Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Nope, I’m not nostalgic for the NME

It’s no secret that my career isn’t quite what it was (lucky I’m rich!) so imagine my feeling of glee when I opened up my email account last Wednesday to find messages galore from all over the mainstream media. TV news programmes, radio shows, newspapers – even the Guardian! – were keen to have my views on…the end of the print edition of the New Musical Express.

What a cheek! I started work there in 1976 when I was 17; I left when I was 19 as, hilariously, I thought that people in their twenties who still wrote about music were ‘sad old men’. Since then I’ve had number one best-selling novels, won an Emmy and been condemned in the House of Commons for tranny-baiting. I’m now 58, in glorious decline but still a cracking little scribbler – and apparently all I’m good for is writing about something I stopped doing nearly forty years ago.

I don’t think I could put my hands on my ‘dander’ without a diagram, but there’s no doubt that it was way up on that day.

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