The UK Music Press: Has It Ever Been Good?

Simon Price, one of said writers in that crew, said in a recent interview that he felt the late eighties/early nineties for him were great as an MM writer -- he was recruited because his style had come to their attention, and he felt that the team in charge there honestly had a love for music and differing opinions both. He toughed it out through Britpop and decided to leave in 1997 or so when his new editor said something like 'you cannot criticize Oasis' performance' or the like when a concert was about to be reviewed. Hm.

It's undoubtedly the case that Reynolds, Oldfield, Morley, Penman et al were given a much wider brief in the 80s - to 'go off on one', to submit a lengthy treatise on whatever facet of the pop beast was exercising their minds at the time. However, if what they were expounding upon wasn't your thing (as I suspect is the case with Timbo), then they would *still* be perceived as operating within a ludicrously narrow brief, and purposefully ignoring all manner of vital, exciting music that didn't fit their models (or else, disdainfully sniping at it). Which is pretty much what happens now, in a much less interesting-to-read way.

Also, as Ned points out, the 'Golden Age' effect has a pleasant way of erasing all the Darling Buds and Mission front-covers from one's memory of MM '88.

So, yeah - much better writers, much more risk-taking, much more than a What Album?/PR-puff affair. But - if their causes celebre weren't the same as yours, it would still seem like a closed shop, full of wilful wrong-headedness and epic missing-the-pointness. I've no doubt that Mark Sutherland censured Simon Price on Oasis; I've vague memories of the Studs merrily trampling all over Simon R's latest 'oceanic' darlings in the pages of MM, but there was still an aesthetic (I couldn't quantify it exactly) outside of which the paper rarely strayed. Would Allan Jones have vetoed a 'MBV are tuneless hippy half-wits' piece?

To be honest, it's difficult to come to any conclusions without having a selection of inkies, then and now, in front of me to compare. I mean, we haven't just got older, have we?

Others might point to early 70s Bangs-era Creem, mid-70s Nick Kent NME or early 80s Neil Tennant Smash Hits, but for me 87/88 Melody Maker was pretty much unmatchable for consistently impassioned pop coverage. I'm not particularly nostalgic for the music of the time, and I'd been reading the NME for 4 years or so by the time I discovered MM, so I'm not sure if I'm rose-tinting their back pages, but I never encountered such intelligence and flair in the pop press before or since. Part of what made it so good was the absence of any absolute party line; you got warholier-than-thou hymns to blondepop, Bataillean exegesis of the Butthole Surfers and thoughtful subcult analysis of anorak culture. You got the Darling Buds sharing pages with Diamanda Galas. Everybody had fun starting arguments, and the overall stakes were raised. Agreeing with it was hardly the point.

And, of course, hardly anyone did agree with them; readership plummetted, and those who remained continued to vote for the Mission in end-of-year polls. Since then, pop journalism has by and large fled from ideas. The nineties were remarkable for a return to it sucks/it rocks butthead-isms, and even the style press, which used to thrive on d-i-y semiotics, has turned its back on the thinkpiece. The marketplace promises infinite narrowcast variety, but delivers a thousand competitors for the same ladmag audience - ever-dwindling wordcounts, list article, capsule reviews ad nauseum.

Once upon a time the music press was an (often poorly-utilisted) maverick space in the culture... These days they have brand managers as well as editors. I don't think a wariness of romantic rhetorical tropes means we can't also admit that our current print-mag culture has a radically constricted sense of novelty, adventure, possibility and variety.

And on a lighter note, what the hell happened to Taylor Parks? Caitlin Moran? Deluxe magazine?

I'll stop the Market Research nonsense now. Anyway, Taylor Parkes writing porn novels? Who knew?

Acutally, I'm sure Market Research is at the root of the problem - 15 years ago, music papers would have had a much less clear idea of who their readership actually were: now demographic marketing is fantastically computerised and sophisticated, and that rather than any aesthetics is probably behind the narrowing of scope. (Not just the NME's scope, either: the first time I ever heard of Nurse With Wound was in Smash Hits, as I never tire of repeating.)

Taylor Parkes writing porn novels?!?!

For novelty value alone, I'd like to see that. Wasn't Caitlin Moran writing for newspapers? I really do miss the late 80's/early 90's MM -- there was just such a wealth of opinions and different tastes in music you don't see anymore. It seems far more homogenized now. And even Select in the early 90's was really fun and interesting -- that's how I first heard of Chris Morris, for one. And now it appears to be more of a bland lifestyle magazine.

The NME of the early 80s, from a post-punk foundation, would branch out not only into what seemed to me like impossibly exotic musical areas - reggae, jazz, funk, soul, folk and a lot more - much of which wouldn't have been given anything other than cursory coverage in the 'Maker' in the time you're talking about. And as for a babble of different voices, that period had pop theorists struggling for space with down-the-line Marxists, earnest post-student-paper types, fanzine refugees, allsorts really.

I used to hate the late '80s Melody Maker for what I saw as a stunted musical worldview, based too heavily around the alternative charts, and for concentrating too heavily on music, when there was so much more in the world which I thought music papers could be writing about.

But my point is not to suggest that 'my' NME was better than 'your' Melody Maker (which it was or wasn't according to whether you're me or you). Rather, that we should be aware of, and revelling in, there being as many golden ages as there are ages. It makes the arguments so much more fun.

But there was one aspect in the whole debate which left me absolutely flummoxed: namely, the moment when Steady M remarked that despite one's memories of the late-80s as an MM golden age, the paper actually had the Darling Buds on the cover. The second issue of MM that I possess (Feb 89) had the Darling Buds on the cover. It still inspires me now. It's memories like that that convince me to convince myself that the late 80s were an MM golden age.

Porn novels? Sorry, no. Reading them, yes. I did do some freelance work in the pornography industry, which is presumably where this misconception came from.

If anyone's genuinely interested in what I'm doing now (if anyone's still reading this thread), I'm living in Highgate, writing for pleasure, writing internet rubbish for money, and trying to decide what to do with the main part of my life. It has to involve late starts, travel, spiritual fulfilment and ultimate salvation. Weary of human stupidity, including my own, I was briefly a recluse, but now I've stopped. So party invites are more than welcome.

Not so long ago I read a piece by Everett True in MM where he claimed he had never liked grunge!

Yahunh ET thats why you went to live in Seattle

Early 90's MM I would agree was a happy time but thats a music thing for me anyhow

And to think that was the paper I discovered Throwing Muses etc. in. Etc.

I started reading both papers in 91, when I greatly preferred MM. NME just evoked images of smug students, drunk on cheap lager, saying "I haven't been to a lecture all week!"... you know what I mean. But then it improved - Maconie, Dalton, and others made it less irritating in that respect. Meanwhile Everett True decided he'd invented grunge and made MM far less interesting.

Now I've given up on NME as well. It's lost it's way in the last 2 years, just as MM did. For a start, there is hardly any content, compared to the old days, and they are too narrow in what they are willing to cover. I can think of loads of great bands I discovered through the weekly press in the past, that wouldn't have got coverage anywhere else in the media (apart from fanzines, which are little use). If they're not going to cover them, why bother? Paradoxically, in trying to go mainstream, they have lost their selling point, for me at least.

Ole skool ilmstalgia starts here.

So when does the new free NME come out?

september

ahh, cheers. I'll probably never see it as I cant see where it will be available as supermarkets/newsagents aren't likely to have it since if they give away a free mag nobody will buy anything else.