I bet I wasn’t alone in this. Every single week from 1972 -1980, I got a copy of the NME and then Sounds. Not a subscription, I went to the newsagent to buy one every Wednesday, proudly walking away with it under my arm, thinking it a symbol of my hipness.
It would be impossible to give an impression to a teenager today of how much those publications were embedded in our lives. They told you about tours - not in 16 months time but about 10 weeks, they told us about new albums, listed gigs, and had hand-drawn ads for loon pants and afghans. Our whole life was in those pages.
Oh yeah, there was The Lone Groover too. What happened to Tony Benton? From around this time, the NME started taking modern rock music seriously after falling behind Sounds. And it went hand in hand with my absorption of the whole culture. Serious articles about Traffic or Van Der Graaf Generator. I loved it.
Sounds was always more ‘heavy’, especially in the punk years. They still took music I liked seriously while the NME, I felt, disappeared up its own fundament in the 80s and stopped appreciating guitar solos!
But in the mid-70s, they were axiomatic to life, and I still fondly recall poring over the paper at school. It was our connection to the culture of rock in a psychological and literal sense. A weekly education.
There was something visceral about the way they made your hands inky and black. Something rock n roll. So much so that I thought everywhere must have similar newspapers and was shocked to learn America didn’t. I tried to read Rolling Stone, but it was too difficult for me at 12 or 13 and was about politics and current affairs as well, which went over my head, but when I was older were great reads. But they did have Creem.
It was kept in an out-of-the-way place in WHSmiths and was expensive, so we couldn’t regularly afford it. In fact, I remember we would wait until the leftover magazines were out of date and discounted to get rid of them in order to get a copy. It was a magazine and was full of every rock act we loved and some we’d not heard of. A magazine didn’t have the same cultural cache as a newspaper to us though. But it was crucial in keeping up to date with what was happening in America, and copies were passed around like pornography.
We initially didn’t understand people like Lester Bangs, and it felt full of lingo we didn’t understand. I distinctly remember wondering what an ‘ass’ was! That was how narrow our lives were. I wonder if Americans were similarly bamboozled by British colloquialisms?
I think the mid-70s were the sort of glory days for the music papers, even Melody Maker, which we always thought of as the third of the three and for older people. They were important in a way that nothing can be now, and of huge cultural heft. Had I been told what would have happened to them, I wouldn’t have believed you. So entrenched in our young lives were they.
The glory days of the music papers...
