Good Morning – Sun is shining, Arsenal are were top of the table and Spurs are were losing to West Ham. Not a bad list to be getting on with. If you read part one of this story you’ll already know how the NME and most other music magazines are experiencing a brutal downturn in sales and potentially facing extinction in the near future. I’m asking the question whether the internet has made this inevitable or if it could have been handled so much better?

I’ll return to the NME (and when I say NME I’m also discussing MM and Sounds also) in the 70’s and 80’s and first half of the 90’s. In Britain this needs no explaining (bah Spurs just scored 1-1) but for everyone else its quite remarkable every week all three of these music papers came out – and for the most part covered the same news – Rock / Punk / Indie music with Sounds placing more emphasis on heavy / hard rock. So three papers weighing in (from memory) 64 pages each, of which 45-50 pages were real ‘journalism’. The demographic was essentially 14-39 year olds and obviously the demand for music news, reviews and interviews was fairly insatiable. Buying records was a huge part of growing up for many then – not just in the UK of course. I knew when singles were due and album release dates would loom larger than birthdays and anniversaries. (The Clash boycotted) Top of The Pops was an institution.

The Monday of release would often see me waiting for the record store employee (a role I later enjoyed) to split open the delivery box to pull out the platter of vinyl I craved. People knew what was in the charts, tours were big news and rival bands bickering was part of the clamour. My memory fails me for the specifics but for a good 10 year+ spell of my life I’d read an album review and purposefully cover the name of the reviewer with my left hand. After I digested the commentary I’d reveal to myself who wrote the assessment and then decide if I’d go with their verdict. I trusted these writers, they understood my taste. An unheard of band would get my blessing with a purchase, an established act would be declared irrelevant.

Single of the week? All hail….

So when did this all change?

I’m going to target the mid 90’s. My own purchasing of the papers was in decline. Partly as the writers seemed to change every two months (how can you build trust?)  and mostly because the quality/volume of journalism seemed to be in recession. It started with shorter album reviews, then lent itself to concert reviews that wouldn’t tell me what I needed – too much focus on the scene not enough on the act. Rapidly following this was the volume of photographs, news stories were shortened to 60 word snippets as more and more of the paper was images and not content. Interviews also suffered in a similar way. The NME and MM writers used to be experts in setting the scene, you felt you knew what growing up in Leeds in 1986 felt like long before the first question was posed to Age of Chance.

The dominance of grunge (bugger Spurs now 2-1 up) gradually receded and England celebrated the arrival of Britpop and what a false dawn that turned

out to be. Rather than focus on enjoying it’s peaks (and there were many) and digging deep to find new bands, the papers just went into full hype mode. Fuelling and co-creating the Blur/Oasis feud and chucking everyone with a British passport under the Britpop banner. Supergrass were not Britpop, Pulp were already veterans of the C86 era and Menswear were a joke. The approach became exclusive instead of inclusive, if you couldn’t fit in the bucket that was hip, you didn’t matter. The other change that I think cost the papers many readers was the build em up knock em down syndrome. The Britpop bandwagon was ridden into the canyon.

In the days of The Clash, a love affair with a band might last 2,3 even 4 years. The Clash only lost some of their initial goodwill by 1979 and it wasn’t until Sandinista! was released that the knives were out. Fully four years after the original romancing of the band. By 1995 you would be lucky to enjoy 9 months of being the next big thing. I’m convinced that hastened the decline of the paper(s).  After the spike of 94-96 how did the papers react? By then only two were standing, Sounds was rolled off to the cemetery in the Spring of 1991. The rot set in about 14 years ago, I’m convinced it wasn’t just the internet.

Incidentally for an AMAZING trip down memory lane for old articles reproduced from the UK music press – visit A M P.

In part 3 – we’ll get up to date  and see what online reading did to the published alternatives.

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