Paul Gorman

I sought this out after being bowled over by Gorman’s recent book on the music press Totally Wired. This earlier effort on the same subject is an oral history whose cast of contributors includes (almost) everyone who was anyone in the history of pop writing. I was convinced that Totally Wired was the definitive book on this subject but I might have been wrong; perhaps this is.

It’s certainly compulsive reading for anyone who ever found the meaning of life in the inky pages of NME, Melody Maker or (insert name of favourite music paper here). Gorman obviously drew heavily on the interviews he conducted for this book when writing the later one as more than a few quotes were eerily familiar. A babel of frequently conflicting voices telling often gonzo tales from the Wild West days of rock and rock writing: punch ups in the review room, typewriters hurled through the office windows and, of course, Nick Kent’s pink underpants.

Even when this was published, in 2001, the days of a thriving rock press were fast receding into the past; Melody Maker had ceased publication the previous year leaving the NME as the last surviving weekly (its print edition finally folded in 2018). The final chapter offers lots of competing theories on the reasons for the death of the music press. Charles Shaar Murray suggests that there was a time when rock music mattered, or at least seemed to, and so produced deeply felt writing; as the music lost its cultural significance the potency of the writing declined along with it. This a terrific book about when the music seemed to matter.… (mais)

Whatever happened to the music press? The weekly inkies with their idiosyncratic repertory companies of insufferable know-alls, motormouths, upstart crows, teenage tastemakers, solipsists and fantasists, common room anarchists, preening poseurs and pseudo-intellectuals.

Paul Gorman’s engrossing history of the popular music press starts in 1926 with the launch of Melody Maker. On the cover of that first edition was one Horatio Nicholls who the paper eulogised as ‘the world’s greatest popular composer’. Horatio Nicholls was, in fact, the songwriting pseudonym of the magazine’s publisher Edgar Wright - an early example of the sometimes murky relationship in the music press between praise and hype. By the start of the 1970s Melody Maker was firmly established as the most popular and widely respected of the music papers. With its journalistic approach to pop music it was authoritative, factual and just a touch dull. Nonetheless, it covered a wider spectrum of popular music than any of its rivals. If you’ve just dropped in from another planet and want to get a quick overview of what happened in pop music in the ‘60s and ‘70s you could do a lot worse than check out some back copies of dear old Monotony Maker as it was affectionately, or perhaps not so affectionately, known.

The template for what became the rock press, as distinct from the popular music press, was set in the late ‘60s by small American magazines like Crawdaddy! and Mojo-Navigator. This can be summarised very simply: young men showing off or just behaving very badly. This testosterone-charged nascent format resulted, for better and worse, in a whole new genre which took flight in the ‘70s.

Having grown up as a pop music obsessed teenager in that decade it’s difficult for me to escape the conviction that it marked the golden age of music journalism. Such judgements are, of course, enormously subjective. They’re not, in fact, judgements at all, but sense-memory and those of a different generation or sensibility will have different memories and other preferences. The 1980s, perhaps, which saw the emergence of the glossy monthlies led by The Face and the start of the gradual decline of the weekly papers. Doubtless there are those for whom it was all downhill following the tragic demise of Accordion Times in the 1940s. What can’t be disputed is that the British music press in its pomp exerted an influence which the American publications could only dream of. There was a symbiotic relationship between the music and the journalism. In their perpetual search for the Next Big Thing the papers hyped many a duff band and non-movement but also contributed to the dynamic flux which characterised the British rock scene.

Anyway, in 1972 the ailing and hopelessly out of touch New Musical Express successfully reinvented itself as the hippest pop paper in the known universe. NME was published by corporate giant IPC (as was Melody Maker. Sounds was financed - and I’m indebted to Gorman for this fascinating factoid- by a company owned by that celebrated punk rocker Rupert Murdoch.) but it drew some of its writers and much of its attitude from the British underground press of the late ‘60s. Afro-headed Charles Shaar Murray, who had contributed to the notorious Schoolkids edition of OZ, and the androgynous Nick Kent, formerly of Friends magazine, became almost as legendary as the rock stars they wrote about and certainly cultivated their images and personal mythologies as assiduously as any. NME had attitude to spare and was hilariously iconoclastic. It gained a reputation for being outrageously rude about rock stars and biting the hand of the music business that fed it. Mind you, this was the 1970s and these boys, though unutterably cool, weren’t quite as enlightened as they thought they were. Sexism and homophobia were commonplace. Bare breasts adorned the gig guide and the debut album by gay singer Jobriath was dismissed in homophobic terms. Gorman quotes Neil Spencer as saying ‘NME was incredibly homophobic’. And Neil Spencer should know because he used to edit NME. Indeed, the music press was very much a White and heterosexual boys’ club.

When NME, the last surviving weekly, closed its print edition in 2018 an era had definitively ended. Music simply no longer occupies the central space in youth culture that it once did. The music press has a curious sort of afterlife, and not just online, in the shape of the heritage and specialist magazines, but they connect with nothing beyond themselves. Popular music and the press that both reflected and shaped it once served as catalysts to private dreams, alternative worlds and unknown pleasures, but those days are now consigned to the history chronicled in this wonderful book.

Totally Wired is meticulously researched and staggeringly comprehensive. It’s clearly a labour of love but also impressively clear-eyed. Gorman conveys what was great about the music press without ever ignoring its faults and an important strand of the narrative concerns the slow emergence into the mainstream of once marginalised or silenced voices. He writes well about the misogyny experienced by female journalists, the marginalisation of Black music and writers and the sniggering homophobia.

Perhaps there was never a golden age but there was, at least, a silver one and it’s certainly not coming back. The best music journalists were essentially fans who wielded a mean typewriter. They inhabited an obsessive worldview of intense passions and hatreds. Their work had little to do with being fair-minded or objective and was all the better for that. They echoed the Dionysian power of the music and careened schizophrenically between innocent enthusiasm and terrifying psychotic loathing. They had a tendency to get carried away and there were many of us who loved being carried away with them.… (mais)