The mag that savaged the hand that fed it
As the NME goes online-only, David Quantick fondly recalls his years there
When I heard yesterday that the NME, the magazine I wrote for, was closing its print edition after 66 years (as part of a disingenuous announcement about an “expansion” online), the memories came roaring back: David Bowie singing The Laughing Gnome to me; Grace Jones thumping me on the chest and shouting, “I like big breasts!” approvingly; my verbal jousting with the Pet Shop Boys, who nicknamed me “Daisy Quantock” (a reference to a character in their beloved Mapp and Lucia novels).
If you’re lucky enough to have worked at the NME, the first question anyone ever asks you is, “When were you there?” as if Britain’s formerly most popular rock magazine was an Oxford college and you were one of its graduates. In a way, I was, but what they always mean is: what rock era? Was it the time of Bowie and Jagger, with Charles Shaar Murray and Nick Kent? (Keith Richards was sick on Nick’s leather jacket and he never had it cleaned again.) The punk era with Danny Baker, Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill? (Julie called Phil Collins the ugliest man since George Orwell.) The arty years with Ian Penman and Paul Morley? The Britpop era with Stuart Maconie and Andrew Collins? In fact, I spanned a number of them, writing for the magazine from the early days of post-punk in 1983 to the peak of Britpop in 1997.
There were so many eras of NME because music changes so fast. In an age of tweet-storms and Snapchats, a weekly paper sounds as slow as the Anglo-saxon Chronicle, but in an analogue age NME was totally in step with the music industry, which it both relied on and savaged, not so much biting the hand that fed it as gnawing the head off, swallowing it and then shouting, “Oi Music Industry! Where’s your hand?” It was violent in its passions (so many Greatest Bands In The World) and harsh in its judgment (Stiff Records withdrew its advertising after an album by reggae band The Equators called Hot was reviewed by Paul Morley in one word: cold). It worshipped idols (readers often wrote in suggesting it change its name to the “New Morrissey Express”) and it supported lost causes. It had, improbably for a magazine based in central London, a hip-hop war, in which half the staff wanted it to reflect new American dance music like Run DMC and Public Enemy and the other half favoured jangly British indie bands like The Motorcycle Boy and The Close Lobsters.
Even though its circulation went up and down – peaking at a quarter of a million a week during punk and dropping to just 15,000 in 2014, before rising again to 300,000 the following year when it relaunched as a freesheet – it was always part of the fabric of life. I’ve lost count of the people who remember my name from their teens or their twenties, men and women now in their thirties, sometimes in their sixties. And wherever I turn, there’s one of my fellow graduates, hosting a radio show, writing music books, being a talking head and even writing about music.
NME was a music paper, rooted in a love of music, but at its best, it was a guide to culture as well as counterculture. Francis Ford Coppola claimed that NME’S Graham Lock was the only writer who’d understood Apocalypse Now. JG Ballard sent postcards. NME ran a knowledgeable obituary of Andrei Tarkovsky, the legendary Russian filmmaker (admittedly with the headline Tarka The Auteur, because it was a funny paper as well as a clever one). It is still the law that any former NME writer has to loathe the paper in its later incarnations, and certainly it was sad to see it shrink into a freesheet that sometimes looked like a supermarket giveaway, but NME always contained at least some of its former attitude. Its existence online is a good thing, even if now it has to compete with downloads, websites, blogs and for all I know giant killer robots. Everything evolves and dies: the NME seems somehow to have done both, and I wish it well.