What the pop papers say: The rinky-dinky Express

I was going to do a quick review of the new-look NME, but it doesn't appear to have arrived yet.

Hang on... what's this, underneath this postcard?

Why, it's a diddy little NME.

Seriously, this is a tiny little magazine. It appears to be smaller than the Melody Maker when it turned into a little magazine shortly before it closed for good. The official line is that this is a tablet-sized format, which makes economic sense - no need to redesign for digital - but a slap in the face of the 20,000 print readers who now get a product optimised for the few hundred electronic subscribers.

Still - it looks great on the front page, and there's a little bit of a secret message down the edge of the page. Yes, it looks like The Face, even down to the plus signs where the downline appears to hover over the crossline. Looks more like The Face than it does the NME, in fact. But it looks like a magazine that has tried.

There's even not one, but two, mission statements - the new slogan "the past, present and future of music", plus a promise of "more new music... more reviews... about %#@!£ time".

It's not quite an apology for the Gallagher years, or the light reviews section of recent times, but it's a start.

It's a front page that wants you to cut some slack, to approach in a spirit of truth and reconciliation.

Sure, it's a Bowie cover, which isn't the most dangerous choice, but last week they had McCartney; as I observed earlier in the week, Bowie was the only strong sales performance in the first half of 2013 and Bowie has appeared on the cover more than any other person, so it's a nice way of tying in history and present. Fits with the mission statement. (Indeed, the Bowie piece shares the new slugline.)

But can the magazine deliver where it counts: inside?

Let's take a peak.

Page 3: There's a full contents page on page three - the index of what bands appear inside is also back. Fela Kuti on page 30; Tindersticks, erm, also on page 30. Oh! Gary Numan. He's on page 30, too. Busy page, then, page 30.

We'll get there in a minute.

Page 4: It's Angst! Or Tool! Or NMEmail! Except now its called Sounding Off. There's only four letters now. One is Abigail Jones in Fleetwood complaining about Haim hanging out with David Cameron; In response, Mike Williams manages to blame this on Tony Blair and Noel Gallagher.

But only four letters? Really?

(They publish a postal address, which is sweet.)

Page 6-7: Double the number of tracks for On Repeat. Kurt Vile, The Wytches and BEEDEEGEE amongst others.

Page 8-19: "The Week", which isn't (just) news. It's basically Thrills, before Thrills became a sarc-muffin.

So there's Jake Bugg meeting someone who is dressed as Elvis, but it gets better. Brandon Flowers talks about playing China. No, it really does get better.

Andy Welch contributes a piece about Muscle Shoals Sounds studios, admittedly inspired by a film that's coming out but feels like a story that hasn't been told to death.

MIA is given space to explain why she gave the finger during the Superbowl. Interestingly, she goes down a 'hey, it used to have a totally different meaning, like the swastika, yeah?' line, which makes her sound like Crispin Mills.

"The only time you'll see a green representation of a woman in the West is a witch, in a musical called Wicked" claims MIA.

I'm not entirely sure I agree, but I can't put my finger on why.

There's a traditional In The Studio bit - this week Metronomy - and an "Anatomy Of An Album" which is Kid A. Not perhaps such a fresh choice.

Back, back, back comes the charts. Not a double page spread, but just a listing for the Official Record Store Chart. Which is sort of like an indie chart, but is more muddled-up, what with Roy Harper and Elton John in there.

Tinie Tempah does the Soundtrack of My Life feature - he wishes he'd written Isn't She Lovely, because it makes women melt.

Pages 21-25: Radar. Dead Coast! Puffer! Jungle!

Pages 26-31: Reviews - albums (and also a book). There's a "play it again" side panel which will remind older readers of Select - the NME column, not the magazine, that repeated sniglets of the last few weeks warmest reviews. (There's a lot of small ideas like this that suggest the team working on the redesign worked their way through a lot of back issues, and with good effect.)

There's probably more reviews than there were before - as promised on the front cover - but it's not like going from a pair of puppies to a hundred and one dalmatians; it's more a few extra. Perhaps it's a quiet week. (Oh, and page 30? That's where five reviews cram into the smaller page size.)

Pages 32-37: Reviews - live. Actually, the smaller format really makes the live photography look a lot better; especially the Nicky Wire and Katy B shots. Not sure what trick has been pulled here - maybe it's with less space to fill, the photos are having to justify every square centimetre they cover rather than cover up gaps in the page?

Theres some adverts then, until we get to...

Pages 44 - 47: Guide.

A moment of silence, please.

The world's most comprehensive gig guide is dead. Effectively, the line-by-line listings have been exiled to the web. Oh, internet, with your tables and mark-up, and real time updating and 'buy ticket' buttons, you are a more obvious home for the comprehensive gig list.

But nobody would ever have heard of Mung Bean Jesus or Who Moved The Ground were it not for the time-killing game of reading the listings for really shit names.

On the other hand, you only ever played that game while waiting for internet to become a consumer product, so swings and roundabouts.

And there's still a list of highlights, plus a nifty collection of free gigs - you can see Pins for less than two pins in Sunderland.

And Staying In rounds up music on TV and radio in the coming days - 6Music sessions given the prominence they deserve at last.

Page 49: Hungerford's crossword, along with a quiz (14. Who was in both the Sesame Street house band and the black panthers?) and... yes... a cartoon.

A cartoon! In the NME! See what I mean about the eye on what worked well in the past?

It's not a great cartoon; it's not a Ray Lowry cartoon, but it's a cartoon.

Pages 52-61: Feature articles. I'm hoping that in coming weeks this space will get a bit of variety in it, but this week it's all Bowie. And it's an awkward taste of 'what had gone wrong with the NME' lingering in the mix because other pop stars have been asked to offer an article about how great Bowie is.

So we're treated to the insight of Faris Badwan, which is a bit like getting Bernard Matthews to talk about Mrs Beeton. I could just be being bitter, though, as Badwan reveals he got loaned the Bowie At The Beeb CD collection when he was still at school, and I listened to it while driving around my wedding venue, so it makes me feel older than even remembering when Ray Lowry cartoons were in the NME does.

And, to be fair, even with Faris on-board the line-up of fellow musicians bowing the knee is pretty impressive: Black Francis, Trent Reznor, St Vincent...

Tony Visconti pops up to talk about the extra tracks on The Next Day Extra - which is surely the first time the NME has offered quite so much promotional space to a 'buy a record you've already bought because we've added some second-string tracks' gambit.

Pages 62-64: An old article about The Sex Pistols. Old habits die harder than old addicts.

Page 65: A look back ten years to a Kings Of Leon cover

Page 66: Brett Anderson does the Does Rock & Roll Kill Braincells, which has been given a new format: The questions are from "the fans". ("Is the window [on Dog Man Star sleeve] open or closed?"). It doesn't quite work, as the questions are mostly 'what job were you doing when you wrote this song' type-affairs. Even so Brett only scores six.

And... that's it. It doesn't quite live up to the promise of the front page, but it shakes up a magazine that had gotten tired, while picking through some ideas that had been dropped in previous overhauls.

Will it find a big new audience? It feels unlikely. But it might just stem the bleeding circulation long enough to allow digital to offer a stable future for the title.

It's a little more new; it's a little bit more musical; it's just been a little expressed.

NME announces new look (assuming you never saw The Face)

Here's a sneaky peak at the new-look NME which goes on sale this week:

Oh, hang on, that's not quite it...

Yeah, that's it. Pretty much the same thing.

Aside from the obvious debt to Imperial-era Face, this is quite an interesting sounding reworking of the NME, as it goes beyond the tinkering. Music Week has looked inside:

The Radar section - which focuses on breaking bands and new music – will expand to four pages and feature contributions from columnists including Dave Sitek and Huw Stephens. The Radar section on NME.com will be playlist driven and focus on daily new music recommendations.

In association with the Official Charts Company, the relaunched NME will feature the Official Record Store Chart both in print and online.

New franchises including Soundtrack Of My Life, Anatomy Of An Album and Lost Albums will run alongside more music recommendations via an enhanced On Repeat section.

A Reviews section features analysis of records and gigs over 11 pages in the magazine, a From The Vault section delves into the archive to reprint features from NME’s 60-year history.

Listing gigs on sale that week, a Guide section will also include ‘staying in’ to highlight music radio and TV.

There's a new slogan, too - The Past, Present & Future Of Music - which suggests alongside paper and digital it might be publishing in Christmas Ghost format, too.

Telling that they're relaunching with Bowie on the cover - especially given that this week's issue had McCartney as the cover story. It's not particularly brave - it was a Dave front page that was the only issue in the last ABC period which outperformed the rest; but having the confidence to stick Macca out the back door during wash up is an interesting message.

It sounds like an attempt to restore heart to the title - and coupled with some strong writing over the last few months this could be the start of a new golden age...

We'll see on Wednesday.

Gordon in the morning: The remake

Interestingly, Gordon Smart's Bizarre is no longer the home of showbizzyness on The Sun website, but a subsection.

I suspect this happened at the start of the week, but it looks like nobody else really noticed as they've had to stick a big button on the Bizarre page (which is now explicitly the home of Smart's column):

On the Showbiz page, there's a clickyback box:

All a little odd. Is it trying to raise the profile of Bizarre, or bury it? Is Gordon trying to distance himself from the bits he doesn't write (but would still be responsible for, as editor) or gather the pieces he's proud of?

Or is there another reason for taking the bits from the paper into a separate area, around which one could, say, throw up some sort of wall?

Or - and this is a real possibility - could it just be a poorly thought-out tweak to a website which already has some strange navigation issues?

Gordon in the morning: An important change

There's been a minor redesign over at the Sun, so it's no longer Gordon Smart's Bizarre; it's Bizarre edited by Gordon Smart.

A crucial distinction.

The other stuff is still as it ever was - N-Dubz are supposedly now "pals" with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. On closer inspection, it turns out they're being polite to each other while in the same building.

MySpace puts its affairs in order

The description of MySpace's soon-coming overhaul as "a last throw of the dice" is unfair - there will be more, more desperate scrambling dice-hurling to come.

But look, this is what they're doing:



It's not the first time MySpace has trumpeted that it's going to become an entertainment destination - I think that was the strategy at the overhaul-before-last, wasn't it? If it had taken, I suspect they wouldn't be needing to reintroduce the concept all over again.

The circus has moved on; the audience are on Facebook. MySpace will continue to be used as a great way of subsidising the cost of storage for bands and record labels, for as long as it chooses to do so. But its hopes of owning music? Gone, Mr Murdoch. Gone.

NME on the eve of another revamp

A lovely big, positive piece on the NME and new editor Krissi Murison was the highlight of yesterday's MediaGuardian - the newspaper's enthusiasm for the magazine in no way influenced, of course, by the magazine's sponsorship of the newspaper's student media awards.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the article was this:

Now it is tempting to think of the magazine as a 58-year-old who, having given birth to numerous offspring, nme.com, NME Radio, NME TV, NME Awards tour and Club NME, is being eclipsed by them. [Paul Cheal, the publishing director of NME and Uncut], who masterminded this brand diaspora, begs to differ: "The magazine is the cultural heartbeat of the brand and a lot of our journalistic integrity resides in the magazine and then spreads out." But he admits the mass of readers has "shifted online", with nme.com enjoying 4.5 million unique users a month. Cheal maintains the magazine is profitable and attracts a healthy number of music and lifestyle advertisers.

It's not entirely unlikely that the magazine makes a profit - there is a fair degree of advertising and fluffy advertorial set against editorial which doesn't suggest too much in the way of Time Warner resources being burned through to create it - and if Cheal is being straight, a couple of thousand extra readers might be all anyone needs at the weekly to sleep well at night. For the next couple of years, anyway.

Mind you, if the title is in rude health, it makes you wonder why there's the need for a wholesale revamp. Perhaps it was part of the deal to bring Krissi Murison in.

And - from the first glimpses on MediaGuardian today - the overhaul doesn't seem too bad.

Sure, it's disappointing that the logo has been reduced to a single block of colour - but on the other hand, the words "New Musical Express" have been restored to the masthead.

Yes, the idea of ten different covers has been done to death, and doing a multicover for no reason other than your own redesign suggests there's not much else to shout about. But, the other hand shows, the design of all ten covers looks bloody great - even the Kasabian one would be lovely, if it didn't have Kasabian on it. These are acts of love.

The choice of the ten cover stars is quite the Curate's egg, too: a handful of irk-the-purists choices (Rhianna, albeit with a sweary word), a few of the sort of interesting and intriguing new acts you never saw on the front page during the McNicholas years, and some thudding, dull, safe choices (the aforementioned Kasabian, and Jack White.)

It's intriguing - from this distance, it's hard to tell if the aim is a steady-as-she-goes don't-scare-the-horses attempt to change the ship's direction, or merely adding some shading to try and give the impression of depth to a 2D publication. Murison's issues so far have been mixed - generally with one cracker followed by three ho-hum editions - but now, surely, this is going to have to be a new era?

What the pop papers say: Mini-NME

We make this the fourth, or is it fifth, redesign of Conor McNicholas' reign as NME editor - he introduces the new look issue with a letter signed "The Editor", and there are two notable things from the off: the first is that it's even smaller, as the paper continues to shrink like Doctor Who on the wrong end of a laser screwdriver. It can now hide, comfortably, behind Rolling Stone.

The other noteworthy point is that it's not as disastrous as early reports had made it sound - rather than a further evisceration of content, this relaunch is more about rationalising the content. It looks quite bitty, but then the content has been bitty for a while; now, at least, it's organised like a professional buffet instead of a fumbled picnic basket.

It'll be interesting to see what it's like when it doesn't have the T in the Park, Oxegen and Live Earth coverage to give its front half some shape - there's clearly a firming up of the attempt to make photography one of the reasons for people to buy the paper (although a cover splash for "free aerial photo of T in the Park" pushes it a bit - that's a picture on an ordinary page, then, is it?) and the weekend festivals have offered a lot of stuff to fill those slots; quite how successful that'll be during the soggy-arse end of November remains to be seen.

If it's good news for photographers, it's not quite so good news for the writers - the longest article is the Kate Nash piece, there's a half-article on Bonde De Role, but that's as deep as it gets. Karen O is interviewed by readers via NME's MySpace - where you can go to put questions for The Cribs next week. As if apparently aware that sending traffic to a rival publisher's website is probably not the smartest move, you're then instructed to "keep checking NME.com to see if your question has been picked". The O interview is trailed as being "her weirdest ever", but it's not especially weird, the odd question about 'what sort of beard would you have' aside: it's all 'how would you like to die' and 'do you believe in god'? Its as weird as the Sunday Correspondent Questionnaire and nowhere near as left-field as the Smash Hits' regular quizzings.

Conor pledges "more album reviews" in his intro, which is managed by giving fifty words to a dozen records - we can figure out why Stephanie Dosen's album A Lily For The Spectre is worth eight marks, but not only a few handfull of words. The reviews are now shorter than the little puffs they used to give when they had a round-up of the best albums from the previous month.

If they needed more space to allow longer album reviews, they could free up a whole page by dropping the "reader's photos" page as quickly as they introduced it - the old "this is me with the drummer from Cud" bar has now been dropped still further, and we're treated to a full cover of someone who has had Mani write on their shoe, and some bloke in a shop "dressed as a glam rocker" (he isn't.) It's like that pointless "pleased to meet you" column which the Guardian does on Saturdays and nobody reads, only out of focus.

The other big problem with this iteration of the NME is that it doesn't have a clue what it is anymore. There's Kate and Karen, but also New Order and Morrissey bits; there's a full page marking The Verve's reunion, which is written with the apparent assumption that people might have heard of Ashcroft, but know little of him (we should point out that the 'full page' is mainly a photograph). So the new target reader seems to be someone who'd be worried about Mozzer retiring and how faithful the Joy Division movie is, but who doesn't know about the Mad Richard years. Someone who'd buy a magazine because there's The View on the cover, but not minding there's only a brief review about them inside. A person who won't count the advertising pages ratio - about 40%, as it turns out.

The revamp has gone a long way to properly organizing the magazine the NME has become, but the big worry has to be that it now doesn't look like a publication that anyone would have come up with if they'd been starting from scatch.