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And then I’d remember that, apart from the odd article by a critic loaned from the ”NME”, you never did have anything readable. But that wasn’t your main flaw. You’ve always presented yourself as a magazine to see, a glossy mag for the new generations, motivated by the hollow ideas of the unfortunate and justly forgotten New Romantics.

But you never had anything worth seeing. The photos were bad; the fashion productions were cheap; and your desperate attempts of creating new trends every month were absurd, without any popular source or street connection.

Even so, you had a great influence on those that, in the early 80’s, had the same age that I do now: the A&Rs (“á-erres” in Portuguese) of the record companies.

Because of you, fortunes were spent making ridiculous videos, with budgets of Hollywood movies, in which the most dubious bands as well as the most valuable ones appeared dressed like clowns, surrounded by hordes of extras, in environments from the Caribbean or Indochina, pretending that they were beautiful.

Every journalist should lament the end of a publication, no matter how unsympathetic he might feel towards it, and, truth be told, this was the mentality with which I first approached this text. But honesty ended up winning out, and, remembering the time that I’ve wasted turning the pages of “Face” magazine, searching for one or two readable or viewable pages, I have to confess that this is an exception to the rule.

The saddest thing about this – or the funniest, depending on the degree of benefit and cynicism that you want to lend to the subject – is that “Face”’s heritage remains alive and well amongst us. It manifests itself in the obsession over “image”, and, due to the proliferation of TV channels dedicated to music videos, it perpetuates itself in an artificial manner.

I remember benefiting from the inverse effect: even though I had liked Nirvana and the Smashing Pumpkins for so long, my faith in the second group was fatally shaken by the care that they put into their videos. Listening to them, they were intriguing and compulsive. Seeing them clowned-up and surrendering to cinematic pseudo-directions, the mystery as well as the respect that I had for them quickly vanished.

Nirvana, even on the ultra-produced “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, still pretended to play live, even though this display also had gigantically damaging consequences.

Of course this process of “imaging” is the same as the ones that happened in literature and classical music. In the old days you read or listened without knowing the faces (or favourite colours) of the work’s authors. There were no movies that adapted novels or used musical compositions as soundtracks.

Appreciation was purer. Either the book or the symphony were pleasant by themselves or there was nothing else to consider. Today it’s exactly the opposite, helped along by the Internet: it’s practically impossible to hear Pop music without knowing how the musicians dress or fix their hair up.

The phenomena of buying soundtracks – because one has seen the movie and, while watching, noticed that the music was “nice” – is an extreme example that’s showing up more and more.

Of course, since I am, above all, a reader and writer – an invested party – it’s natural that I would find cinema, photography and art* in general are less rich forms of perception, since they depend on “seeing” and not “reading”. It’s a brute and perhaps unacceptable dichotomy, but there’s also been some very convincing theories springing up recently according to which music shouldn’t be seen as the expression of emotions. The emotions come from the musical construction itself. Saying that a passage is “sad” is highly debatable.

Seeing, to me, is a lazy thing – almost analphabetic. Seeing a kind of blue is different from reading “blue”. It’s a lot easier and, I think, a lot less rewarding. Seeing is something we do when we’re very tired or not up for anything more. How many more people must have seen cinematic adaptations of classic novels – and formed an opinion, sitting there, passively, accepting already digested interpretations of narrated episodes – than read the original works?

It’s obvious that reading and listening, to those that enjoy reading and listening, is easier and lazier than seeing – seeing is a sort of violence, like a car crash – but since there are so few people addicted to reading, it is natural that I show some concern about the incessant translation of the read-and-heard to the seen that today abounds on an almost exclusive basis.

To give an example: the many Joy Division fans that didn’t live in Manchester had very few opportunities of knowing what they looked like physically. Peter Saville’s graphical creations on the album covers worked a lot better than videos or the few photos, taken from live concerts, in the “NME”.

With less worshipped bands, the sound/image relationship was even less pronounced. We’d go to see them in concerts - events that we’d look forward to with enthusiasm – and we’d see them like people see other people; playing and singing. There were no other filters, like the video director’s “vision”.

Then, with New Order, Factory didn’t take long to start searching for directors with more perseverance and bigger financial spending than what they had dedicated to musical producers.

A lot was lost with audio-visuality. A lot of perception was distorted by the perceptional excess and by the natural (but fascist) predominance of the visual over the hearing-based.

This is why I do not regret “Face”’s death and secretly wish for the return of a time in which we can judge Pop music entirely by the imaginative and sensitive way that it sounds to us.

In other words: I long for the death of image.

* he means ‘art’ as in paintings, sculptures, etc. I think, not including music and all that