You did. as a teenager I didn’t care about the writing (but doubt it was horrific as you say) as noted above apart from listening to John Peel and 120 minutes on MTV it was the one of the few places to find out about decent music. I would trawl the gig advert pages to see if the band I loved was playing anywhere near me.
It does cowie. Thank you, I will be using that from now on.
Yes. And every 3/4 weeks (?) you would have the Saturday morning ITV Chart Show doing the ‘Indie Top 10’. Other weeks being Dance and ??
It was fascinating, even if you saw just clips. I discovered Pixes that way. I taped it every time it was on.
1 Like
Indie, Dance and Rock.
Yes, of course, thanks. I also remember Snub TV which ran briefly in the early 90s. Saw Miki from Lush being interviewed on that (I think). I only saw MTV 120 minutes from time to time as I didn’t have it.
“It’s Springsteen…”
what is?
1 Like
always hundreds left at every topman and hmv i’ve been past since it relaunched
1 Like
Yeah, Snub, Rapido, The Beat (with Gary Crowley, remember that?), Dance Energy, the odd band on The Word. I watched them all.
1 Like
11 Likes
Yes, that’ll do.
2 Likes
I would sit down for the chart show praying it was the indie or dance chart. Was always gutted when the heavy rock one appeared instead 
It is beyond awful but it is a total anachronism – there is almost no real point to a physical weekly new music magazine in an age where you can hear new music for free.
Possibly if somebody with real vision had been in charge about 15 years ago it could have been a web-led thing somewhat closer to p4k at this stage, but clearly that didn’t happen and its old irreverence sort of morphed into a relentless triviality that has now turned into a desperate, sad desire to please. It is presumably making just enough money from sucking up to things it would have once slagged off to keep going, but clearly not enough money that they can even make it look nice.
It essentially died about ten years ago, when the sort of music it instinctually championed ceased to be commercially successful.
1 Like
i’ve always wondered why they never just went monthly, as well. could have been like a shit version of Loud & Quiet.
The fundamental problem it had from the moment it became free was that it became reliant on advertising to survive. Advertising wants readers and that inevitabliy drives editorial policy and decisions.
There was a certain inevtiability about the future of a paper weekly (that, gulp, readers would need to buy) but there remains a need in my opinon for engaging, thoughful and challenging musiic/culture writing. The problem of course is that nobody wants to pay for it.
Good writing fires the imagination and soul and feeds creativty. Creative ground breaking music feeds and facilitates great writing.
Everyone here seems to be wondering why it didn’t go super niche as though it were run by a bunch of hardline punks and not the product of IPC Media and its eternal quest for revenue in a shrinking advertising market.
2 Likes
With decreasing advertising revenue AND the huge rise in online music news sites, I don’t understand why they haven’t gone under.
3 Likes
Yep agreed. NME completely missed the rise of AM as their hype/growth was all via the internet . It didn’t help that Turner shunned the NME (and London in general) in the very early days. They were totally behind the curve and tried to play catch up with subsequent bands by totally over hyping them in the hope they could claim the _NextBigThing_™
that’s my take anyway. Think they went downhill in the early 2000s when they bigged up Jet as this Aussie version of the Strokes.
1 Like
Not sure mate. They made a lot of money in the mid 00s championing some rather shit music. Its when that movement collapsed that they struggled.
I think they operated by appealing to a certain image and that required music built around common trends and a general teen music culture. The Internet has now dissipated these boundaries really so theres none of this hype.
I think what killed them is that they so strongly latched on to the 00s ‘landfil indie scene’ and they became synonymous with it. The magazine was in decline at the start of the 2000s but they managed to revive it with the promotion of that first wave of 00 indie bands. Certainly when I was at school during this period many were reading it. But as people got older and the scene became more derivative and eventually seen as rather unfashionable so did NME. In the late 00s sales just fell of a cliff, it was trying to flog any odd band as the ‘next big thing’
2 Likes
I remember that Delphi were supposed to revive the music industry. Its sales declined by 80% from the mid 2000s to the point they went for free.
Q, Uncut, Mojo and Kerrang! have just survived fine on the other hand. To be honest all these magazines put far more effort in their content the NME were.