Brief 10: Writers on the Storm

 In the last year or two, I’ve noticed several of the writers for the NME that I used to read have died. It’s not a big enough story to make the news, it’s just because I follow a lot of journalists on twitter and you see them paying tribute to their former colleagues and friends.

I started buying the NME in early 1995 and then bought it close to every week for, I’d think, 12 or 13 years. I learnt more from it than pretty much anything else.

I’d also get Melody Maker occasionally, and some of the monthlies intermittently until, in 1998, I settled on Uncut, which I still subscribe to. A lot of the writers whose names I’d see have gone on to bigger things. As in, a lot of them were really good writers. It wasn’t cheap hackery.

I think I initially bought it as much as because I’d just started to get into “indie” music (i.e. I quite liked Blur and Paul Weller) as because I knew it had a full rundown of all the charts, and I was interested in charts.

It caught me at the perfect moment – I was starting to have a bit of money to spend on music, I had a burgeoning political awareness and, of course, I was right in time for the haphazard heyday of that old beast Britpop.

I feel like the way NME covered Britpop is itself retrospectively mischaracterised, perhaps by slightly matured journalists ashamed of their youthful indiscretions. It was rarely jingoistic, tunnel-visioned and uncritical. In the first few issues I bought, I was baffled and intrigued to see East 17, Tricky and Orbital on the cover, perplexed that though Paul Weller was the lauded cover star, his ‘Stanley Road’ only received 6/10 in the all-important album reviews. The famous Blur/Oasis Boxing cover felt like an incongruous joke even at the time.

The reviews were much more honest and brutal than they are now. There were lots of 4s and 5s for much-hyped albums, lots of wit and malice.

A lot of the writing will probably not have aged well, but I remember, on the occasions I ever made the mistake of reading the “lad mags” of the era, the tone in the NME was very different, much more right-on, less misogynist. Of course, most of the NME writers were white and male, not all of them. They seemed like they were from all parts of the UK too.

It was funny and incongruous for those first few years that they didn’t write “fuck” and it had to be f*** or fook or fack – ridiculous, really. Alongside that, I was shocked, especially when I first read it, that journalists would openly write about artists’ (and their own) drug use. Would the police not get involved?

Mainly, it was funny, and it was copious. Every week, it was full to the brim with words – interviews and reviews, comedy features, puzzles, charts, letters, news. There’d be enraging stuff, journalists I came to be wary of, journalists I came to value. It took up happy hours of my time.

Anyway, “critics” get a rough time, especially from some artists, these days but, to me, criticism is utterly integral to rock’n’roll culture – at its best, its alive and glorious, a kind of hyperfandom which elevates and mythologises the artists, and the wise ones know to be grateful for it.