Q magazine - classic or dud?

I read the October edition today whilst waiting for a haircut.

It was absolutely abominable. They did a '10 best songs' thing, which was won by Jeff Buckley's cover of Hallelujah. It honestly defied belief.

every issue has some stupid list, doesn't it?

That list of non-musicians who changed music at least shows a spark of imagination. The other lists are so mind-numbingly obvious that they write themselves. Who thinks to themselves "you know, I really want to read another article on how good the Beatles were, and I know just the magazine for that!" I guess its comfort reading- being reassured that "yes, I do indeed have good taste in music".

full of banal lists and polls, making it a kind of forerunner to ILM's current incarnation.

berry gordy, bob geldof and midge ure non musicians?

horror gallery

21 years of Q covers...
http://covers.q4music.com/

how it started..the 1st issue
http://covers.q4music.com/Item.aspx?pageNo=5847&start=1986

a bargain... £1.10

Q's worldview of music is, well, not entirely correct but considerably more correct than the typical ILM worldview.

Any canon that isn't mainly about Beatles - Stones - Dylan - Pink Floyd - Bowie - Punk - Madonna - Prince - U2 - Grunge - Britpop is absurd.

yawwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwn

frequently painful reading for 'us lot' of course (i mean it's a mainstream rock and pop magazine!) but May 2000's 'When Rock Stars Go Crazy' article (by Quantick among others) genuinely brought the LOLs.

"Any canon that isn't mainly about Beatles - Stones - Dylan - Pink Floyd - Bowie - Punk - Madonna - Prince - U2 - Grunge - Britpop is absurd."

sheesh.

DJ MARTIAN COPIES AND PASTES SOME NEWS ABOUT Q MAGAZINE, MAKES SNIFFY COMMENT
GEIR TALKS UTTER SHIT
JUST ANOTHER DAY ON THE ILX DAY SHIFT

haha

Q, the music magazine for people who aren't really that interested in music. as much as the nme sucks, at least its drippy, smug readers are dumb enough to think the band featured are "important".

not sure which is worse.

It is a mystery. Perhaps leave ILX for a few weeks while you work out an answer?

If only you could have waited another seven minutes before posting back there Dom

On the other hand whilst the list stuff is the usual lazy rubbish, there is a rather good interview/article with Damon Albarn and a decent interview with Ian Brown. Mind you, first issue of Q I've bought in years.

Better than Word Magazine, at least.

It is a mystery. Perhaps leave ILX for a few weeks while you work out an answer?

-- Dom Passantino, Wednesday, 3 October 2007

ever so sorry, sir.

Word Magazine is what Hepworth & Ellen wanted Q magazine to be like in 2007, if they were still at EMAP and Mojo never existed.

worthy revival thanks to classic Martian opening, particularly excellent use of 'spotted' and 'apparently'.

mad props to Geir for listing one black man in his little canon

21 years of Q covers...
http://covers.q4music.com/

just been having a look at the covers over the years. i'm not a fan of the same red, white and black every month. i never saw this mag on shelves until the mid 90s maybe because it blended in with so many other mags so easily.

one difference between covers now and 20, 10, maybe even 5 years ago is that EVERY front cover now features a 'THE 10/20/50/100 GREATEST/LOUDEST/RAREST/BIGGEST...' list - big indicator of how list-driven things have become only in recent years (why, when and how this has happened is relatively interesting).

there's not enough big star names that appeal to the Q audience to fill the front covers for 12 issues a year so they resort to these silly arsed 'top 100...'s. i don't know how long it can last doing that. much of the time it's hard to tell if you're reading an advertsising promotion/ tie-in or a real article.

yeah the albarn interview was properly revealing i thought. and nice and *long* too.

not much of the year left and they haven't featured a woman as main cover star by herself.

women who Q might put big picture of on cover:

Madonna

women who might get a little pic on front cover:

Amy Winehouse (looks too fucked up to get big pic)
Lily Allen
PJ Harvey
Bjork
Joss Stone
KT Tunstall
Courtney Love
Kate Nash
Patti Smith
Kate Bush
Sheryl Crow?
based on their 20 years/20 covers thing last year, one or two others if it was a similar multi-cover thing

Some EMAP publishing landmarks

March 1991 - Sounds closes [EMAP buy Sounds, Kerrang and Select from United News & Media. EMAP immediately decides to close Sounds, to concentrate the weekly rock market on Kerrang and focus a more generalist student / early 20s market with the monthly Select magazine to compete against IPC's Vox]

meanwhile

Q...March 1991 - Queen
http://covers.q4music.com/Item.aspx?pageNo=5914&start=1991

October 1993 - EMAP Launches Mojo

(over the years in the post Mojo era, the Q demographics were lowered to cater for mainstream 20s...the type of music played on Virgin radio and Chris Evan's TFI Friday show that was launched in 1996)

meanwhile...

Q ...October 1993 - Nirvana
http://covers.q4music.com/Item.aspx?pageNo=5945&start=1993

December 2000 - EMAP close Select magazine due to the 90s British Britpop era fizzling out

meanwhile...

Q...December 2000 - Spice Girls
http://covers.q4music.com/Item.aspx?pageNo=6031&start=2000

Q...January 2001 - Oasis
http://covers.q4music.com/Item.aspx?pageNo=6032&start=2001
Oasis, Travis, Coldplay, Robbie Williams, David Gray, Badly Drawn Boy.... it's all Virgin Radio Mainstream Pop/Rock

Has Q Got Good?

Since 2 months, Andrew Harrison (Select, The Word)is the editor of Q Magazine.
The last 2 issues are indeed, a lot better than than the previous.. 600
What do you think?

hmmm
http://covers.q4music.com/images/399x567/634704399858182117.Jpeg

"freetards"?

also saint etienne in 2012? oh you said former Select editor

http://torrentfreak.com/are-pirates-freetards-111005/

Used to enjoy reading Q Magazine in the mid '90s. Less so now.

i have to say i never enjoyed it

who are the freetards

i remember it in the 6th year common room at school in 89/90. was always u2/sting/phil/eric/dire straits in it. i bet whoever used to bring it in would be all embarrassed now.

good question zs. i assume its downloaders.

I pretty much started reading it in about late '95/early '96 and stopped reading around '98(!)

was that when it was all britpop?

I wouldn't have said it was ALL Britpop, but Britpop was certainly covered in 1995/1996. As I guess it was in a lot of UK magazines.

was it collins and co who was in charge then? i remember it definitely started targeting a much younger audience

it was far from all Britpop aye. the cover may have been Supergrass/etc but inside was still very Sheryl Crow and Texas heavy etc. it was pretty good in the Kelly/Collins eras IMO.

No-one's mentioned the late Tom Hibbert's Who The Hell...? interviews that used to be at the front of the mag. They were unfailingly excellent.

I bought the most recent (Plan B) issue to read on the train, as a few people on Twitter said it had improved under A.H. I thought so too; there were marked signs of improvement throughout. Good Rumer feature in particular.

so what is the freetards article about?

all torrenters are freetards but not all freetards are torrenters

Lengthy feature by Eamonn Forde, titled "How free is ruining everything", although it's more impartially written than that. Interviews with people on different sides of the argument (Pirate Party leader, PRS economist, FAC spokesman) plus industry observers, legals etc.

is it any good?

The freetards piece is a bit too long, but Q is at least now doing some proper journalism after years of just packaging everything into lists. A year ago that feature would have been "The 100 biggest freetards in music." With an inexplicable John Mellencamp interview in the middle of it.

Everything about Q feels better: headlines, captions, front section. Feels like it's being done by people who enjoy both magazines and music, which hasn't been the case for a while.

also people who enjoy the word "freetards"

I decided to bin all Qs post 2002. So should this be purchased? That recent Kasabian cover was one of the worst things to ever happen

The Kasabian cover was an all-time low. I had a Gillian Welch interview in that issue and when I saw the cover I thought, well there go any readers who might possibly want to read a Gillian Welch interview.

um "freetards"? really? um.

we have a long way to go.

I don't like the word but it's pretty common, no? Q didn't make it up.

by coincidence i was just talking to a friend today about how widespread "retard" still is, inc among kids who know racist/homophobic slurs are not ok, and he brought up the Q cover. it was part of my vocabulary until a few years ago, it's something i've had to consciously eradicate, and while i wouldn't say i take huge offense when i hear people use it, it's not something i expect to see emblazoned on the front cover of a national music mag, just like i wouldn't expect a hilarious pun on, idk, "faggot" or "slut" to be there either

Hope it doesn't go pop, it's been really great for the last few years. Are we talking about this on another thread? My bad if so.

Who do the British seemingly hate Q Magazine?

Stay tuned... pic.twitter.com/cOwLZSpPt8

— Q Magazine (@QMagazine) November 15, 2023

a digital version to be (re)launched ?

Ted Kessler on X/Twitter: "An American publisher has leased title. No former staff or freelancers involved."