Lets take a more in depth look at these insidious enemies.

Part one – The NME

NME or New Music Express was launched in 1952 and was initially printed in a non-glossy tabloid format. The early paper was very successful and by the 60’s had built up sales of 200,000 issues weekly, making it one of the UK’s best selling music journals. However, as music moved into what is arguably one of the richest most creatively productive times in modern history, the 70’s, the NME was slow to respond to the change in music and began to loose ground to Melody Maker.

‘Can you imagine the NME writing about anything remotely forward thinking today?’

By 1976 the great Punk plague was upon the world and thinking intelligent musicians were in heavy retreat but the NME was lapping it up, changing the tone of its writing to appeal to the new bread with articles on all the usual suspects. Sales of the NME continued to grow as teenagers stuck safety pins in their faces and bought the magazine in their droves!
Following the Punk plague was a sort of cultural dark age, the 80’s, where the peddling of mundane drivel wasn’t confined to just the NME. However, in true NME form the magazine dumbed down its writing and got political, inviting Steve Lamacq and Mary Anne Hobbs to write for it, Hurrah!

‘Now something interesting starts to happen, sales begin to drop… quite a bit.’

By the 90’s the hair cut fashion magazine we know today as NME was starting to take shape. Acid House and Britpop were the order of the day and the writing had as much to do with whom Liam Gallagher was fighting as it did culture and music. The 90’s saw the NME running around like a headless chicken trying to find some credibility, writing about Tony Blair and doing a front page spread on God Speed You Black Emperor.

‘Imagine God Speed You Black Emperor slamming straight into an adjacent page on say Liam’s mullet. Cultural worlds collide!’

The 90’s had seen NME’s sales figures drop to 120,000 copies a week, a huge fall from the heady days of 73 where weekly figures were well in excess of 250,000. The downward sales trend has continued year on year and as the magazine moved into the 2000’s things went form bad to worse. The Libertines, Doherty, Artic Monkeys, Babyshambles… need I say more!

The NME has come to represent all that is horrid and wrong with popular culture in the new millennium, becoming some sort of hellish, daytime television, train wreck of a monstrosity. Sales have dwindled to a little over 40,000 copies a week while the magazine continues its self destructive course, writing about bands with no vision and believing itself to be trend setting as the audience moves on to find genuinely interesting and forward thinking publications.

The surprising increase in sales for Classic Rock Magazine speaks volumes about changing reading habits and its new Prog publication, Classic Rock Prog seems to be doing just as well. Perhaps we are starting to see a genuine change in popular culture. Then again…

Next instalment, Oasis break up… church bells ring and angels are singing in my ears!