Has The NME Got Good?

Anyway, enough moaning.

The NME feels very pleased with having outlasted Sounds and the Maker, but a gut feeling tells me it will no longer be with us in five years time.

Who is 'we' here? A very select group, perhaps. I have most certainly never, ever said that anyone or anything anywhere should have anything to do with 'Popstars', 'Missy Elliot' or 'the Miami Dance Conference'. I have a feeling that all of them are probably atrocious.

Plus! I was responding to previous threads about the NME which broadly seemed to be concluding - well the NME is crap because all it covers is indie music, where are the hip-hop and dance and indeed pop features? Or that was the - biased - impression I was left with. Clearly there are dissenters, prominently DJ Martian who is no doubt as unhappy with Missy Elliott coverage as he is with more Terris, and the Pinefox, whose vision for the NME, if he has one, eludes me.

Plus plus! It was rhetorical - I could have said "some of you" but it would have got less people involved in the thread I judged.

Editor: Steady 'Steady' Mike Chief Feature Writer: Stevie 'Edna' T Think Pieces: Tom 'It's Elusive' Ewing Roving Reporter: Tim 'Reality' Hopkins Letters Editor: David 'Incredible' Moore

Once every five years, Steady M takes pity on me and commissions a major retrospective on Harriet Wheeler. I dig out the last retrospective and add 200 words based on HW's activities, as known to me, over the previous five years. I struggle to reach 200. No-one notices that I am repeating previous retrospective.

Next week its Destiny's Child - another useless front cover.

Destiny's Child - and the NYC issue for that matter - pretty much confirm my original qn, i.e. the NME is on the right track currently. Themed issues = good. Putting the people making exciting pop records on the cover = good. The records Destiny's Child are making at the moment are terrific - there shouldn't even be a question about them being on the NME front cover.

We didn't know where to put ourselves.

However the NME should at least have a 1 page feature of Ulver.

and a significant album review - in the old MM circa late 80s- a band released a significant and exceptional album then they would be rewarded with a large review (column inches) regardless of size profile.

I will be surprised if the NME review the Ulver album - as the NME are ignorant bastards when it comes to non US/British bands.

For the curious Ulver - Perdition City

Ulver - Perdition City - is released April 23th on Jester Records through Shellshock/Pinnancle in the UK.

There are also a number of important points on the NME current music coverage - that I want to expand on. Later.

x0x0

In what way are Travis the biggest band in Britain? Hear'say? Westlife? Destiny's Child? Atomic Kitten? How many number ones have Travis had? Their definition of "band" seems to still be confined to a) Not manufactured (Whatever that means) b) Play guitars (and only guitars - none of this electronic nonsense) c) Male. It's the equivalent of Fruit and Veg Magazine putting Greengrocer Of The Year on the cover and describing them as "THE GREATEST PERSON WHO EVER LIVED", provided by "person" they mean "greengrocer".

But to get back to the subject...I think NME has changed for the better this year, but basically there just isn't enough to read in it that's interesting.

Maybe it's trying to be all things to all people, when it will always be synonymous with indie/leftfield music. Personally I don't mind reading about Destiny's Child or Outkast as long as it's interesting. But people are going to read Mix Mag, Hip Hop Connection whatever, if they are really into the dance, hip-hop or R'n'B scenes.

What was it that Matt from Sarah Records once said..."if you're a fan of jangley guitars then you're narrow minded. If you're a hip-hop fan then you are a specialist." or something like that.

to be heavily into hip-hop, understand the push/pull it enacts, you can't be fascistic about it, which is why the holier than thou attitude taken on by much of the uk hip-hop underground (trying to put pop in a cage where it can be looked at but not touched) - and, i suppose, that of our transatlantic counterparts as well - irks so much.

NME freelancers are being told to sign these horrible new agreements. Say, for example, someone gets to do a feature with Destiny's Child. The writer turns in a pretty good interview but has some material left over. The LA Weekly or someone asks for that writer to file a piece on same. Under the terms of the NME's new agreement, they wouldn't be able to because the NME would own, forever, the TAPE of the interview and any other out-takes.

Any freelance who doesn't sign does not get any more work from the paper/website. They are paid something like 15p a word for work they do, which is a lot less than you can get for selling interviews to the American market or a British newspaper, and they have none of the benefits of being on staff, usually no retainer even. It's patently unfair to ask those without job security to agree to such terms, and 20 writers are looking into a potential case against IPC for restraint of trade/intellectual property rights etc. If you want to know more, Tom, ask Angus Batey to fill you in. I think he was the one who went to the Guardian in the first place.

The best part of the story DG's quoting? 'Mr Sutherland was unavailable for comment.' Now there's a great big fuckin' first!

Source Media Guardian Feb 2001

I would think that if the NME dropped below 50,000 a week then questions would be asked about its future.

Sounds closed at around around 39,000 sales in 1991, Melody Maker closed at 32,500 sales in Dec 2000.

However much I dislike NME's music direction in 2001 To lose 20,000 sales from Feb 2001 to the end of the year, is unlikely.

When the Guardian went online it sent around a fait accompli letter to anyone submitting freelance work that said The Guardian owned the reprint rights on each piece submitted; notification of this fact equalled an expectation of compliance. A lot of people stopped dealing with them afterward because the freelance rate did not rise one jot. What's going on at the NME is about a million times worse, and might be one reason the thing appears to be written by monkeys and Muppets these days - good writers often have annoying characteristics like principles and the tendency to disagree with the logic of their 'superiors' at work.

I don't think the NME will go down the pan because the site gets a gazillion hits every week. Brand manager is the perfect job for an Oxbridge, sexist skinhead Muppet like Sutherland, the job can do itself.

Do the freelancers laugh at the Travis, Stereophonics, The Strokes and Linkin Park front covers ..like the rest of us?

Who decides on the NME front covers Sutherland or Knowles or 16 year old work experience kids on a focus market research panel? I want to identify blame.

Also I noticed that Mojo are seeking a new editor at the mo Advert

But did you see the piece Keith Cameron wrote on Travis for the Guardian Weekend? I found it frighteningly ambivalent, as though he was just *describing* the situation where they have got so big, and he just didn't seem motivated to speak out against it. Maybe age has hit him where it hurts, but his pro-Oasis rhetoric wasn't what I wanted to read from the NME *at all* in 1995.

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.

Yeah he was one of the people along with Graham Linehan who i followed was quickly horrified by then unfollowed. Twitter is such a bad look for some semi-celebs.

He's responsible for my favourite tweet of all time

Rag n Bone man sounds like Jimmy Nail.

— luke haines❌ (@LukeHaines_News) June 25, 2017

i agree with matt johnson re his band.

Swells rarely had much insight about music, but he was very funny. Turning in an entire feature about a band you freely say are bad but had a great time with is an excellent use of the music press. With 900 pieces a week across the inkies, it's fine to show kids that you can just write an entertaining piece, not attempt to tell them what they should buy. Here's a joke, here's some invective, here's some human interest, go freelance a career.

didn't he once use the immortal phrase "the fetid stench of human cock-meat" in a Green Day review or something. I'd stopped reading him at that point tbh, but laughed when I read it quoted somewhere years later. G search doesn't doesn't yield anything so I might be just making this up.

He rarely had much insight about music but he had a lot about the people who wrote about music and about the music industry itself. As (very funny) meta-commentary he was great.

I loved these Swells remembrances bitd

http://thequietus.com/articles/02000-steven-wells-a-tribute

sad that his final piece -- "in extremis: steven wells says goodbye" for the philadelphia weekly -- doesn't seem to be on the internet any more

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/mar/09/he-tried-to-get-out-of-the-car-at-80mph-the-stories-behind-nmes-greatest-covers

Don't think I knew that Penny Reel was AKA Paul Simon before!

he's not, he's pete simons :)

this is either forgetfulness on viv's part or the long-stewed beef of some ancient feud

Grauniad?

i blame Alba

for some reason the swells phrase which sticks with me comes from a mid-90s interview where he takes issue with some feeble waif of a frontman (possibly rick witter) and asks if he'd not prefer to be stalking the stage 'encased in 250lbs of rock-hard raw beef'

just realised that i have academic access to rock's back pages and thus i can confirm that swells did indeed use that exact phrase in conversation with rick witter in an article published on 9 may 1998, meaning it's been rattling around my brain for almost exactly 20 years :(

"When I am dead and opened, you shall find Calais engraved on my heart" — Queen Mary

^^it's like this but world-historical

also we have to open your head

i can't remember this morning's commute but i can remember something an nme hack yelled at the singer from shed seven three decades ago

i feel like my head is already open tbh

irl lolled at rock's back pages revelation

A classic from the the Steve Sutherland era

Oof. Here's the original NME review of Baduizm. Yikes. pic.twitter.com/RXCXw6LSwY

— Caspar Salmon (@CasparSalmon) July 5, 2018

Music magazine NME's switch to all digital format led to a 72% collapse in reader engagement:
https://www.mediaite.com/print/heres-what-magazines-lose-when-they-go-digital-only/

Online readers of NME only spend an average of about three minutes a month with the publication, per the study, while print readers spent an average of about a half-hour a week with the magazine.

[...]

NME was founded in 1952. The publication was acquired earlier this year by the Singapore-based company BandLab Technologies and was previously owned by Time Inc., which made the decision to end the print product.

Well, there it isn't.

Longtime NME media editor and features writer Gavin Martin has died at the age of 60.