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.

NME Awards 2016: What the pop papers say

This week, the NME awards were doled out; this week's print edition of the magazine tries to make sense of them.

The awards are possibly a transitional moment, covering a period where the weekly went free, and took on an editorial direction ever less about music; moving closer to the mainstream. Last year, prizes went to Royal Blood, Foo Fighters, Alex Turner and Kasabian. There was a clear sense of what an NME band sounded like.

This year's winners... well, they're a little different:

Best British Band: The Maccabees
Best International Band: Run The Jewels
Best New Artist: Rat Boy
Best British Solo Artist: Charli XCX
Best International Solo Artist: Taylor Swift
Best Live Band: Wolf Alice
Best Album: What Went Down - Foals
Best Track: Giant Peach - Wolf Alice
Best TV: This Is England '90
Best Film: Beasts Of No Nation
Best Music Film: Blur: New World Towers
Best Music Video: Cheer Up London - Slaves
Best Actor: Idris Elba
Best Actress: Vicky McClure
Best Reissue: Five Years - David Bowie
Best Book - M Train - Patti Smith
Best Festival - Glastonbury
Best Small Festival - End Of The Road
Music Moment Of The Year - The Libertines "secret" Glastonbury set
Best Fan Community - The Libertines
Worst Bad: 5 Seconds Of Summer
Villain Of The Year: Donald Trump
Hero Of The Year: Dave Grohl
Vlogger Of The Year: KSI

(Just in passing, how come actors are split into categories based on gender and solo artists aren't?)

It's the solo artists who stick out - in a month where NME's covers have run through James Bay, Kanye West and Coldplay, Charli and Taylor seem much more in keeping with where the title is heading than Wolf Alice and Foals. They feel like an echo of where the title was before, when it charged an entry fee that few were interested in paying.

This makes for difficulties for the awards, though - remember, these used to be styled the Brats and positioned themselves as an alternative to the Brits. Even before NME became the sort of magazine which would put James Bay on the cover, the distinction was blurred, but if the endeavour survives another twelve months it's likely the NME Awards/Brits relationship will become more like the BAFTAs/Oscars one - the former a lower budget version of the latter, taking place a couple of weeks before, and serving no real purpose other than letting bookies set the odds for the main events.

This year, though, we find ourselves in the awkward position of the magazine having to send a prize designed for rebellious shouty rock upstarts to Taylor Swift. Her reaction:

I got the award in the mail and I gotta be honest with you about this, when you first open up the box this feels a little aggressive.

Yeah. That's the sound of worlds colliding.

Coldplay picked up the Godlike Genius award - I know, I know - and in the accompanying interview, Chris Martin shares his favourite moment of being a popstar. This was playing Michael J Fox's Parkinson Benefit, and getting Fox to join them onstage to recreate the moment from Back To The Future when Marty plays guitar at the 1950s prom.

That's telling. The worst part of the entire Back To The Future trilogy is the point where the invention of the boisterous, brilliant cacophony of rock is taken away from Chuck Berry and reassigned to a pasty-faced white kid from the suburbs. And the peak of Chris Martin's musical career has been recreating the creation myth of a deracinated rock music.

The David Bowie I knew, and what it says about me

There's been no end of great (and also rotten) pieces written about David Bowie, but none perhaps as strange as former NME editor Steve Sutherland's bit which appears in the Stratford Herald. Oddly - I suspect as a quirk of a local paper's publishing system - the online version appears under his wife's byline.

It turns out Steve attempted to save Bowie from Tin Machine by sending him a shoegaze mixtape:

Now, knowing his reputation as a magpie, scarfing up other people’s ideas, sprinkling some fairy dust on them and then successfully representing them as his own, I figured Dave might benefit from an earful of some new stuff, so duly made him a cassette.

The tracklisting went something like Lush, Moose, Chapterhouse, Adorable , Slowdive, The Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, Telescopes, Ride — a veritable who’s who of shoegazers making a name for themselves at the time and a line-up I felt sure would top-up Dave’s creative juices.

Just goes to show how wrong you can be! A few weeks after I sent him said tape, I received a very nicely wrapped package which contained a small broken-up jigsaw of Michelangelo’s David. When the pieces were all put in place, there was a message handwritten on the back in, if I recall correctly, green ink, the gist of which went something like, “Thanks for the lovely tape. Not really my cup of tea. Try this instead.” The “this” was a cassette tape of Different Trains, an interminable modern classical piece by avant-garde composer Steve Reich performed by the dreaded Kronos Quartet. Shudder.

It turns out that Steve - by this point having moved from the Melody Maker to the NME - had a bit more luck with the next generation of British indie stars:

My last encounter with Mr Bowie was not long after I took over editing NME. All the staff hated me for reasons we needn’t go into here but I figured — rightly as it turned out — that if I could deliver a journalistic coup, they might come around.

So what I did was arrange for David Bowie to meet Brett Anderson from Suede, who were then the hottest band in Britain. I sat in on and taped their conversation with Brett, being a big fan, asking tons of questions and Bowie, being Bowie, offering up sage avuncular advice about not doing too many drugs like he once did etc.

Again, a fun day made easy by Bowie’s polite and gracious ease in company, and his genuine interest in what Brett had to say.

Brett and Bowie, coming together to save an NME editor. There's surely a Hollywood movie in that?

Stone Roses drag out new announcement like they dragged out that second album

Mysterious (not that mysterious) posters have appeared around Manchester, causing Stone Roses fans to forget how bad Ian Brown's voice is live all over again. Look-In ("NME") reports:

Fans of The Stone Roses are speculating this morning about activity from the band after a series of posters carrying the band's lemon logo appeared around Manchester.

Images of the lemon, which has appeared on the band's posters and album artwork in the past, have appeared around Manchester with sightings confirmed at Close barber's shop on Greater Ancoats Street and the Vinyl Revival record store on Hilton Street.

Eagle eyed fans have spotted that there are 16 lemons on each poster and are speculating that this means an announcement about 2016 is imminent.

Well, yes. Of course it's going to be about 2016, unless they're going to haul ass in a very non-Stone Roses way.

The posters appear in several shops in the Northern Quarter area of the city. One shop keeper told Manchester Evening News that he had been "sworn to secrecy about an announcement due in the next 24 hours".

Telling the MEN that there's an announcement coming in 24 hours isn't really suggesting you've got the hang of this "sworn to secrecy" business.

Of course, last time round, it was Gordon Smart who got most excited. Is he excited now?

Gordon Smart, editor of the Scottish Sun, has also speculated that two gigs at Manchester City's Etihad Stadium could be in the pipeline. "I've felt a disturbance in the force @thestonerosesofficial blue seats, two nights, baggy jeans and a beanie hat...", he wrote on Instagram.

So two nights at Man City's ground, then? That's probably ruined all the speculation, hasn't it?

What the pop papers say: Missing by Moyles

Week three of the car-crash that is Free NME looking for an identity, and it manages to make last week's Robert Pattinson cover look like a wise choice. For staring out of the front page this time round, it's Chris Moyles.

Now, a Chris Moyles cover by itself doesn't have to be bad, if it was leading into a piece about Chris Moyles written out of curiosity. Instead, it just waves off four pages of fawning.

Moyles kicks off by announcing he's a feminist; he underpins this by listing the women he works with and muttering about tax on sanitary products. They ask about the whole "offering to fuck Charlotte Church now she's 16" thing - Moyles' defence is that he "said it once. I moved on." And how does NME counter this? Er, by just moving on to the next thing.

The next thing is his homophobia and racism. Unbelievably, Moyles uses the human shield defence - "one of my best friends is transgender".

Does the NME point out that this justification - don't judge me on what I do, judge me on who I know - is incredibly weak? No. Just write it down, type it up, print it out, move it on.

His continuing beef with Radio 1 is given paragraphs of space - which could have made for some interesting commentary; Moyles at Radio X suggests a man who's still obsessed with his Radio Ex, using the platform to try and convince Radio 1 that he's having a great time and he's really glad that they split up. Is there any attempt to quiz him on his obsession with Ben Cooper? Nope.

His tax arrangements? Mentioned just to allow Moyles to trot out a "I didn't break the law, and I paid it anyway" line before moving on. Yes, given the chance to ask him about his second hand car business, the NME blinks. Any opportunity to explore the question is gone.

Even on the reformatting of XFM as Radio X, which you think the NME would have once cared about, is treated in a way that will have Global Radio PR purring:

Don't expect to come to Moyles to find obscure new grime artists or cutting-edge psych-rock bands. Radio X has retained new-music champion John Kennedy's late-night X-Posure show for that. Moyles is here for the express purpose of entertaining people as they battle hangovers, get ready for another mind-numbing day in the office or peel out of bed before going to college.

That radio station which was supposed to be the home of alternative music on British radio? Don't worry, they've kept a tiny rump of that late at night - presumably when the 'real' audience is out building up those hangovers for the morning.

Back when Radio One was shunting John Peel ever further into the night, NME called the BBC on the bullshit claim that you can support new music best by putting it where nobody is listening.

Why on earth would NME give such a free pass to the new Radio X?

Clearly, in part, because the idea of taking something that used to be a distinctive, alternative voice for new music and pissing it down to yet another chart-and-chat platform might resonate with NME. The token music piece this week is a very, very, very short feature on Wolf Alice. They're dubbed "the best new band in Britain". The NME first wrote about Wolf Alice three years ago. The proper NME did. If they're pretending that Wolf Alice are a discovery now, no wonder they'd think John Kennedy is more than enough of that cutting-edge stuff.

The more prosaic reason for the free passes handed to Moyles and Radio X is probably the two page advert that appears immediately before the interview.

One other sign that the NME has lost its mojo quite badly - the person who used to maintain Wikipedia's list of NME covers hasn't bothered to update the list with the new ones. You can see why.

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.

Morrissey, the ray of sunshine, predicts death for Corbyn

Morrissey played Plymouth last night, and took the chance to comment on current events. In particular, he suggested Jeremy Corbyn might want to check his brake cables before cycling:

Fans on Twitter disagree on the exact quote – see tweets below – but all agree that Morrissey said that left-wing Corbyn's vegetarianism and opposition to both war and the monarchy put him under threat. NME has spoken to someone who attended the gig last night and who verifies that Morrissey did say this about Corbyn.

Yes, I'd imagine the All New Free NME went to great pains to verify that Mozzer said something, what with their history.

It's not impossible that the establishment might move against Corbyn - the experiences of Benn and Wilson suggests it's a real possibility - but I somehow suspect it's not going to be over his rejection of sausage rolls. Nobody is going to be meeting in a clean room at MI5 fretting that a leader who won't have a shepherds' pie is going to drag us into a dystopian nightmare. "It's not that he's going to quit NATO and dump the nukes, Commander. It's that he won't be eating a bacon bap while he does it."

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?

NME prepares to join the free sheets

Tomorrow is the last day the NME will be trying to charge people money for their services; to mark the occasion they are inviting users to add page impressions wildly ("click through 50 best covers to vote for the best").

They've found space for Simon Cowell's 2009 cover. That's the standard we're going with.

Personally, although I always think the much-hated Youth Suicide issue was the best NME cover ever, and I have a soft spot for the Motorcycle Boy one which was a by-product of corporate meltdowns, I think the occasion should be marked with this one:

Yes, it was awful. But it's a key cover in the NME history, because it was the point where the magazine passed its point of no return.

Not just the WK cover choice - or that they added a second cover because they believed him to be so brilliant. But that does tell its own story - a magazine which would have once seen through his schtick desperately trying to laugh along, hoping it would catch up with the joke.

It's the rest of the stuff on the cover - you could argue what you're looking at it is an eclectic title offering a range of delights. But it's not, is it? It's a rudderless ship throwing not-very-interesting bits of every flavour in the hope something will catch. Travis. Oasis. ODB well past his best.

It wasn't a question of who is this title for, but why is this title here? And over the subsequent 14 years, there have been fluctuations in quality - the magazine got a lot better, and more interesting, and then less so, and then more so again. But that cover - Andrew WK, so good that he needed two covers that week; so poor he never got near the cover again - feels like the point where the paper moved from making the weather, to sheltering from it.

Ryan Jarman defends Courtney Love

Ryan Jarman launches into a spirited defence of Courtney Love in a blog for the NME freesheet.

There are a lot of grounds to call out people who attack Love - some are motivated by sexism; some forget that she has had a stack of challenges to deal with; just waving Celebrity Skin should be enough. Jarman's case, though, seems to rest on her being a chum:

I stayed at her place for a bit and it was such a fun time because Courtney is a total star and when you live with her she absolutely shows you that proper side of being famous. It's kind of trippy and amazing. To a newer generation of people, she still wields a lot of power because of who she was when they were growing up. She still conducts herself in the same way - she hasn't mellowed in any way. Absolutely, she is exactly as you'd expect and the way she presents herself in the public eye is not put on whatsoever.

That's lovely, but... it's not really a defence, is it? 'Don't slag her off because she's the same behind closed doors' would only work if the Love-Haters suggested she was fake, and I don't think even Courtney's strongest detractor has ever accused her of putting on an act. Indeed, many pops at her are motivated by concern that she doesn't change her behaviour when she's in public. Courtney Love has never been a woman with an Outdoor Voice.

The trouble with Jarman's defence of Courtney is that it simply ignores the missteps Love has made. Those - the throwing of bottles; the battles with Courtney Love the band; beating up David Gedge at Reading because he'd worked with Albini; tussling through the courts with the rest of Nirvana; the list goes on - are fair grounds to question some of her decisions. And those fair grounds have, over the years, become fairgrounds on which more extreme whack-a-Hole games have been established.

If you want to say 'it's gone too far' or 'she doesn't deserve all this', that's fine. But to do that effectively, you have to understand where it began.

If you love Courtney Love for who she is, and what she is, you have to understand that she's always been uncompromising.

And you have to understand that not being willing to compromise isn't going to endear you to a lot of people.

Ryan Jarman knows Courtney Love. I'm not convinced he knows people, though.

NME for free

The NME has confirmed, or admitted, that it is going to turn into a freesheet. It's a move that seems to be mashed up in some nonsense:

NME has today announced a major brand transformation.

As well as a new look NME.COM and new digital products, in September the famous NME weekly magazine will go free, with more than 300k copies distributed nationally through stations, universities and retail partners.

A statement to the media confirmed that music is "firmly at the heart of the brand" but there will also be "film, fashion, television, politics, gaming and technology".

The statement goes on to say that "NME will dramatically increase its content output and range, with new original as well as curated content appearing across all platforms, including print. Other highlights will include an expansion in live events, more video franchises and greater engagement with users on new social platforms".

You could see this as an announcement that, from September, NME will become a logo.

The idea of the magazine doing more than just cover music is interesting - obviously, it did that sort of thing very well back when it was about 75p a week, until people further up Kings Reach Tower saw what they were doing and locked them back down to just music. But we'll wait and see what they actually mean before we get too excited. I'm not expecting many 'Pat Kane on the semiotics of chocolate' style pieces laying around in a pile on the counters of Superdry.

Ben Cardew, who writes for the NME currently, isn't entirely convinced the magazine can pull off the trick:

The new, free NME faces significant challenges to reinvent itself as a musical gatekeeper for the digitally-enabled mass market. But the wave of emotion online – both positive and negative – in response to the news that it was going free shows that the magazine does at least continue to occupy a particular place in the British musical heart.

Then again, so did Smash Hits. And we know what happened there…

It feels like a radical change; much more radical than anything that's happened to the magazine since it abandoned newsprint. The first question is 'where will these magazines be available from'? The second is 'have they left it too late for this move?' The third is 'are they just going to be chasing the same advertising as the free Time Out with a similar sounding product'?

The fourth is: what is this doesn't work?

What the pop papers say: NME pulls a surprise

This week's cover band is Wolf Alice.

Last week's cover band was Florence.

That's two female-fronted acts in two weeks.

The last time that happened? November 2003, when Kylie followed The Distillers.

If you don't think Kylie counts, and are looking for the last time two rock acts with female leads followed each other on the NME cover, you'd have to go back to the end of September 1998, for Hole followed by PJ Harvey.

And if you're wondering 'when was the last time two British female-led acts came in subsequent weeks on NME covers', if you stretch a point, November 1986 had Cilla Black followed by Swing Out Sister - but Cilla was there as a TV personality, not a musician.

More accurately, this is the first time the NME has run two subsequent covers of British female-led acts since December 1984, when Siouxsie followed the Cocteau Twins.

The first time in thirty years.

What the pop papers said: Shampoo wash Heavenly

From 1992, Shampoo - still in the bit between being fanzine writers and bona fide pop stars - take aim at Heavenly in the NME:

If you're too young to recall 1992: 'Having a go at Sarah Records' was a way of having one foot in the Pop Establishment while making it look like you were an outsider. Shampoo would go on to, erm, help promote the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers movie.

Jack White. Jack White.

Jack White Writes Poem Called 'Music Is Sacred' http://t.co/SK2ejvKrEu

— NME (@NME) May 23, 2015

Of course he has.

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...

Do you wonder what Conor McNicholas is up to these days?

What happens to former NME editors?

Conor McNicholas, he of the double Andrew WK cover era, is doing this sort of thing:

Businesses need to "get radical" and change the structure of their business if they are to succeed in the new networked world, according to Conor McNicholas, the chief executive at AllTogetherNow.
[...]
McNicholas used the example of Barclays setting up an editorial board to bring together the different communications departments. He worked with Barclays at his previous employer Redwood.

Barclays put a router at the centre of the business with a representative from each department that met weekly to sign off joint actions.
[...]
He said: "At the heart of the editorial board is the concept of a shared culture. It creates a neutral space that allows those involved to bring opportunities or projects to the group and work on them together, no more meeting on your turf or mine."

McNicholas encouraged delegates to embrace the new networked world and "start kicking the shins" of the way things have always been done.

One day you're telling people that Party Hard is the greatest thing ever; the next you're punting a minor change in the comms strategy at a big bank as the revolution of our lifetimes. That's life right there, isn't it?

CORRECTION: This post would have worked a lot better if Conor McNicholas had been editing the NME at the time of the Andrew WK cover; actually it was Ben Knowles. And to be totally fair, he did put Fucked Up on the cover.

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.

NME Awards 2015: Kasabian, Kasabian, Kasabian

Last night was the NME Awards, which a few years back had become quite a thing; even getting televised. This year, they don't even seem to have bothered putting people picking up the prizes on the NME YouTube channel, although there's some video on the NME site.

The lack of a livestream seemed to upset some people on Twitter last night, but looking at the list of winners, it might have been wise for the magazine to try and do it in secret:

Godlike genius award Suede
Rock’n’roll soul award Jimmy Page
Best British band Kasabian
Best international band Foo Fighters
Outstanding contribution to music Teenage Cancer Trust
Best solo artist Jake Bugg
Best new band Royal Blood
Best live band Royal Blood
Best album 48:13 by Kasabian
Best track Zombie by Jamie T
Best video Zombie by Jamie T
Best festival Glastonbury
Philip Hall radar award Dean Blunt
Best TV show Game Of Thrones
Best film Northern Soul
Best music film Pulp: a Film About Life, Death and Supermarkets
Reissue of the year The Holy Bible by Manic Street Preachers
Dancefloor filler Fancy by Iggy Azalea featuring Charli XCX
Worst band 5 Seconds Of Summer
Villain of the year Nigel Farage
Hero of the year Alex Turner
Music moment of the year Jamie T’s comeback
Best fan community Muse
Small festival of the year Liverpool Psych Fest
Book of the year Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys by Viv Albertine
Best band social media Liam Gallagher’s Twitter
Best lyric “I’m wearing Win Butler’s hair/There’s a scalpless singer in a Montreal rock band somewhere” by Happyness
Best quote “Five records, ten years. We’ve earned our shot” - Sergio Pizzorno of Kasabian talking about headlining Glastonbury

Let's just take a second to look at the full name of one category, shall we?

Best International Band supported by Austin, Texas – The Live Music Capital Of The World®

Sponsored awards? Well, that's probably unavoidable. The sponsor's crappy slogan? If you must. But a registered trademark symbol as part of the prize name? Jesus wept. Or rather Jesus wept with the King James Bible copyright the Bible.

(Incidentally, the NME 'full list of winners' doesn't actually list all the winners.)

There's a lot of Kasabian and Jamie T there. Could the prize giving be any more awful?

Oh, hang on. Yes. Yes, it could. Added Gervais:

A special video, featuring the band's former manager comedian Ricky Gervais, was also shown - watch the video above. "I did help this band out a little bit in the early years," he comments. "When I told them I couldn't manage them anymore, there were no tears, they didn't beg - and that's when their career really took off."

At least he didn't do it in character as Derek, I guess.

Let's celebrate the good news here: Liverpool Psych fest; Viv Albertine; respect for the Teenage Cancer Trust.

But then... look at that "quote of the year"" - Serge out of Kasabian suggesting that they've paid their dues and it's now buggin's turn. Look at the belief that the best thing that happened in music during the whole of 2014 - the whole of 2014 was Jamie T's comeback (to a world that hadn't even noticed he'd gone in the firts place. The way that Muse still won a fucking prize.

Good lord. A magazine that has set its sights so very low might struggle to even give itself away.

NME heading for free?

There's growing rumours that NME's print edition might be turned into a giveaway. MediaGuardian reports that staff have been told it's an option, but not a done deal:

It is understood that staff were told at an editorial meeting on Wednesday that nothing is set in stone about the future of the magazine but that it will continue.

It is thought that there have been talks with retailers such as Topshop and Urban Outfitters about possible partnerships.

Despite speculation, it is understood that an announcement will not be made at the NME Awards on Wednesday evening.

There's a fairly huge question about how a free NME would be distributed; they may or may not be dumped on a shelf at Urban Outfitters, but unquestionably it would make the magazine much more of an urban plaything.

And can free work for a music magazine? Less than twelve months ago, The Fly threw in the towel; a free NME would need a solid advertising market to sustain it and a global meltdown rerun of 2008... well, that might put a wrinkle in the numbers.