4/29/2023 0 Comments Malody spyIn the 80s, the likes of the Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Stranglers, for example, couldn't count on favourable coverage at all. I was a regular reader of the NME and it could barely hide its contempt for what its readers liked. I agree with Freddiefenton's observation at how scathing and dismissive writers were on the pop/rock press (less so Record Mirror and not at all with Smash Hits). Many of the past episodes have featured the behind the scenes politics of the MM, particularly in its final years If anyone's interested there's a Podcast called Chartmusic in which several ex Melody Maker journalists discuss a random Top of the Pops episode. I gave up on the NME first and carried on with the Maker into the 90's but the move to Hip Hop and Acid House was not my generation and I stopped buying it when that became the most prominent feature Though the random gig going had ceased and I was more interested in what albums/singles to buy I even got one review published (The Alarm at Southampton Gaumont)Īfter University, I carried on getting both magazines on my way to work getting them from the Train Station Newsagents. Looking to see what bands would be playing in the area When I was a student in the early 80's Wednesday was my favourite day getting both the Melody Maker and NME from the campus shop and spending the first couple of hours of the day reading both in the University's SU Bar. Most young artists today are really into and influenced by many 80s mainstream (and electronic) bands and singers who were at the time dismissed as a "trendy" passing phase, when in fact ironically those artists (esp the New Romantics) were made to feel anything but trendy at that time and were treated as distinctly unhip by those Fall/Tom Waits/JAMC/etc loving tastemakers, maybe one or two of whom are probably either turning in their graves or throwing their phones across the room in disgust when yet another nail goes into the the-80s-were-bad coffin. Which is why I find it immensely satisfying that the 70s/80s influence on today's music is so huge and vast, unsurprisingly, as the sounds that were around between say 19 were a truly huge landscape encompassing so many quickly moving-on scenes (including disco, New Wave, two tone etc) which could never fully be explored in those six short years, and offer so many explored avenues and modern variations (more so than say the much hipper but much more narrowly defined rule-based confines of say grunge, grebo or C86). There is still some divide between cool and uncool but much less so than the 80s and history now looks much more favourably on quite a lot of the above names. They generally enthuse about things they like but still show respect to things they don't. Young people who write (and blog) now are much more open minded and willing to like things. People like Gary Numan, Duran, Howard Jones, Nik Kershaw, Thompson Twins, Phil Collins, Fears For Fears, Spandau, Visage and the New Romantics etc were treated like absolute pariahs. whenever I read through any of the above old 1980s magazines though, it strikes me how bitchy, cynical and nasty the general tone was that the music journos of that age wrote in, and how they were particularly narrow minded towards mainstream pop music (i.e. I loved Record Mirror, Melody Maker and NME especially in the 70s, 80s and 90s.
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