have come along in the last thirty or so years is about hooks, drama, personality, comedy, sex, tone of voice, anything it takes to achieve the required air of sad swagger. That's why in all those thirty years it hasn't really produced a single worthwhile song, not in the sense of one that you could sit down and play.

a whole genre condemned. not one single song.

even i in my greying years with hip hop loving a thing of the past, this is quite a statement to make.

(would loved to have been a fly on the wall when AH was rocking some public enemy in the office)

How does someone like that end up as editor of a national music magazine? Fucking moron.

The Word was the kind of whiter than white magazine that preferred its black musicians to be old or dead.

Jesus. The implication being that a piece of music is not worthwhile if you can't sit down and play it on a guitar or piano or whatever right? Cos that obviously goes a lot further than 'just' hip hop...

on a more positive note, in between my DEEP BREATHING TO CALM MYSELF, this from the comments

I also think there are examples of artists 'covering' hip-hop songs successfully in a more 'traditional' form - Tricky's cover of the PE's Black Steel comes to mind.

might be an interesting thread idea!

not sure.

could end up just being a list of landfill indie bands doing their so called ironic cover versions for the lounge.

eg. umbrella.

You have no idea of the plague of ironic country covers you would be unleashing with that.

Tricky's Black Steel is an awesome cue that no one ever really picked up on.

lest we forget duran duran's 911 is a joke

the two that sprung to mind along with "black steel were tori amos's "97 bonnie & clyde" and the mf doom cover on neneh cherry's new album

but yes, you are right i fear :/

Earliest example that springs to my mind is World Dom's cover of I Can't Live Without My Radio from 1988 so people have been doing it for years

Tricky "traditional": oh my stars.

Unfortunately with me DL still thinks it's 2005 or whatever. He's incapable of moving on. It's a characteristic of certain forms of Asperger's (NOT THAT I'M SAYING THAT'S THE PROBLEM HERE JUST MENTIONING IT) that you just see people as fixed constants who stay the same their whole lives through, never have any new experiences and never change, and maybe there's a degree of projection there too, but it's kind of tragic.

DL doesn't like the way I write, well *shrugs* it's not for everybody, I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. I don't much like the way most music writers on the Grauniad write either (Oxbridge types hypocritically slating musicians for being "over-intelligent," i.e. know your place peasants) but you know, I don't make a religion out of it.

And if more people liked the way people wrote in The Word we wouldn't even be having this "discussion."

Any flamewar here is strictly one-way and one-sided.

masterful trolling, mc.

Look, I'm not the sort of person who's going to walk into a crowded room, have things shouted at me and pretend I'm not there and can't hear. And Lynskey's latest slurs are just another round of ammunition in the "let's have a go at MC" stakes on ILx.

It is a pity. I thought ILx really had changed, but down below it's still the same old cyberbully that it probably has always been.

("hyuk hyuk MC you can talk/re-posts comment of mine from 2003")

If that's what makes you happy.

wonder if the Rocking Vicar mailout will start back up again

― mr-c-on-deadmau5-complete-wanker (DJ Mencap)

^ support this

Luka Bloom's cover of I Need Love is the ur-text of singing-y hip-hop covers, that got flogged to death on the AM grown-ups' three-songs-an-hour station my parents listened to.

Apologies to anyone who wondered what the hell that was about. I lost my temper at someone crowing over the demise of an independent magazine and some of my friends losing their jobs, but I don't come here to argue with people. [insert joke about ILX here]

Marcello, you'd have to go back a long way to find me snapping at you (or anyone) like that. Pretty cheap to make out that a couple of angry posts suddenly make me an autistic cyberbully. If a magazine which employed anyone on here closed I wouldn't instantly put the boot in and call it "payback time". And if I did do that I'd expect a comeback without acting like an innocent victim. Weirdly, I don't dislike the way you write - I have your book - but I dislike your bitching and gloating.

More broadly, I disagreed with David Hepworth's opinions most of the time. Most of my work came from the reviews editors, Jude Rogers and Kate Mossman, who ensured that the magazine covered plenty of hip hop and dance music and employed plenty of younger writers. It's tempting to reduce the whole mag to David Hepworth's bulletin board but that was just a small part of it.

Are any magazine markets still a serious concern? Women's glossy monthlies?

TV listings. Some women's glossies. Men's Health, the Economist, Private Eye. Saga and probably some history and heritage type titles. Magazines that have been canny enough to give you stuff that just doesn't work as well on the internet.

That's about right, though Men's Health wasn't great in the last round of abcs. Pretty grim all round - lots of double digit drops - ime 'success' is now losing the least in a sector. It's mostly frees and customer magazines that are gaining.

I guess the numbers are still mostly big enough for a bit of profit but I've no idea how long for.

(all this not even getting into woes of advertising)

From those ABCs: Oxford Today ( Future Plus ) : 172,526 ; -1.8%
From wikipedia: [Oxford] has a population of just under 165,000, of whom 153,900 live within the district boundary

it's the university alumnus magazine, gets sent to you if you belong to something or another.

ah okay, sounds v exciting

couldn't see Terrorizer in that list

was the wire there?

They're being closed as well.

xpost: The Word's reviews section certainly feels like the place where the magazine deviates most notably from the perceived aging-Nick-Lowe-fan template. In this month's issue, I found useful, thoughtful, lengthy and instructive discussions of albums from Natalie Duncan, Bobby Womack and Neneh Cherry & The Thing, as well as Strut's This Ain't Chicago UK House comp - four very fine records, two of which I checked out as a direct result of reading the reviews. I'll miss that.

xps

abc figures basically useful for advertising, can see why niche publications from a v small publisher might not want in - you have to pay for the audit, & it'd be a waste if the number won't bring in new ads.

The most recent ABC figures for the Word, covering the last six months of 2010, showed that the magazine's circulation dropped 5.7% year on year to 25,048.
-

is that a big drop? i have no idea about ABC figures.

It's not a fatal drop, no. Most magazines are experiencing equivalent drops. The killer blow, I gather, was the dwindling of music-industry advertising, which has mostly moved online. The only way to make up for that loss of revenue without outside investment would have been to buck all the trends and achieve a giant leap in circulation. Likewise the Guardian (like all papers) is losing readers, and some might say it's because it's not good enough, but the real issue is the collapse in public-sector job adverts. Or like local papers with their ad revenue imploding. Next to that the choice of writers or cover stars is a drop in the ocean, sadly.

This is just my theory based on what I've read though - I have no inside scoop.

In the olden days, when robert elms ruled the fair isle of Albion people bought magazines, it would be a bad, but not fatal drop; nowadays, yeah, it's about par, maybe a little below, and big magazines are losing that yearly and praying it stabilises soon.

Compared to the lad mag apocalypse:

FHM ( Bauer Consumer Media ) : 140,716 ; -20.6%
Loaded ( Vitality Publishing Ltd ) : 34,505 ; -30.2%
Nuts ( IPC Media Ltd ) : 114,116 ; -19.8%
Zoo ( Bauer Consumer Media ) : 54,599 ; -20.4%

Uncut ( IPC Media Ltd ) : 62,305 ; -14.2%
New Musical Express ( IPC Media Ltd ) : 27,650 ; -14.0%

It's not so bad.

It's the 25k that surprises me - I thought all of them - uncut, word, mojo, classic rock - floated somewhere between 50-75k.

DL's analysis sounds right.

(nme isn't really 'like' as a weekly, I suppose, just mean 'musicky')

oh, should maybe add to DL's take that it's a vicious circle - if Word's circ was low and falling and then they decided not to be ABC-audited, advertisers would be a bit sceptical.

Hard times.

xpost Other factor in print losses in past couple of years has been catastrophic rise in the cost of paper. One of those things that rarely gets mentioned, but was certainly a major driver in the Guardian's "streamlining" in the past year or so.

xxpost BTW While there are Oxbridge educated music writers on the Guardian, there are many more who didn't go to Oxbridge. And I can't recall anyone "hypocritically slating musicians for being 'over-intelligent,' i.e. know your place peasants." Do you have any actual examples of that?

realised I called Hepworth a 'dull man' before spending several posts discussing and analysing audited magazine sales figures and their relationship to advertising revenues.

The truth of the matter is 'The Quietus' has more interesting articles in the average week than most music mags have in a year...it's also unfair to charge nearly a fiver for a mag that by the end had became more of a pamphlet than a magazine...

I don't even remember what this magazine looked like... even after GISing it I don't remember seeing it anywhere!

Um, actually DL I was NOT having a go at you and your fellow employees on The Word. I quote from above: "I agree it's tough on those who are going to be thrown out of a job." It is, as I made fairly clear, about the management. However wide-ranging and inquisitive individual reviews and pieces may be, casual readers - or "passing trade" as Petridis puts it - judge a magazine by what they see on the front, or at the front, when they pick it up in the newsagent's. If at the front of every issue they are confronted with a reactionary curmudgeon droning on and effectively saying: "Look, all of this stuff in here we're only pretending to love, it's all been downhill since 1971 and you know it" then that's basically saying to the casual browser, "go and buy/read something else" NO MATTER HOW GOOD THE REST OF THE ISSUE IS. Punters go by first impressions; if you just rely on fifty quid man to pay your bills then you've had it because the niche advertisers for that demographic aren't necessarily going to bring in enough revenue. Unless you step up ads for drinks, cars and so on, and that brings with it its own problems as I'm sure more than one Uncut person will tell you.

It's the thing of being a freelance worker; it's awful when one potential field of employment closes down, of course it is, but you move on and find paying work elsewhere, you HAVE to. If these fields are systematically dwindling - whether it's the fault of the internet or anyone/anything else - then things are changing and you have to find some way of adapting. I know for instance (because it's been publicised) that the Guardian is thinking seriously about winding down physical production of the paper and sticking up a paywall on their website - it goes against all the paper's principles, but since the bottom fell out of the public sector job advertising market (as DL mentions above) they may not have many other options available.

Again I think the answer is for any print publication worth keeping afloat to make sure and let potential readers know that they are offering something you won't find on the internet, and that doesn't mean 15,000-word blog posts (since magazines aren't blogs) but just some originality, wit, signs of life, signs of doing something more than 80-word capsule PR recycling. I wouldn't want to pay to read anything like that, nor anything that firnly set its feet in some mythical golden past (nor anything that mindlessly hypes up everything that comes out because it's "now"). There has to be some balance.

Thanks for buying the book; I also bought yours and found it an absorbing and intriguing read. It's just that in places like ILx things get taken or interpreted out of context, or I post something here that turns out to read like the opposite of what I intended. And it's a shame to have those arguments when we're basically on the same side so I apologise if my momentary "grrr"ness comes out as jaded old MC Maniac boxing with himself in an otherwise empty ring. Any suspicion of "bitching" or "gloating" is not what I intended so I'm sorry if that's how it reads.

Oh and btw I went to Oxbridge in the eighties and I'd like to apologise for not doing something about Michael Gove when he was at the same college as me and I had the chance. Now that's a BIG regret.

Thanks Marcello. The news hit me hard and I lost my temper over what I thought you were saying re: "payback". But I don't come here for friction and I'd love to apologise in return and forget all about it.

What depresses me about The Word's closure is that it won't be replaced by a different magazine with less interest in Nick Lowe and 1971 - it won't be replaced at all. Which leaves (unless I'm forgetting something) The Wire as the only independent music print publication that isn't handed out for free. It leaves the world of arts journalism smaller. I don't often read The Wire but I'd be sad if that went too.

Yeah, I’ve frequently gone “grrr” about the Wire in the past but there is an umbilical thing between me and the magazine that I can’t properly articulate here; I don’t always do more with each issue than skim through them in Waterstones but sometimes I feel that’s more my fault than theirs. I’d love to write for them again and I know there’s more than a few people at the Wire who would agree – it’s just a question of working out what to write, or write about there. But they have often been kind to me in the past so if they packed it in that would be a complete disaster.

(btw I haven’t abandoned my idea of the “London Review of Music”; it’s just a matter of getting off my backside and doing something about it, plus persuading anyone else that launching a new music magazine in the current economic climate is not a new and extreme degree of madness.)

South Lanarkshire could do with a music magazine (and some record shops), Marcello. Got any influence up here?

Which leaves (unless I'm forgetting something) The Wire as the only independent music print publication that isn't handed out for free

There's fRoots and Songlines as well.

As for The Wire, I've been a subscriber since 1994 or something and have never stopped reading or enjoying it in all that time. I make a point of reading every single review and feature even if it's about an artist/genre I don't like, b/c their writers always manage to say something interesting. I've said it before and I'll say it again, everyone with a serious interest in non-mainstream music should be reading The Wire – it's totally readable, gorgeously laid out and super-generous in its coverage.

I enjoy reading the reviews and interviews of artists I've never heard of in The Wire too.

The Thing is:

With the "Word" mag, the reason it got published in the first place was because of the 'names' involved i.e. Ellen and Hepworth. It was aiming for that continuum of disenfranchised OGWT viewers (and doubtless got them). So, should the "London Review OM" get going, how is it going to get that dissipated readership back together to buy issue one onwards? (not a rhet q, but possibly unanswerable)

So, "word" made over 100 issues, which is a reasonable amount. How many did "Creem" do? Zigzag did quite a few, but it was massively different in content/style to how it started...

Maybe it had the wrong name. Or did Terry Christian drop off the contributors list early on?

Grout Monthly has a good ring to it. Amber & Alice not got into the fanzine game yet?

ah, they're all over Facebook at the mo..

Buy them a lil lisa simpson printing press!

http://a2.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc6/222839_5404604809_2257_n.jpg

South Lanarkshire could do with a music magazine (and some record shops), Marcello. Got any influence up here?

Given that I'm old enough to remember Bryce Curdy, probably not. Not lived there for nearly 31 years either, so I'm a stranger in my own back yard, as Gilbert O'Sullivan once named an album (see what I mean?).

Grouty xp - dunno, I'd love to get some big names on board so folk can read some really substantial stuff and I have drawn up and costed a business plan, it's just a matter of getting finance-type people/potential backers interested.

More power te yiz.

oh man first tom d talking about Mr Abie and now a Bryce Curdy mention. Next we will be talking about John Toye!

A rather sad story, is John Toye's:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Toye

Don't have to read that, booze is it?

My maw used to tut and shake her head and the mention of his name

Not unlike Marcello does with David Hepworth

Who the fuck is Nick Lowe?

Was in Brinsley Schwarz but, on their commercial failure, changed careers to read the news for STV in the 70s

xpost Why are you pretending to be Nick S, Lex?

I do occasionally have small areas of massive disconnect which could be said to be Lex-esque, to be fair. This is one of them. Was he in Haircut 100?

That was Nik Kershaw

Nick Lowe is awesome. The first couple of albums anyway

aaah

i was just gonna post that ACTUALLY i DO know who nick lowe is but then i looked it up and the guy in the pet shop boys is CHRIS lowe

no idea who nick lowe is then

Who's Nick Haywood? Or Hayward?

Nick Leeson?

Heyward.

No, Nik Kershaw used to do world music programmes on Radio 1.

Which insufferable cunt wrote "I Am The One And Only" for Chesney Hawkes?

i love the thought of nick lowe in the pet shop boys

After Brinsley Schwartz he went solo and was at the heart of Stiff records. So It Goes and Heart of the City were key early independent singles. Produced first Damned album and loads of other Stiff stuff. Married Johnny Cash's daughter.

For past 30 years he has existed largely as someone to be written about in music magazines aimed at men who were young in 1971. Allan Jones's back page column in Uncut seemed always to begin: "We're on the M1 just south of Sheffield when Nick Lowe says he knows a pub where the landlord sells double brandies for the price of a single."

Curiously, this month's raft of Lawrence coverage – for a record that will sell no more than 12 copies, all to middle-aged men - suggests he is to my generation what Lowe is to Hepworth's: a beloved underachiever who personifies one view of English rock.

That John Toye link is genuinely tragic... if only he was more famous, David Walliams could have played him in a sensitive BBC4 drame

wHO'S lAWRENCE?

xxp: sad to say I am one of those 12 middle-aged men.

SMouthy xp: hero of Arabia

For past 30 years he has existed largely as someone to be written about in music magazines aimed at men who were young in 1971. Allan Jones's back page column in Uncut seemed always to begin: "We're on the M1 just south of Sheffield when Nick Lowe says he knows a pub where the landlord sells double brandies for the price of a single."

lol and otm

Which insufferable cunt wrote "I Am The One And Only" for Chesney Hawkes?

That was his father, a famous pop star in his own right back in the day, Tony Hawkes of Morris & the Minors of "Stutter Rap" fame

tom d otm

xp: no, it was Bill McCue.

Of course, a couple of years back a scandal broke concerning Chesney Hawkes paternity when it was claimed his real father was one half of the hitmaking duo Flanagan & Allen, Chesney Allen

If it wasn't Bill McCue, then it would have been Colin McDonald, host of Radio Clyde's prog rock show Son Of Baroque And Roll. Definitely wasn't Ken Sykora.

xxp It's not Nik Kershaw, it's "Nicker" Shaw. He was a legendary burglar, finally nicked by "Nipper" Reed after breaking into Westminster Abbey and stealing Edward Lear's floorstone, which he had planned to sell to an absurdist crime syndicate in Catford.

Those Krazy Katford Kats!

Lawrence Hayward?

Star of Manchurian Candidate innit. Oh wait a minute that was Harvey Out Of So Solid Crew.

Nipper nicks Nicker over Lear.

Curiously, this month's raft of Lawrence coverage

I may have missed it but other than a review in your publication a couple of weeks ago I haven't seen any Lawrence coverage at all.

xp to Mark G yep or Go Kart Mozart as he now styles himself

Interview in Q, big review in the Times by Will Hodgkinson, respectful reviews in all the monthlies, and not all capsule reviews. For someone of his commercial stature it's an avalanche of press.

Will Hodgkinson? The organist from Henry Cow?

... sorry this is getting silly now

just want to say "aw" at Simpsgrouts

yeah, Alice did that a few years ago. Now they're both near to my wife's height.

Will Hodgkinson was always going to write a glowing piece on Lawrence. Will's book "Song man" has numerous interviews with Lawrence and sets him up as a tragic genius, which is only half true.

There was a feature on Lawrence in Mojo a few months back to tie in with the film. He was also on "The One Show" not so long ago - it's on youtube somewhere. Lawrence overload?

So who is Colin Dobbins then?

the late lamented nrq had a review of Lawrence of Belgravia is the most recent Sight & Sound too

No wonder I was reading the Nicks section of this thread as lyrics building up to a chorus of "these were the Nicks of the Eighties", approximately to the tune of "The Great Pub Rock Revival"

I've just been sent the Nik Kershaw's eighth studio album, Ei8ht (do you see what he did there?). Life gets no better.

Robert Smith on the front of the final issue: their most hideous cover illustration ever? Still, he makes a nice Goth Forefather bookend with Nick Cave on the front of the first issue. How far we have travelled!