What the pop papers say: New life through Brexit

Yeah, we've all been wondering what the point of the NME actually is since it went free - but, over the last couple of weeks, it's started to look like the magazine might have found a purpose.

Unfortunately, it's the decision to leave Europe taken in the referendum. Obviously, given a choice between the death of the NME and the death of the European Dream, we'd plump for saving the one with the Ode To Joy soundtrack over the one parping out the Be Here Now re-release.

Still, it's great to see the NME with a little fire back in its belly. This week's issue is part-cri de cœur, part call to arms - a how-to-cope with the new reality. The advice is, to be honest, the sort of thing that Tumblr users have been sharing for the last month anyway - join a party; "trust your generation", write to your MP. The NME isn't suggesting we build barricades or stockpile molotovs.

In fact, it genuinely suggests sorting out your saving account and thinking about getting together a deposit for a house.

And if that isn't enough to give the sense that this is your Dad trying to help you out, there's the way the issue is presented: The cover line is "Anarchy In The UK".

It's a coverline that doesn't make any sense in its own right - why would a magazine talking about anarchy be promoting savings accounts and political party memberships?

But worse, it's slapping a lazy, Summer of '77 model onto 2016. Is that really the best we can do? The answer to Farage and May is Rotten and McClaren? It's not like the NME responded to the rise of Thatcher with calls for a revival of the Blitz spirit, although the time gap is the same.

So, yes: two cheers that the NME has got a cause, and that it's fighting a good fight. But what it desperately lacks is a way to connect cause to culture. If it can find whatever The Clash would be if they formed this year, it might come together.

An old friend reappears

Ah, it's been a while since we've sighted someone saying "hey, why does everyone think Morrissey's glum, he's actually very funny" as if that's not the whole point of Morrissey - in effect the "why does everyone focus on how wet the sea is, because if you taste it, it's actually quite salty" of music.

Turns out the thought isn't extinct, though. NME has one in the wild this week:

http://wilderdevotee.tumblr.com/post/132927388884/theres-some-morrissey-stuff-thats-genuinely

What the pop papers say: Bloodless coup

Last week, the free NME made a semi-decent bid at suggesting there was a life ahead for the title.

This week? Not so much. You could probably just about get away with a Robert Pattinson cover, if you didn't feel the need to allude to Twilight on it. The NME does, so they don't.

There's also three pages on Jeremy Corbyn but it's not clear who it's aimed at - the information assumes so little background knowledge that it's presumably intended as a 'start here' guide, but why would anyone who hadn't bothered to discover that he's the new Labour leader by now give a shit? And who is this audience who need to have Corbyn's voting record detailed for them, but who will know who Tony Benn is? After a summer where young people have been more engaged with politics - and Labour politics at that - this suggestion the kids need a primer is embarrassing at best.

There's a really confused sidebar, too - the "punkest politicians of all time". It includes Berlusconi, calling his dodgy behaviour as being "in the punkest fashion possible". Apparently either the all-new NME doesn't know much about the fraudulent, sexist Italian politician, or it doesn't know much about punk.

They also include Cromwell, but don't manage to squeeze in the whole being the only non-Royal head of state. It also describes him as "extremely unpleasant", which suggests the NME doesn't like punk. (Their inclusion of Andy Burnham reiterates this.)

There are a full four album reviews this week, which is something. But there's only one music feature - Rudimental - and it looks about two hundred words long.

The first issue they had over a month to work on. The second issue, clearly, didn't have as much time, or as much room for thought, and so gives a clearer sense of what the new NME is trying to be.

What it seems to be is a really watered down Shortlist. Which is a blow to those of us who were hoping it might at least be a watered down NME.

Something better: Art Decades**, which has just* launched its fourth issue, with a 20 page appreciation of Lush. There's interviews with both Miki Berenyi AND Emma Anderson. One of the main revelations is that there's a Lush song which rips off the theme of Reggie Perrin.

* - I say "just"; it's dated July 2015.

** - You can get it via ArtDecades.com

What the pop papers say: The free NME

Well, it even made the news on BBC Radio Bristol, so I suppose claims that the latest NME relaunch was "historic" aren't that overblown.

But what are we left with now?

The first nought-pee NME has bagged a pretty strong cover - Rihanna, with a fairly hefty interview with Peter Robinson. It's eveb got coverage in People and other US titles, and having talk lines picked up by other media won't hurt with getting the magazine picked up in shoes shops.

Editor Mike Williams explains the choice of Rihanna for the cover:

[She] totally embodies the spirit of the new NME. She's individual, she's iconic and, as she tell us in our world exclusive interview: "I just have a way of breaking the rules".

They might have been better getting Madonna, to be honest - her best days behind her, jumping awkwardly onto any fad a little too hard and a little too late, and when your Dad spots you're listening to her he asks "is she still going?"

It's also slightly awkward that Rihanna was on (one of the) covers of the 2010 relaunch, and significantly hasn't turned up since. Until yesterday.

The claim that Rihanna is iconic, and thus like the NME, is a bit weird too, as in Mike's welcome letter it comes just one paragraph south of a claim that:

Whether or not you know that NME launched in 1952 as New Musical Express [...] isn't important (though we're very proud of our incredible history).

If knowing the brand is insignificant, then the obvious question is: why have you slapped the brand on the magazine? If the letters "NME" don't have to mean anything to the reader, and the magazine under the letters is all new, why didn't you just come up with a name that would carry some meaning?

While the Rihanna interview is meaty (and obviously next week we'll get an idea if that scale of ambition is keeping up), the rest of the magazine is quite slight. Chrvches are interviewed, although the resulting piece is two pages, heavily padded out with (what don't appear to be specially shot) photos. Space is found for a tiny box about 'other bands which spell name funny ways' that doesn't mention Pvris, and implies that they're expecting readers to be going 'isn't Chrvches a strange word').

The other feature is even more dispiriting - why Big Bang Theory is the new Friends. Now, if we were in season two of Big Bang Theory, this sort of thing might just pass; if it was an unwatched gem tucked away in the schedules, it might have had something to say. But even on E4, it's getting an audience ten times the circulation of the new NME, so an article saying "hey, they're friends but it's like they're family" is bemusing. Next week: "hey, you guys, there's a series called Hollyoaks and it's a bit like Emmerdale but with a different accent."

It's good to see Peter Robinson Versus is back - although this week it's John Lydon. Asked what he'd tell new readers about the NME, he cracks wise with "you've got a good tractor section", although his more familiar put-down of "not new, not musical, and not particularly express" is now more fitting than ever.

The best innovation is a column by Katherine Ryan - I'm going to call her the new Alan Parker as a result. Other new clutter - a page asking people what they're listening to (currently the only indication that 'ordinary' people will be featured in the magazine, something of a strange decision in the social media era); a 'good week/bad week' ladder; a games page - could have come straight from Shortlist or any Saturday magazine bundled with a regional newspaper.

And what of the music? There's only three album reviews - a few shorter pieces do little more than acknowledge they are now available; a handful of tracks. The live pages are ten big pictures of upcoming gigs. There's no reviews of events that have happened, and one of those gigs is One Direction.

The good news, at least for Time Magazines, is that there's a lot of advertising - pages and pages of live ads (why print a full gig guide when people will pay you to promote their events?). So as it's clear there's barely any editorial budget at all, economically the relaunch appears to be working.

The 1980s NME would have seen you through a decent length train trip. The early 21st Century might have lasted a fast journey between Milton Keynes and London. This new version, if your train was five minutes late, you'd have finished before you got on board.

It's not that it's slight, but - presumably to encourage as many people as possible to pick it up - there's no sense of what it is, or what it believes, or even what it likes.

It's not a great new era for such a venerable title, but on the plus side: you do get a little bit more than what you pay for.

What the pop papers say: The last NME

Yesterday, Conor McNicholas, former NME editor, Instagrammed a photo of the last-ever NME (paid version) with the words "I'm holding a piece of history".

If even a former editor didn't exactly bother rushing out to get it when it hit the newsstands, you're looking at a piece of history that somehow struggled to write itself.

So what do we get for the extra quid on the cover price? It's a bumper edition - 132 pages, although 50 of those pages are reproductions of the greatest covers (or the "greatest" covers). And I say reproductions, but the older covers - at a guess, the ones which predate digital production on the magazine - look really shit. I can't work out if they're supposed to be artfully distressed, or if they're just distressed. On a few, you can even make out the adverts on page two peeking through. Even covers which have been reproduced elsewhere, in better quality, like the Shaun Ryder on the giant E one, have turned up for closedown looking like they've been scanned for a school project.

What else is there? A history of the magazine spends longer on the punk years than the interesting bit in the middle. The hip-hop wars get a mention - and the 1988 "Greatest Rock & Roll Band In The World" Public Enemy cover is neatly tied to Kanye's Glastonbury pronouncement of his "greatest living rock star" status, but curiously Barry Nicolson declares "the hip-hop warriors eventually won". A strange victory, as Kanye aside, there's not been any other hip hop act (or even hip-hop-ish) on the cover of the NME since Skrillex over a year earlier. If hip hop won - and that's not an unfair suggestion - then the NME was very much the warrior who didn't hear the war was at an end; fighting on deep in the jungle. Fighting on against those deeply into jungle.

This bit's odd, too:

Indie remained the paper's bread and butter, however, and a series of questionable laet-80s cover stars (Cilla Black, anyone?) hinted at a scene in the doldrums

The impression here is that somehow indie was in such a parlous state by the end of the 80s that Cilla Black was an indie hero.

Let's just unwind this a moment. The Black cover was the front of an issue about TV (Victoria Wood and Dennis Potter also featured in that edition; at the time, Cilla Black was the biggest thing on TV. And this issue looking at TV was part of the era when NME used music as an entry point into writing about the wider culture - this was the week after the famous Youth Suicide all-black cover.

More importantly, while the 80s NME covered indie well, it's a myth to say that indie was the paper's bread and butter. It might have been the margarine, but the main features around this time were as likely to be the Eurythmics or Suzanne Vega as The Wedding Present or The Smiths. In fact, the run of really indie covers (when Smiths and Mark E Smith and Pop Will Eat Itself) had yet to happen when the Cilla Black front page was published.

And it's the date that's really important - because Cilla Black on the front of the NME happened in 1986. 1986. The point where C86 came out - which Nicholson describes just a few paragraphs before as helping "define and contextualise [the] scene". The scene which, we're supposed to believe, was in the doldrums. I know times were tough in the mid 80s, but nobody was ever going to send away for a tape which gathered together the last farts of a dying scene.

The thing is, there's no shortage of actual covers which could have been used to make a similar point - early in 1990, the paper was reduced to painting a world map on a bald writer's head to do a front page.

Barry ends his piece like this:

We approach the future cognisant of the most valuable lesson learned from our past: that music doesn't stand still, and we can't afford to, either.

Well, Time Magazines (formerly IPC) clearly couldn't afford to stand still.

Otherwise, there's a rummage in the archives - a welcome outpouring of love for Swells and Peter Robinson; some features get re-run; as do some live photos. Really oddly for a paper who insists even its reboot is going to be about music, though, the live photos come with only a couple of lines from the original review, and there's no space at all for any reprints of record reviews. Some bits of Thrills are republished, although the introduction is wrong (it was only satrical and made-up for half its life; initially it was straight-faced short items and featurettes - a look back at page 16 shows this because there's Thrills covering the Pistols on the Grundy show) and the reproduction of the cutting so poor you just have to take the captions' word for it that they were funny.

And a chilling statistic: Oasis in their various incarnations have appeared on the cover 78 times. Bowie has only managed 32 (he held the record for a bloody long time, too.) You could argue that Oasis sell papers, but the downward line on the circulation graph would argue they don't.

What does it amount to, then? As a summation of a 63 year history, it's okay - it's effectively the 60th anniversary edition they seemed too embarrassed to produce. They're still treating Lana Del Ray as a big deal, although the rest of the world seems to have moved on. But it's mostly a big thick line. Running through the pages is a signal that this isn't going to be relaunch like Time Out or the Evening Standard - dropping the cover price, reworking the title, but remaining as close as possible to the old model. This feels more like its going to be that time Zig Zag merged with One Two Testing, and tried to start from scratch while keeping the old audiences.

Still, if it means a few fewer Oasis covers, it won't be all bad.

The NME has fallen silent. Next month, who knows what will rise in its place?

What the pop papers said: Big Hard Excellent Fish

You'll remember that we losy Josie Jones earlier this year.

Rummaging in a box of things, I found the Big Hard Excellent Fish interview from the NME...

Click to make readable...

What the pop papers say: Ails to the chief

Noel Gallagher's on the cover of the NME this week, which can mean only one thing. (And, yes, it does - Pete Doherty's on the cover next week.)

Noel on the cover; and inside, there's an amusing interview with a grouchy, funny giant of the Manchester music scene.

No, not Noel; Mark E Smith:

I mean, the Arctic Monkeys, come on. They've been to music college [this is not true]. They've got degrees in tock music [this isn't true, either]. I think some of them have got passes in The Fall.
[...]
I get sent magazines with all this advice for new bands... and it's 'Number one, get a decent bank account.' It's like applying to university. There was always privilege in music, but nowadays you don't have a chance in hell."

That's the way you do it. But then Smith doesn't have the problem Gallagher does - he's not trying to square a working class hero image with struggling with paying to send his kids to school; his anecdotes are about Pixies fans trying to take selfies rather than (as Noel does) stories about being on the red carpet at the BAFTAs.

The NME is still calling Noel "the chief"; I'm hoping this is ironic, given his timorous, weak new album - the way men in their 80s who were something in the Raj were still called The Major long after the sun had set on the Empire they once bestrode and the career they once had.

There's six pages of Noel, and Tom Howard gives him an easy ride. Especially when there's a strand of his thinking that's a little disturbing.

First, Gallagher trots through the Ali G defence for sending his kid to private school. We've heard this before, of course:

Good for you that you don't have to go to fucking school and come home talking like fucking Ali G, because, believe me, I would beat that out of you

Let's hope that Noel's using "beat that out of you" as a figure of speech. Let's hope that.

But - as the last time he used 'I don't want my kids to sound like Ali G' justification for swerving the local comprehensive - what does "sounding like Ali G" mean?

It could be that he simply means that he doesn't want his children to sound like working class kids do these days - a strange position for a man who has made his money out of tales of working class upbringing. Suddenly, Gallagher is concerned about "speaking proper", is he?

Or it could be that "talking like Ali G" means "talking like Ali G" - co-opting the speech patterns and slang of young black men?

Later on, Gallagher is talking about his support for the Teenage Cancer Trust - one of the things that reflects really well on him. It's a great cause, and Noel has really gone above and beyond in the work he does for them.

There's a but.

I like it because it's a charity for British kids, and it's real, you know

Not a charity for kids who are unwell; not that they're facing a massive challenge at a time of their lives when they should just be enjoying themselves.

It's a charity for British kids.

As opposed to what, exactly, Noel?

It's not as if Noel hasn't helped charities aiding people cursed with the misfortune to not have been born British on top of their other problems - Oasis were one of the main attractions for War Child, for a start. It makes the phrase even more puzzling.

Like the Ali G remark, it feels less like a racist stance and more a throwback to Victorian charity-begins-at-home Little Englanderism; a faint whiff of the UKIPs that Noel himself would probably be surprised to notice.

Maybe The Chief has more in common with The Major than we'd first expect.

Elsewhere, Laura Snapes watches Sleater-Kinney, deftly linking Carrie's claim that their music is an "obliteration of the sacred" with their presence as "some sort of religious totem".

Emily McKay talks to Kim Deal, making a game attempt to get to the bottom of the Pixies split but deciding it's better to hear about the Breeders than it is to pursue the matter.

You do wonder, though: The Fall, Noel Gallagher; Sleater-Kinney; a Radiohead The Bends feature; Mark E Smith; The Breeders... why on earth are young people not buying the NME? Is it because they're not really much in the NME these days?

One last thing: Between page 52 and page 59, Pete Doherty has morphed in Peter Doherty. Might want to decide on which it is before you lay out next week's cover, guys.

What the pop papers say: Toffs

The New Statesman which, erm, went off the newstands yesterday (No Rock & Roll Fun - last with the news) splashed the Blunt/Bryant 'posh people in the arts' story all over the cover, with contributions from Stuart Maconie and Robert Webb, and - more interestingly - some actual people who make music giving their perspectives.

Johnny Marr actually tried to shift the debate from background to the actual music world; record companies no longer sign up young bands with a view to long-term investment, and:

The worst part of this is the 'pay to play' culture [which] means bands have to hand over cash for 50 or more tickets or pay for whatever tickets they haven't sold, leaving many of them lose heart.
[...]
This is what's happening to young musicians all over the UK, and it doesn't matter what school you went to or what your parent's background is.

Marr is furiously committed to this idea - that background isn't important; it seems partly driven by a desperation to prove that his success wasn't aided by coming from a working-class background when that was supposed to open doors at record company offices.

But it misses the point by a Morrissey and a half - if the only way you can get gigs when you're 18, 19, 20 is by effectively bribing the venue to let you play; if your time 'paying your dues' also involves paying out hard cash, of course the family you come from is significant.

It's not just that coming from a cosier background means a parent might feel willing to dip into the Spanish villa fund to make up shortfalls on ticket sales but also the amount of time families can invest in, say, driving young musicians to rehearsal or a gig. Come to that, if you're growing up in a house which has a large garage to rehearse in, you might have a brick-built advantage over a kid with same amount of raw talent living in a two bed maisonette with neighbours who pound the walls the third time you try to work out a new song.

In sport, there's a suggestion that nurturing the success of a talented youngster can consumer about 12% of family resources; there's no reason why auditions and guitar strings are any less onerous demands than competition and racquet restringing.

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.

What the pop papers said: Bernard Butler

We find ourselves at the end of a slightly underwhelming BBC-mandated 20th Anniversary of Britpop (marking the point when Johnny from Menswear first said the words '... and if we bung a picture of, I dunno, a Mini or Ena Sharples on the sleeve, I reckon it's money in the bank').

BBC Four, rather than showing the old compilation of Britpop performances at the BBC with the introduction from Damon Albarn, edited a new set of Britpop performances together, and slapped the old Damon Albarn intro on the front. Still: Pulp meeting Trev and Simon.

In the end, though, it was just a further coagulation of the Britpop narrative: John Humphrys in front of the Blur and Oasis logos, announcing a state of permanent warfare, forever.

Which is a pity, as by now you'd hope they'd be finding space to tell some of the more interesting stories of the time.

Like the acrimonious Suede split - which did get touched on, accidentally, on one of those late-night repeats from the Evening Session this week.

It's worth spending a little bit of time digging back into that awkward period. John Mulvey's interview with Bernard Butler from the NME in 1998 gives just a flavour of what went wrong:

It was around this time, probably, when Bernard starting doubting himself. Even today, you can see a potent and battling combination of confidence and shyness in his character: sure of his own gifts, but reluctant to express himself. Surrounded by people telling him he was wrong when he wanted to expand the band's musical parameters, struggling with a producer (Ed Buller) who he disagreed with over everything, alienated from a band he had nothing in common with something had to crack... Him.

"I don't necessarily think that a nice personality makes a nice record. There's a lot of bastards around that make great records, and that's the one thing that kept me going after Suede, because they trashed me so much personally, saying so much bullshit.

"It was really cowardly to do it when they knew I wouldn't answer back. They knew I'd flip and I did, I pissed off to France 'cos I couldn't hack it. I cried a lot, because it really hurt. I've got a lot of good memories of Brett and it really f--ked me up that I never said goodbye to Simon. The last time I was with Simon we were getting stoned, having a nice time, having a laugh like we always did. Next minute he's saying I should have my head chopped off or something, I should be put down like a dog."

"But I just said to myself, 'They'll get through it, just don't answer back'. You can't answer back when someone's calling you a wanker. What do you say? 'I'm not a wanker! I'm alright!'"

Bernard, bravely, rose above it all, and always carried that regret that he never got to say goodbye to Simon. Can you explain some more about how you rose above it, and - I dunno - maybe try to show Simon he was wrong to be so rude about you, Bernard?

[Were you] a control freak?

"No. I wasn't a control freak and never have been."

If you were, you wouldn't have Ed Buller produce the records?

"Right. Exactly. I tried to stop him making 'Stay Together' and then I tried to stop him making 'Dog Man Star'. No-one would let me. So, at the end of the day, that's why I left. There were lots of bad vibes between me and Brett and stuff, but they'd always been there. He was going off in one direction, shooting off as this star, and I was shooting off as this songwriter somewhere else. Unfortunately we were going totally the wrong way.

"At the end of the day, I was with the wrong people: I had the wrong manger, the wrong record company, the wrong road crew, the wrong band... I didn't think the drummer was very good, can you imagine what that was like? Simon Gilbert, the rock star drummer in Suede, I think is very average. Mat Osman: he's not a great bass player, he should've been Jeremy Paxman, he should've been reading the news. He should never have been a bass player 'cos he's just a theorist.

"Those are my biggest problems: standing there with a whole set of ideas about what I wanted the record to sound like and I wasn't allowed to say them. I'd have this great idea about what the hi-hat should do in bar four, but if I said it I'd piss off the drummer. There were times when I remember Simon taking his drums and throwing them down the stairs saying, 'I'm not being told how to play the drums'.

Oddly, Bernard would be later surprised to discover that Simon said some negative things about him.

All a long time ago, and bridges have sort-of-been rebuilt since then, of course. We were all much younger.

But the stories have got to be worth hearing, more than seeing that rack of Country House next to the rack of Roll With It in HMV for the 33,000th time?

Maximum Rock & Roll dig out old Black Flag review; set off firecrackers

Thirty years ago, MRR reviewed Black Flag's My War. Tim Yo wasn't impressed:

To me, it sounds like BLACK FLAG doing an imitation of IRON MAIDEN imitating BLACK FLAG on a bad day. The shorter songs are rarely exciting, and the three on the B-side are sheer torture. I know depression and pain are hallmarks of BLACK FLAG's delivery, but boredom too? (TY)

Of course, thirty years ago, there wasn't an internet for staunch-defenders-of-that-particular-Black-Flag-line-up to 'have their "say"' on. Their whiny responses were just shouted at paper, and who would know they fundamentally disagreed with those views from that?

The magazine has fixed that problem by putting the review online, thereby giving people the chance to argue against a three decade old review:

Greg Ayotte Side 2 always. You're a very close minded punk, it's about freedom of expression for a punk band, not playing at the speed of light. It has been such a huge influence, side 2 the main focus. Hell, it created grunge, which has influenced all rock music since. Everything after slip it in is pretty much crap but to compare my war to any iron maiden is just ignorance...

Chadd Heath Yeah, that's one shitty and completely wrong review and i hope that person was "fired" or whatever they do at MRR.

Is the review really more wrong than hoping the magazine sacked its own publisher and founder for writing it? Hard to calibrate that one.

Coming up next week: MMR unseals the long-stilled Rapeman debate, pretends to be surprised when it kicks off.

Fly sprayed: freesheet to close

Sad to hear The Fly, which built the most-read-music-paper quietly off the back of a listings freebie for the Camden Barfly, has closed; mostly a victim of HMV's collapse:

A statement on the magazine’s website read: “After nearly 15 years of pioneering new music journalism, the owners of The Fly are officially closing the magazine as a result of current market conditions surrounding publishing. We offer gratitude and wish well all the staff and contributors that have allowed us to deliver the UK’s longest serving monthly free sheet. To the multitude of artists and musicians that have graced our covers, the advertisers and sponsors who have supported us and our loyal readers, we salute you.”

It added that “ownership of the digital and online brands will now pass to the magazine’s longest-serving member of staff, editor JJ Dunning”, suggesting that the brand may survive online.

Dunning had been tweeting on Friday to see if anyone wanted to help him keep the Fly alive; there's a difficult question about whether a print product is viable without anywhere to distribute it.

(Although... maybe it'd fit well with the Stylist/Shortlist stable, don't you think?)

What the pop papers say: Turner over, it's done

For the last few weeks I've been telling people that the NME had turned a corner, and that it was packing something of a punch in a way that it hadn't for years.

And then it does this.

Genuinely, despite having watched the Brits and liveblogged them, I had no idea what speech they were talking about. After all, the speech that actually did create a minor stir was Kate Moss-as-David Bowie mutter about Scottish independence; if anyone did mention Turner after the event was over it was 'what the hell was he babbling about' and by the following morning even that had been forgotten. To claim that people are still talking about it a week later is a bit of a stretch.

And the cover itself?

Oh, my.

But the Neneh Cherry piece inside? That's worth reading. To be fair, you probably wouldn't want to have put Cherry on the front page, either, but at least you'd be showcasing what's great about the magazine at the moment.

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.

What the pop papers say: Stoked on Trent

The NME this week has done something extraordinary: it's produced a Reading/Leeds preview issue - traditionally the most 'will this do' edition of the year - which is actually of interest if you weren't planning to spend a weekend in a tent.

Surprisingly, it's the first time ever Trent Reznor has appeared on the NME cover. In fact, it's the first time anyone called Trent has been on the front page since Terence Trent D'Arby, inexplicably, got four covers between 1987 & 1989.

(Worth recalling the month's-worth of TTDA issues when trying to create an argument about a golden age.)

And it's a pretty good interview, too. There's been - not that you'd know by looking at the outside - some strong articles on pop music around the world (death metal in northern Europe; protest music in Southern Europe) for example. And there's only been one spurious list issue so far in 2013.

Whereas Krissi Murison's editorship started off strongly and then collapsed, Greg CochraneMike Williams didn't seem especially promising when he first sat down but is doing some interesting things, quietly, inside the magazine.

What the pop papers say: Fifty years, more or less.

After the 60th anniversary of the NME (or the 60 and a half-th), the next big anniversary the NME is celebrating is the 50th anniversary of the NME Awards.

They start trailing this in the current issue, with an announcement of "a special Spotify playlist" (ooh, you're spoiling us) and a look at the new art-deco logo.

I have no idea why the logo is based on the 1920s for a celebration of an event from the 1960s, but anything that gets us away from that awful raised-finger statue has to be welcomed.

I'm not sure the celebration is quite right, though. The promo says:

It's 50 years since rock n roll's biggest knees-up began...

- but surely for a long period of that time there wasn't any event as such, just the publication of a magazine containing tabulated results?

Still, there were parties and TV specials. Although, erm, it looks like there was one in 1961 - shown on ABC. Which would make 2013 the 52nd anniversary.

Never mind, it's an impressive track record however you miscount it. And clearly the NME would be keen to focus on the mid 1960s instead of the start, when they scored a pretty sweet presenter for their events. Chap called Jimmy Savile. Why wouldn't you want to fudge the numbers a little to remember those days, eh?

What the pop papers say: Staggers launches attack on the NME front

I've been banging on about how the NME has got locked into a dependency on the sort of heritage act that it was supposed to have blown away back in 1977 for a while now. I doubt it bothers them much.

They might want to be a bit more concerned about a similar complaint from the New Statesman. Because if anyone is going to write from a sympathetic position, understanding the difficulties in shepherding a long-in-the-tooth magazine through hostile times, it's the New Statesman.

Writing on the paper's Cultural Capital blog, Rob Hastings asks why NME readers find themselves cast as Cole Sears, so often seeing dead people:

Personally, I can’t complain. After drunkenly bopping away to Franz Ferdinand and The Libertines during most of my drunken uni nights out – back when I would buy the NME week-in, week-out and blu-tacked the front covers to my bedroom door – the subsequent decline in the bubble of excitement around indie rock in favour of electro and hip-hop has left me cold, making me explore older artists’ back catalogues more often than discovering new bands. Save for Arcade Fire or the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the surest way for the NME to secure me as a reader these days would admittedly involve sticking Bob Dylan or Neil Young on the front.

But perhaps that sums up the sadness of the situation. The magazine’s frequent decision to promote features on “heritage” acts from the past rather than interviews with exciting new groups such as Mercury Prize contenders Alt-J or Django Django must be commercially driven – either because the current crop of up-and-coming acts just aren’t deemed good enough, or because people listening to the hottest acts don’t care what the NME has to say anymore, leaving the magazine groping for older readers to sustain itself.

In the comments section, Alex Lyall thinks he has a gotcha:

Hilarious because NME's new cover has Palma Violets on it. A band much younger than Cobain, Curtis or Lennon

This does miss the point a bit; Hastings doesn't say that they only do heritage covers.

But boy, they do do a lot of them. I think you have to go back to April/May to find a two week period where the cover was given over two weeks running to artists who hadn't already made enough to buy an island (Tyler The Creator followed by Friendly Fires) and probably back to 2008's Fucked Up-Glasvegas-Crystal Castles page ones for a three week run of new music covers.

And next week is a tenth anniversary of Up The Bracket special, so it's not as if the Palma Violets cover really is the start of a new era of looking forward.

What makes it worse, though, is that the Palma Violets cover is part of a New Music special. A special! It's like the New Statesman doing a left-leaning political narrative special.

And the coverlines don't exactly suggest the paper has much faith in new music interesting its readers:

NEW MUSIC SPECIAL 25 BRILLANT BANDS YOU HAVE TO HEAR
PICKED BY LILY ALLEN, THE CRIBS, MANICS, BATS FOR LASHES AND TONS MORE

Don't worry, people - the new noises have been filtered through the same acts we're always going on about.

Are you still nervous?

STILL GOT IT
How DAMON, WELLER, BJORK & THOM embraced the future

What? Still feel that despite offering 'new' music from a bunch of acts with 113 years of experience between them, we might be getting too edgy?

Don't panic, dear reader:

OASIS: THE REUNION
Bonehead spills the beans

An interview with Bonehead about Oasis. Could anything be less relevant to a new music special?

To be fair, the Damon/Weller/Bjork/Thom piece is well meant, but misfires. Barry Nicolson starts out with a thesis that older musicians don't have to get stuck into just playing the hits. That's true, but an article that gathers up artists who share little beyond being a bit older might not want to use a pull quote which asserts:

Age is no more relevant than gender or sexuality

Ah, and if we could only say so confidently that gender isn't relevant.

But with Rolling Stone just about to publish a "special" about Women Who Rock, I'm not sure we can.

What the pop papers say: NME at sixty and a half

With a multitude of covers to choose from, this week it's the NME's 60th birthday.

Only it isn't, is it? As the free facsimile of issue one inside shows, the magazine launched in March 1952. Were you looking for a metaphor for "slightly behind the curve", turning up six months late to your own party would be a pretty good one.

So, who do we get on these multicovers? There is a nice surprise - a Patti Smith variant, meaning that at least there's one woman given front page prominence. A fifty per cent drop in the number of women who appeared on the front of issue one, but - hey, who said progress would always be a straight line, eh?

Smith is a slightly risky choice for the anniversary - she's not been considered worthy of a cover for over thirty years and so, unlike some of the other cover stars is a bit less grateful, a bit less eager to please. She tells an anecdote about how, to punky New Yorkers, NME was too expensive, so they'd read the content but not buy the magazine. Ah, for the days when that was just a problem in overseas markets, eh, IPC?

Other covers- well, obviously there's not one but two Gallaghers.

Liam is reminded that the NME in the 1990s was "practically stalking" him every week - imagine that, eh? Asked why the NME is important (a leading question) he burbles out something almost incomprehensible that they transcribe anyway:

When I go and do my weekly shop I get NME and I read it while my misses is putting all the gear in."

Ah, the magazine of choice for boorish middle-aged men; such a quick read you can get through it while someone lobs a couple of foccacias and a bottle of merlot into the Bag For Life.

Noel, meanwhile, makes a more spirited attempt to justify the NME's existence:

I don't read about things in the Daily Mail, or a Sunday supplement, or the fucking Guardian. I read them in the NME.

Me, Liam, Noel. Is there anyone in the actual demographic that NME sells to its advertisers buying the thing?

Talkingnof demographics, there's an inadvertently revealing quote from Noel when he's talking about his brother's covers:

I'd go into the shop, and me two Asian mates, they'd be reading it under the counter.

"Me two Asian mates", Noel? Apart possibly from David Cameron, who mentions irrelevant ethnicity in the middle of an anecdote?

Paul Weller awkwardly tells a story about the Melody Maker (hey, how is that Meldoy Maker website coming along, IPC?) but does spark a wonderful admission from Gavin Haynes, that the Preston from The Ordinary Boys interviews his hero Weller piece was a bit of a sham:

[Preston] wasn't even a fan, despite claiming to be. [...] He only didn't because that was the feature that would get him in the NME.

Really? Preston pretending to like someone just to raise his profile? Hard to imagine, innit?

Weller helpfully announces that he, too, reads the NME rather than blogs. The advertising department must have been screaming "can you find someone who doesn't wear trousers with elasticised waistbands who reads the bloody thing?"

There are some teenaged readers in the Arctic Monkeys piece, but, erm, they were the teenaged Monkeys.

Nicky Wire actually has something interesting to say, recalling a time when NME spoke confidently about Roth and Amis and - wonderfully - singling out the Sing Me To Sleep Youth Suicide issue, which normally gets pointed to as an example of what the NME shouldn't have been doing, despite it coming from an era of more solid sales and a more creative product.

John Lydon out of the estate agency business gets a front, too - I think he's the only person to mention Sounds, and as far as I can see, there's not a single mention of the fourth power, Record Mirror, anywhere in the issue.

The sixth cover is The Killers, who use their platform to announce that Razorlight get a bad rap. Which is true; Razorlight are no worse than The Killers.

Perhaps what's more interesting than the people who turned up is the people who didn't - most notably, no Bowie, who was something of a God for the 40th and 50th anniversaries and used to hold the record for most covers back when you had to wait for a while between reappearances. I wonder who fell out of favour with whom.

And there's barely a whisper of Pete Doherty.

What else do we get? There's a collection of "crazy covers" which ignores Wire's genuine enthusiasm for a time when NME was interested in the culture that created music rather than just rerunning old Lennon interviews. An arch eyebrow is raised for the Karen Grant and Blind Date covers - imagine, eh, the NME putting TV on its front cover. What were they thinking? It'd be like, say, half the 2012 NME website being given over to film and telly, wouldn't it? That would be crazy.

There's a two-page history of the magazine, which runs thought the well-trod path: Accordian Times, singles chart, Beatles, swinging London, falling sales, Tony Parsons, indie pop, lion rock, The Arctic Monkeys.

Alright, it might not have mentioned Lion Rock. But the is a namecheck for shrromadelica.
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Rather awkwardly, the history starts with an error, suggesting it was a merger between the Musical Express and the Accoridan Times which created the NME - a "fact" which the Guardian repeated this week.

The reprint of issue one is lovely, although to be honest, I'm more curious to see what the final Musical Express & Accordian Times looked like. It's interesting to see a tension as to what the magazine might be known as back in March 1952 - there's a small lobby for The New ME, and NME appears only once. The page given over to Accordians mentions the first ever electric accoridan. Dropped from the masthead and electricity - it must have been a worrying week for accordianists everywhere.

Perhaps the most heartening thing in the issue, though, is a short bit by Matt Wilkinson setting out a manifesto for the next 60 years. Part a diagnostic on what's gone wrong in alt rock - no stars, no spirit - and part a pledge for the future:

Personally, I'm for smashing the whole fucker wide open

Next week's cover is Palma Violets. That's a start. But only time will tell if this really is a new rallying call, or merely the new music ed doodling in the corner while the churn of Gallagher - Beatles - Gallagher - Clash covers roll on.

What the pop papers say: Heaton rifled

So, welcome, then, new NME editor Mike Williams. He officially put on the eyeshade on Monday 25th, so this week's edition is his first one.

It marks a complete change from Krissi Murison's reign. Her last issue was dedicated to The Stone Roses reunion, while the first edition of the Williams era, erm, was dedicated to The Stone Roses reunion.

There was a period when The Stone Roses were, arguably, the most interesting band in such parts of the world as NME had on its radar. Even then, they never got two NME covers back-to-back.

Perhaps the incoming and outgoing editor didn't talk through their plans?

Maybe the picture on the cover was just so amazing as to have blown away any other possible choice of front page.

Not really. By any measure, that's a lousy cover. Admittedly, Heaton park was a hostile place for photographers, but was this really the best photo from the night?

Obviously, it's nice to see Reni's one-man tribute to BD from Doonesbury, but... really? There wasn't one where you could say for sure it was John Squire and not a stunt double?

I'm sure it was a moment, but a cover? Really?

And the cover lines themselves, how do they stack up?

Eight pages isn't "massive" for a poster section, although given the magazine runs to just 68 pages these days, many of which are adverts for Bruce Springsteen ebooks and Uncut, it's quite a high percentage.

Liam sings the classics isn't really Oasis reborn, is it? And given that the audience consists mainly of people who haven't bought a record since the Golden Jubilee, what else was he going to do but some songs they might have heard before?

Amazing stories and pics? I suppose "amazing" in the sense that a paid-for publication has filled two pages with a cross-section of bad Instagram snaps and random tweets, but is

"great gig last night"

really an "amazing" story?

How about

"bunch of dicks, haha"

There's a slightly odd photo of some random people outside Salford Lad's Club, but mainly the feature just seems to be designed to reassure people who didn't go that staying at home was the best option. It looks like the writing team did their best to find a "character":

"I came down from Liverpool with a couple of mates; one of them is a proper drug addict. I couldn't be arsed wearing me top today. [...] I'm not arsed, really. I just wanna get fucked up! Have you got any drugs?"

Still, nice to hear Bobby Gillespie enjoying himself, eh?

Actually, that was "Crazy Dave" from Liverpool. There's a Crazy Dave at every gathering of any size. You just don't need to put him in the newspaper.

And the claim that The Stone Roses made history? It wasn't the biggest gig ever; it wasn't their comeback; it wasn't the first gig in Heaton Park. It wasn't the first comeback of a band from that era. It was a success in financial terms, and the crowd who turned up expecting to enjoy themselves went away happy. But does that stack up the NME's claim that

[A]fter all the hype, the excitement, the years of waiting, it's finally happened. And it felt a lot like history.

You'd have hoped for a little more perspective.

The swamping of the issue with Roses makes it hard to get a sense of what the Williams NME will be like - and next week, it's another treading-water issue with the T in the Park review, so we'll still be waiting.

There's still the odd hint of the sort of direction that Krissi tried to take the magazine towards like a generous feature on Haim, which doesn't even get mentioned on the cover.

And there's a considered piece about Gove's attempts to bring back CSEs and O-Levels. The political pieces the Murison returned to the magazine were the highlights of her era, but always felt a bit tacked on to the rest of the content rather than part of a radical thread running through the editorial; never more so in a magazine aimed solidly at solid, middle-aged men carrying a 'won't someone think of the 14 year-olds' bit on exams in the middle.

This, you might think, is as good a summation of the choice Williams faces in the weeks to come - slapping commercially-friendly unchallenging nod-a-long stuff on, issue after issue, or finding a stance and a battle and a voice.

Murison seemed to start with the latter approach, but by the end was reaching for the Gallagher-then-a-list-issue forumula way too often.

That could be the problem, though: in order to sell enough issues to keep going, the NME might have to lose what remains of its heart. The chase for the newsagent casual pick-up could be at the cost of the audience.

Good luck, Mike Williams. Lets hope you can make history.

Blanco family, CPS unimpressed by Doherty NME interview

In the NME last week, Pete Doherty made some large claims about the night that Mark Blanco died.

It was a bit odd that the paper didn't attempt to push him a bit - particularly, on the idea that the Met Police has a video which shows Blanco falling to his death which clears him.

It was even more surprising that, having gifted a large chunk of space for Pete to put his case, the NME didn't bother to contact either the Met or the Blanco family to put a counterpoint. You know, in the interests of not looking so desperate for a Doherty exclusive that they'd let him say anything - however incredible - with barely a mutter.

The second part, in this week's paper, doesn't get much better. Doherty sounds off on the various qualities of London against Parisian heroin while "smoking something". When he tells Jamie Fullerton that in Paris, when you score

"it's like China White"

the response is a weak

It's a better class of heroin in Paris?

as if this was a bit with Alex James banging on about cheese.

Once the interview is over, in the epilogue, Fullerton suggests that Doherty's ongoing drug use is "disappointing", which is an odd choice of word for a man who has been brain-twanging all the way through his talk with the paper. Rather an understatement.

Meanwhile, Jamie Doward for The Guardian has been doing the research the NME chose not to, following up Doherty's tale of the night Mark Blanco died.

First, there's a perspective from Blanco's mother:

Blanco's friends and family have attacked the claims as a desperate attempt to rewrite the past. "Mark was a pacifist who would never raise a hand to anyone," said Sheila Blanco, Mark's mother. "Pathetic, tawdry PR stunts such as these strengthen even further my resolve: to secure justice for my son and to expose anyone who has obstructed the protracted investigation into his tragic death."

And then a quick call to the Met about the video which puts Pete into the clear:

The Met has referred questions about Doherty's claims of video footage to the CPS. Last year the CPS said in a statement that "CCTV footage did show several individuals later leaving the same building that Mr Blanco had fallen from and passing his body, but this evidence does not shed any light on how Mr Blanco fell or who, if anyone, may have been responsible".

So, no film, then. Quite an important point for the NME to not mention, surely?