The Only Band That Matters/The Definitive Music Paper (Photo: Chalkie Davies)
Hearing the news that today marks the final print edition of the New Musical Express was rather like learning a pub where your early drinking years were spent and a hundred happy memories originated was being turned into an internet café – the analogy somewhat apt as the NME is continuing as an on-line publication.
During a 54 year run as the longest-running popular music publication in the UK, outliving titles such as Sounds, Melody Maker and Record Mirror by over twenty years in some cases, the New Musical Express shaped trends, extolled and disparaged in equal measure, while throwing its reputation behind new movements far removed from the mainstream – and gave voice to writers whose work was imaginative, acerbic, inspired and profound.
On its Thursday publication day there was a time when those featured on the cover began pub conversations that evening – and over the next 48 hours when interviews and reviews had become digested, the crux of an article was being either treasured or trashed.
In terms of its lifespan my tenure as an insatiable NME reader was relatively short, the ten years between 1975 and 1985 – but words written on its pages remain with me to this day, becoming a mandatory purchase each week after I happened to read a review of a Who show by Charles Shaar Murray, containing lines such as:
‘There ain’t no finer sight in rock n’ roll than The Who doing Pinball Wizard. The power of the stage show a testament to the power of The Who.’
For an impressionable fifteen year-old who had seen The Who for the first time six weeks before it was an epiphany and I was hooked – not only by the NME but with the writing, especially of Shaar Murray and Roy Carr, who around that time always wrote with a flourish about The Who. The sleeve notes written by Carr for the compilation albums ‘Rolled Gold’ (Rolling Stones) and ‘The Story of The Who’ rank among the finest rock essays ever written.
Recently when doing publicity for my novel, I was asked about my influences as a writer and without hesitation referred to brilliant articles I had read as a youth in the NME, certain I had in mind work by the likes of Shaar Murray, Carr, Barney Hoskyns, Nick Logan, Ian MacDonald and original punk provocateur Tony Parsons – whose hugely enjoyable 2005 novel ‘Stories We Could Tell‘ only added to the mystique of what it must have been like to work for the paper in the late 70s.
Some years ago I chanced upon Charles Shaar Murray in a London bookshop and told him how much I had enjoyed his pieces, particularly about The Who – but somewhat cowardly failed to mention my infuriation with his oft-quoted lines about The Clash, written after he saw an early gig (oh alright, I’ll repeat them):
‘The Clash are the kind of garage band who should be returned to the garage immediately, preferably with the engine running.’
At the time he may have been right, although shortly afterwards The Clash were to release the greatest debut album in history which closes with the song ‘Garageland’ – their superb response to what Shaar Murray had written, so ultimately only good came of it.
To its immense credit the paper were quick to champion punk and like me were soon enamoured with most things Clash (the January 1981 interview with Joe Strummer is a marvel) and as they fought the corner for punk and new wave, became sneeringly contemptuous of 70s dinosaurs – while remaining deferential to The Kinks and The Who, both Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin took an awful kicking, which I am sure informed the prejudice I once had toward both bands.
Never to do things by halves it was when the NME took Hip-Hop to its heart in the mid-80s that my connection with the paper became lost, being a genre I struggled to find empathy with. By then a new breed of rock music monthlies (Q, Mojo) had begun to appear which, on the whole, were giving a more sympathetic hearing to those (Townshend, Bowie, Neil Young, Dylan) whose careers I was continuing to follow.
As a result I doubt if I have read the NME a dozen times since, the last occasion being about five years ago when amongst a slew of adverts I found very little to engage me, although at no time has a 55 year-old been the NME target audience.
But with the internet changing not just music, but daily life in ways once unimaginable, coupled with the fragile state of print media, it is perhaps no surprise the NME is disappearing from the newsstands – but those of us recalling the pleasure, annoyance and excitement of turning those pages will mourn its loss.
This article was first published on 9/3/2018.
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NEIL SAMBROOK is the author of ‘MONTY’S DOUBLE‘ – an acclaimed thriller available as an Amazon Kindle book.
