I used to read NME when I was young. Of course I did. I was obsessed by pop music in its every colour and my youth happened to coincide with the old inky’s heyday, or certainly one of them. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the New Musical Express was one of four weekly music magazines. Record Mirror was for kids (people a year or two younger than us). Melody Maker was worthy and a bit dull. Sounds was brash and lively, but too keen on heavy rock for my taste. NME was broader in range and more ambitious in tone, and it had the writers: strung-out drug zombie Nick Kent, blues ideologue Charles Shaar Murray, the teenage lunatic Julie Burchill and frog-faced Tony Parsons, whose sneer spoke for a generation.
They all wrote with a certainty I found both repulsive and curiously impressive. Here was the arrogance of youth unhindered by self-restraint or, crucially, subeditors. It took me ages to realise that most of these people were only a year or two older than me. I rarely missed a copy and kept back issues in a huge pile in my bedroom cupboard. Of course, what was marginal and trivial 30 years ago now lies at the very hub of popular culture. Alumni of the NME infest every corner of public life. Astoundingly, the magazine is still going, and celebrates its 60th birthday this year.
Pat Long worked there in the early 2000s, but his history of the magazine only takes us up to the end of the 1990s, long after most of us ceased to care. It seems only appropriate that this hardback is infinitely tattier than it has any right to be, and that its ink comes off on your hands.The
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