NME .... RIP

not_the_dj

My Grandad was in the NME once, back in ‘54

(Les George on Piano)

https://s18.postimg.org/susnsv48p/CDBFF4_EB-_C717-46_FD-_BC3_E-90_B0_A3042527.jpg

https://s18.postimg.org/pny49f6zt/D661744_A-1_EFC-421_F-_B648-0062_E43_D61_B5.jpg

octatonic

Serve the Indie fucks right.

Sporky

He's a bit premature - they managed 12 more years than he has so far.

fandango

axisus said:

I always thought that NME was indie hip rubbish. Couldn't stand it. Having said that, you have to congratulate it for existing for so long. It outlived all the other music rags by many decades. For me it was SOUNDS all the way, heavy metal rock and punk, all I needed at 17. Melody Maker I occasionally bought if SOUNDS had sold out.

I still have my SOUNDS T-shirt! A free gift back in about '78

I too was a Sounds fan back in the day. Showing how young I am.

It was in Sounds and Melody Maker where I came across my first dream guitar - an Aria Pro - in the classifieds. Don't ask me exactly what model, because Aria made loads of guitars with 'Pro' in the name, but it sounded pretty cool. Used to pore over those classifieds every week, whilst my drummer pal was fixated on Zildjian, Paiste, Gretsch, Tamar and Ludwig in the drums section. Early GAS ..... that wasn't sated for many years.

JezWynd

Legionreturns said:

Let's face it, the written page was never the best medium to talk about music.

Even less so now you can just look up any song and hear it for nowt.

Not at all true. Lots of good writers (& photographers) worked for NME. Nick Kent, P Morley CS Murray etc. It was an era when music was about more than wanking off to the latest guitar/amp/pedal and was about social issues. The writing was an essential part of the culture. Fanzines like Sniffin Glue helped kickstart a whole genre. A lot of it was pretentious trumpery but so what? - they mirrored the times and sometimes even created them.

MagicPigDetective

I’ve said this before in here, but the NME in the early 90’s played a big part in my life, being from a rural backwater where not much happened and knowing almost nobody into indie bands, it was my connection with another world and taught me much, not just music but films, comedy, politics etc, I remember vividly the cover of thr first copy I bought with Carter USM: 

Philly_Q

Sporky said:

Philly_Q said:

I don't quite understand but I think you're probably being a bit rude and implying metal isn't music.  Or something.  

Not at all. Some of the music I like is probably metal.

Just that NME wasn't meant to be about all genres of music, so lack of coverage of a different genre shouldn't have been surprising. It was basically about indie, bit of goth, punk and soft industrial at a pinch.

Metal and hard rock were Kerrang's thing, no?

This was pre Kerrang, I was buying Sounds and Melody Maker and my impression - I could be wrong - was that they both made an attempt to cover and review most genres of music without being such cliquey wankers as the NME.

Sounds had more rock/metal (and eventually gave birth to Kerrang) but it also had things as diverse as Eric Fuller writing about ska and reggae, Garry Bushell raving about (or inventing) Oi! bands and a bloke called Dave McCullough droning on about Red Lorry Yellow Lorry and Crispy Ambulance.  And all with Tommy Shaw of Styx on the cover.

Phil_aka_Pip

Worthless rag. I won't miss it.

Nitefly

I was always much more into the Melody Maker.

When I went AWOL in 1971 for a few months, my Mum put an ad in the "personal" column of the MM, because it was the one publication she knew I'd buy.

monquixote

I always hated the nme as a kid in the 90s

They turned their noses up at anything that wasn't ironic and art school and all the bands they championed were all about going to the right parties and wearing the right clothes but produced shit music.

ToneControl

NME were a bunch of cliquey wankers in the 80s
It was all about how cool it was to not like anything popular as far as I remember

Edit: I see the same phrase has already been used. Heh.

ICBM

Like many others here I won't miss it. I read it a bit in the 80s but quickly found it irritating. It wasn't a music magazine - it was a lifestyle magazine written by and largely for people who thought they were cooler than everyone else, and had to conform to liking a certain type of music while being sneering and condescending to anything that didn't get their seal of approval.

The reason it lasted so long is that this is a much bigger market than actual musicians, sadly...

Phil_aka_Pip

Nitefly said:

I was always much more into the Melody Maker.

Oh yes, the Maker. They wrote about the music, not about what they thought the music was about, or should have been about (in their opinion). The Maker was a serious music paper.

scrumhalf

I stopped readng the NME in about 1982. It suffered from the same disease that afflicted Rolling Stone - a belief that the  music was tangential to the writers, and that if the music disappeared we would still be in thrall to the writers.

Sounds was way better. It didn't have the unecessary "is it hip enough" thing going on. They just wrote about music and bands.

Corvus

So it's finally succeeded in actually disappearing up it's own arse.

lasermonkey

In the 80s and 90s I used to buy Sounds, MM and NME. I always liked the Maker most of all. sounds wasn't great IMHO, but between the three, you could get a reasonably balanced approach, or at least a wider coverage than you'd get from just getting one of them. I was quite sad to see Sounds go and still have the last ever copy.

For the most part, the MM covered the bands I liked (the "indie rubbish" that so many of you hate), plus it had a decent gig guide. The NME always seemed like it had some kind of agenda, which I could never work out. I was gutted that it was MM that folded and not the NME.

One day it occurred to me that I was only buying the NME for the crossword, so I stopped. I didn't miss it.

I met one of the more prominent NME writers a few years ago through a mutual friend. It was interesting to learn that all the IDM acts such as Aphex Twin, Autechre, et al, that he'd been championing since the early 90s, he didn't like them one bit. He just thought it would make him look cool.

Teetonetal

monquixote said:

I always hated the nme as a kid in the 90s

They turned their noses up at anything that wasn't ironic and art school and all the bands they championed were all about going to the right parties and wearing the right clothes but produced shit music.

Yup, my thoughts on it exactly. I'm amazed it lasted this long to be honest. 

Dopesick

Used to read the odd issue back in the mid 2000s to pass the time at my old job during long periods of waiting for machines to be fixed.

I quickly preferred 'doing nothing' to reading it tbh. It was like it had been written by half the cast of Nathan Barley.

Bluebeard

It was a magazine that followed the trends and pretended to set them.

Bygone_Tones

The album and single reviews used to be pretentious nonsense a lot of the time. You could read them and by the end still be no wiser about whether the reviewer thought it was any good or not. I never bothered with it much, even in the 90's.