What the pop papers say: The Stinger

It's not often these days you get the chance to write about a successful music magazine; it's even rarer you hear of one which is a print magazine. Which makes the success of The Stinger even more something to celebrate.

It's a free publication which serves Hastings and what appears to now be known as "the 1066 area". (The implication that nothing much has happened in the area in the last thousand years or so might seem unfair, unless you've ever been to Battle.)

It looks gorgeous, and is just coming up to its third edition. It works because it treats music as a perpetual timeline and runs history alongside the contemporary. Kind of the thing NME has spent the last five years trying to fumble its way towards, but without the horrible whirring of gears. Perhaps living in an area where the main attraction is a military defeat a millennium ago makes you better at absorbing the past and using it to drive the present. Or perhaps the team is just more confident at explaining why music moves them.

Either way: a great read. Let's hope their reign is as long and solid as that of our Norman overlords.