Press Gang

Stood in a shop the other day, I browsed the row of music magazines and found myself asking the question “who buys these anymore?”

14 years ago or so, I would buy Melody Maker every week and Q and Uncut every month. Back in the late 90s, Uncut used to give away a great free CD every month where you’d have stuff like a Mansun b-side alongside the Go-Betweens. There’d be interesting features on cinema as well. Q, despite it’s current state as a tedious celeb mag, used to be pretty good reading too. Melody Maker was fine too, this being before its ill-advised final throw of the dice in becoming a glossy that brought about the executioner’s axe.

Looking at it with hindsight, I realise that I was basically trying to educate myself about music that I wanted to hear. Living in the back end of nowhere, we had no record stores. The Internet was still a fairly new thing and finding information wasn't that easy. In the sixth form common room, nobody else seemed to know much beyond what was in the charts: by chance, I’d stumbled upon the Smiths, Joy Division and the Jam. From the radio, REM and the Lightning Seeds tickled my fancy but the fag-end of Britpop was truly desperate: wither now, 3 Colours Red? Though I did buy theaudience album, I have suspicion that may have had something to do with my teenage hormones getting excited by Sophie Ellis-Bexter.

Thing is, at the age of 18 I packed myself off to uni at some town close to That London. There were record stores where I pick up LPs by Stevie Wonder, Sam and Dave and just about anything New Order did. There were people I met who knew about music and would lend me stuff. Add to that limited student resources and the music press seemed a tad irrelevant.

Now, a decade on, I’m surprised there’s still so many of them going. Uncut and Mojo seem to go through a routine of having Dylan, Beatles and the Stones on the cover with tags like “shocking new revelations” about Led Zep or suchlike. The NME has long ceased to be seen as a serious magazine, not helped by it’s relentless bandwagon jumping in recent history.

A book once stated that the past was a different country. That may well be so, but in music terms, it feels like one that’s been mapped to the point where we know what colour kex Jagger was wearing at Altamont. Perhaps they've given up on trying to compete with the websites in breaking new bands – I can remember Uncut attempting to create a buzz around Hamell on Trial, which struck me at the time as an odd horse to back.

Regardless, they seem to be recreating the worst aspects of Classic Rock magazine, where nothing of worth was created pre-punk. Their time is surely limited and I'm not sure they'll be missed - not in the way the completely fab Your Sinclair was anyways. Now that was a magazine.