“A pirate nation, moving under our own flag, with lawyers, clowns and attendants.” – Keith Richards, Life

As a teenager I was enthralled by the music journalism of a long gone age. It wasn’t the contemporary hacks coughing out words on Pulp or Oasis or…god forbid…Northern Uproar, that got me desperate to get my words in those inky rags. It was the big beast of the 70s that intrigued me.

I was fascinated by Nick Kent, all leather and bad intentions hanging out with The Rolling Stones, Julie Burchill – a malevolent fairy flung from surburbia into a barbed wire encampment at the heart of the NME, Charles Shaar Murray – all curls and spiky put-downs and Lester Bangs, the sweaty prophet of pounding the typewriter until it groaned, dead at 33 but always looking 10 years older.

They worked in the time when rock was in its teenage years, boisterous and unruly, spitting and snarling, wrecking its hotel rooms for the first time, awkward and interesting in ways that just seem boring now.

Rockstars had entourages and hangers-on but they hadn’t formed an impregnable phalanx yet. The Roman legion of PR people and marketing types hadn’t got into their stride then, they weren’t armed and dangerous.

The music press was teenage then too. Experimental and wild at times. It had shaken off the fustiness of its school days, the precious hagiographies and boring news stories. It want to make friends, fuck, fight, drink and drug just like the bands it was writing about. 



The seventies was the golden age of the gonzo music hack, vampiric in their desire to gobble up the free booze and drugs and backstage passes flowing through the veins of the music industry. At every turn their was an opportunity for excess, to sample the “fruit and flowers”.

The barrier between the music press and the music industry was far more porous. Mick Farren could be a journalist and a musician at the same time, My good friend Andy Giles could get his typewriter confiscated for turning to the dark side and pounding out press releases for Peter Grant and Led Zeppelin while still taking the NME shilling.  

It was also a time when music papers could be self-indulgent and allow writers to be brutal and funny and daring. The music industry needed the music papers as much as they needed the music industry. Things were not so predicated on a conveyor belt promotional schedule and complete control. Artists could swerve round managers and PRs to talk directly to writers and built relationships with them.

Nick Kent was effectively embedded with The Rolling Stones for months at a time, a situation that helped to increase the time he spent with a needle embedded in his arm. Lester Bangs could publish an epic on The Clash that stretched across two issues of the NME and sparked controversy and ire from the band and its fans for depicting an episode where a roadie wailed on fan. Bernie Rhodes tried to set him on fire.

On the road pieces now are carefully choreographed, a few hours dropped into the humdrum precision of a tour. Shepherded in to talk to the band before the gig, allowed a brief window of socialising afterward. Rock’n’roll as a Disneyland attraction. True access like the kind Nick Kent got with the ‘Stones is a rarity. The last piece of truly surprising writing in the vein I saw was Caitlin Moran on Lady Gaga, Gaga pissing through her tights and taking Moran out to party late into the night.

But it’s unlikely that any writer will ever again get as close to a band as Kent did to The Rolling Stones when they were one of the biggest bands in the world, watching Keith and Mick looking down from thrones as two girls wrestled in flames on the floor, the decadent and dead-eyed rulers at the heart of the pirate nation.

The new world of music writing as its own stars but their domains are small and more fragmented. They don’t speak to grand narrative or thrilling access but speed and specificity. It is a world of experts in limited domains, not stowaways in music’s pirate nations. And the ones that did sneak onboard back then, they’re either dead or dull. I saw Charles Shaar Murray speak a few months ago. He committed the cardinal sin: he was boring.

The fire of my teenage obsession with music journalism was stoked by the kindling provided by second hand copies of the NME, Sounds and Melody Maker. Yellow artefacts from a time when London punks with mohicans were something more than Camden picture postcard remnants, those magazines were like holy scriptures written by the great ones who’d gone before (Burchill and Parsons, Kent and Shaar-Murray, Bangs and Tosche…the list of the inky-fingered deities is lengthy…). 

iPad magazines are another nail in the coffin for the magazine collection, the disintegration ray of technology pointed at print just as it has ripped its way through the traditional idea of the record collection. Sure iPad apps will sit for a while on your iPad but their size (hundreds of MB right now) will make them digitally disposable, consigning old copies to the cloud or the corner of an external hard drive. Tied to your account there will be no second hand issues in boxes beneath the record stacks. Their digital timelessness will not gift them a yellowing, curling-round-the-edges cool.

iPad magazines make many mistakes right now (the primary one is the replication of a traditional magazine structure as if that can be directly slung onto a touchscreen) but their biggest failing for me is their lack of passion, their lack of romance. They are not items to be slung between friends, sacraments to be shared in worshipping your mutual gods of rock. They are sterile bundles of video, words and sounds, experiments in giving an electric shock to a struggling business. They are tied to no history and will leave no trace in turn. 

I like Everett True. Many don’t but I do. He’s a personality and modern music writing has a paucity of those. But that doesn’t mean I always agree with him. This week he’s been posting up the archive of one of his much-missed projects Plan B, a fine magazine which gave birth to many a great up and coming new music writer. But while that’s a brilliant public service it gave me occasion to read his editorial from Issue 0 and now, a few years late, I need to disagree with one of his quips. 

Recounting a trip to lecture some media students, Everett talks about dismissing “NME and Q as being put together by people embarrassed to be writing about indie music…” That’s the point at which he and I take different paths.

Both Q and NME have been terribly compromised publications for years but that isn’t down to the people working on them not caring or not loving music as much as Everett does. It’s because those magazines are cogs within large corporations with confused agendas, turned into toys for editors enthralled with a philosophy of “brand”, “content partnerships” and other phrases that translate to bad magazines. 

Everett’s advice to potential Plan B contributors was “be yourself” but that’s not always been a choice at NME or Q (although NME under Krissi Murrison is 1000% sharper than the dull days of Conor McNicholas running the paper into the ground). Q is like the Borg. It gobbles up writers and pulps them into a bland mush.

The Atlantic has just published a list of what makes great editing in celebration of its 153rd birthday. One point stood out for me as a big failing at Q was this: “Don’t over-edit. You will often estrange an author by too elaborate a revision, and furthermore, take away from the magazine the variety of style that keeps it fresh.” Too often Q has been like a mangle, squeezing until all the writer’s personality is left in the bucket.

That is not the fault of the people who work on Q [I was front section editor there for just over a year]. They are a sharp, smart, committed team with a real love of music. But the product they are made to produce is a sad compromise, under the cosh of powerful PRs trading access for writing about bands that just aren’t up to snuff. Q has to play safe.

Editors aren’t given the scope to be imaginative – they can’t take risks and there have been some terrible decisions (putting Johnny Borrell aka the least palatable man in music on the cover?!). No one in the office besides the boss backed that move but it happened anyway. A few months down the line the revisionist history had begun: “Who’s idea was that then?” 

Plan B was wildly inventive and individualistic. It could never sell more than a nominal number of copies. Q is bland and it struggles to maintain the sales figures it once easily pulled in. Neither is the solution for what a music magazine should be now.

In some ways, the question is whether a traditional music magazine, a bound collection of pages, still has a place. I think it has but a successful one needs freedom of movement that an oil tanker like Q doesn’t have right now. The ship can be turned around but the captain needs to accept that the iceberg it’s headed for is there to begin with. Right now, they’ve got their hands on the wheel and their eyes closed…