Has The NME Got Good?

poll each paragraph of that or do we have better things to do?

The boss of the music magazine between 2002 and 2009, Conor McNicholas had a front row seat to stars like Dave Grohl, Pete Doherty, the Kaiser Chiefs and the Killers

i was gonna post that specific line, sends a thrill thru the pulse

Mirror article hashtags:

Danny Baker Dave Grohl Joni Mitchell Reading and Leeds Festivals Kasabian Kings of Leon The Killers The Strokes Hospitals Giving birth

Seems to be more about white dudes behaving badly than about music.

Hospitals Giving Birth had their moments.

Is 'wide passion' a misprint?

I remember Dave Grohl almost killing a journalist by throwing an unopened can of lager full pelt at their head after they’d sprayed him with beer for a cover shoot backstage at Reading Festival. (Only a swift duck saved the hack.)

https://cdn.birdwatchingdaily.com/2013/10/ducks-Mallard.jpg

I caught a glimpse of (hair + eyebrows dyed jet black) Terry Christian yabbering incoherent cliches about this on the news and he was credited as a music journalist. How on earth do you get to the age of 57 and still be Terry Christian?

Some are born Terry Christian, some achieve Terry Christianity and some have Terry Christian thrust upon them.

A cover featuring Amy Winehouse

some have Terry Christian thrust upon them.

ew

#RIPNME This is from an NME photo shoot in 1997. Kenickie on the Staten Island Ferry. Should mention NME wouldn’t put us on the cover because we refused to strip off and be painted gold. pic.twitter.com/Gly7MKQ4ym

— Emma Jackson (@EmmakJackson) March 7, 2018

Seems to be more about white dudes behaving badly than about music.

on the NME's masthead since at least the early 90s iirc

since 1973 iirc

http://www.paulgormanis.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Nick_Kent_1.jpg

probably but i wanted to note *cough* honourable exceptions

honourable saelf-pimping klaxon: i wrote an obit in 2009 for steven wells which i think describes the good and the bad of the nme i cared about (which was never quite the nme i actually wrote for):
http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2009/06/steven-wells-1960-2009-sleep-gently-sweet-foe/

lol as my sister just pointed out, i now have to jam another sentence into my book at late proof stage: thank you ipc for yr thoughtful timing you were always garbage >:(

Excellent timing from a promotional point of view though.

I was genuinely saddened by Swells' death. He was a big part of my formative years.

xp haha yes, i am still thinking like a sub-editor not a future mogul: MUST CHANGE THAT

G. K. CHESTERTON ON SWELLSY: "It is many years now since this colossus of crime suddenly ceased keeping the world in a turmoil; and when he ceased, as they said after the death of Roland, there was a great quiet upon the earth."

Swells was always one of my absolute faves even when i was getting cross with him for being mean about some music i liked or when he was doing that C4 breakfast programme being mean about football

That's a great piece on Swells there, Mark.

The woeful Luke Haines was making derisory comments about Swells and pretty much everyone else at NME on Twitter yesterday, and was evidently searching Twitter carefully enough to catch my subtweet of him and try and set the millions of Auteurs on me.

when everyone else was either tittering at Sean Ryder's big + clever *authentic* homophobia. Wells took the fucker down a peg or two with that Working Class Zeroes piece iirc.

or editing it out of interviews, I meant to add.

start a twitter war abt swellsy w/luke haines to promote my book y/n

if there was an a-hole that needed murking up, it's that fool.

y

he has 8,000+ followers, but most of those followers have +/- 90 followers and seem to be suffering frontal lobe damage so i'd say n

that's several thousand more than i'd've guessed and i enjoy much of his work

his professional baddie shtick is so lame tho

its hilarious that he's so anti-music-press when he is the archetypal only-the-music-press-cares-about-him artist.

I'll take him on with my 14 followers (4 of them porn bots).

4 Non Bots

Shenanigans

https://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/former-nme-editor-reveals-shenanigans-12145655?x

assumed this would be McDickless but c'mon, you could have used a trigger warning

lover Swells so much I attempted to special-order his novel from bookshops in Australia for years

thanks autocorrect

I must have stopped reading NME before Swells got good, because he wasn't when I was reading it.

I can't stand Luke Haines anymore. His bitter bullshit was clouding my Twitter feed for far too long. I'm not even sure he's serious, but I think he is based on how badly he reacts to any criticism he receives. I once saw him cry his eyes out to some website's editor because a writer panned his third or fourth greatest hits collection; they actually took down the review, too.

more like luke heinous amirite

Think I've said this twice before on here and I wasn't going to again, but fuck it - Swells (and Johnny Cigarettes) put me off all music journalism for a long time, I just found many things he wrote to be unnecessarily nasty, not usually in a constructive way, it just seemed vindictive without providing any greater insight. I appreciate that he sometimes stood up for good causes (like with Shaun Ryder and homophobia above) but feel like his canonisation is at least partly based upon the old 'hip young gunslinger' fantasy which is of interest to nobody except music journalists (by this I mean the idea that quality is judged on how angry and passionate you are rather than whether you actually have anything to say) (I may be wrong about this - if so please show me something genuinely good he wrote about music)
In any case, I felt the NME of the mid to late 90s had an overwhelming air of contempt for both musicians and their listeners and rang hollow for anything it was supposedly championing - it wasn't anywhere near as bad as the Conor McNicholas days, but as vapid as his NME was, it was Swells who stopped me buying the paper, not him.

Had stopped reading NME by then tbh. Only familiar with early social realist Swells

The actual final cover:

.@stefflondon is Britain's hottest new rapper – meet her in this week's free NME magazine

Out Friday. Get your copy 👉 https://t.co/VfiZ6vWj1K pic.twitter.com/YKJoxGsnd8

— NME (@NME) March 8, 2018

lol, ok, good for them, not the worst way to go out: final cover star a birmingham-hackney girl who speaks fluent dutch

is that Geri's dress?

Swells wrote an article about punk in that appeared in an early 90s issue of UK comicbook Crisis, unfortunately doesn't seem to be online but I remember finding it incredibly exhilarating, maybe even "formative" when I read it as a teenager (in the late 90s after buying the comic second-hand) though tbf as far as I recall most of the article wasn't about music per se, more about the idea that anyone could create art regardless of technical skill or background (I remember that when I read Mark Fisher's K Punk blog a few years later I thought they seemed to be coming from a similar place in some ways)

I only commented to Haines that if he ever got bored with his sour Toby Young in a indie-hat persona he might find something better to do with his time to slag off ppl who are no longer able to defend themselves. And he called me a halfwit and blocked me!

I found the cult of Swells irritating too - for the same sense of unearnedness mentioned above. Perhaps I came to him to late but it was rage and bile as motor as far as I could make out, in place of insight.

I only commented to Haines that if he ever got bored with his sour Toby Young in a indie-hat persona he might find something better to do with his time to slag off ppl who are no longer able to defend themselves. And he called me a halfwit and blocked me!

his skin appears to be thinner than his hair

Haines is just a Poundland MES isn't he? Without the wit, or tunes. And imagine MES searching for himself on Twitter.

he was called smith

The Auteurs were great. They had lots of tunes. He's a sad, bitter dude past his prime, though. His Twitter is a broken record of negativity.