RIP to NME – the firebrand rock mag that electrified my teen years
NME ( New Musical Express) magazine – which ceased being printed on Friday – was the holy bible for music loving teens over several generations.
Its demise brought a flood of memories back; memories of rainy Thursday lunch times spent flicking excitedly through the pages in the newsagents of my hometown. Stacks of NMEs, placed alongside Melody Makers, provided welcome relief from schoolbooks. The black print of the NME sang of the lives of rock stars – living amazingly exciting times. Band rivalries were played out in the column inches and band in-fighting provided a satisfying melodrama to while away hours on end. At a time when music videos were a rarity, the pages of the NME provided images of my favourite bands taken at gigs across the globe. The writers seemed, at times, to be as rock n’roll as the artists themselves and there was a clear sense that the musicians loved appearing within the publication’s pages. To be given a 5 star review by the NME, you got the sense, was the ultimate apogee a band could reach as the NME was a source of street cred within the industry, as well as being a trusted paper when it came to recommending bands to music hungry teens. The pages of the NME, (which I bought whenever pocket money allowed), afforded me a window into the world of the mad, the bad and the beautiful in rock at a time when who you felt defined by the music you listened to. I would glaze over the British underground scene, preferring to whet my appetite by reading the latest dispatches about American bands from Sebadoh to the Smashing Pumpkins, Jeff Buckley to the Stone Temple Pilots.
Growing up in a quiet town – made all the more quiet as I was shy and a ‘ blow in’ – I found company and comfort among the NME’s boldly designed pages. The interviews with rock stars from Richie Edwards to Flea (of Red Hot Chili Peppers fame), offered something real in what, at times, seemed like a world of academic box ticking exercises and saving face social etiquette. The paper’s reviews section was a shining light of journalism, where careers were made and destroyed in a few effusive or barbed remarks. I remember reading a review of Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness by singer with The Manic Street Preachers James Dean Bradfield, in which he suggested that the Chicago band’s caterwauling singer should be lined up and shot for his yelps on one track. There was a freedom to what was written and said which matched the boundary testing ragged language of the crowd of friends I hung around with. Today many artists, even good ones like Maynard James Keenan, have to resort to posting cryptic messages about upcoming albums on social media. In the good old days of the printed NME you were fore-told about new songs from bands you loved and got to read the reviews days before the cassette tapes hit the shelves of the local music shop. Gig venue and date lists were poured over, while images of bands wearing tattered jumpers or flouncy shirts in the case of Suede’s Brett Anderson provided sartorial cues for my generation, just as the Sex Pistols did for the generation of the 1970s and Morrissey and New Order did in the 1980s.
As the NME moves completely into the online sphere, having lost its way somewhat since the mid-Noughties, I, for one, will lament its loss; not because of what it will mean to the current generation, but as the end of an era of another publication, whose print got stuck to your fingers and whose words electrified your heart.