ROCK PAPERS FOR BRITS

ROCK PAPERS FOR BRITS

LETTER FROM BRITAIN

by Penny Valentine

Being a survivor of at least two British rock papers—one of them now slipped in the annals of time—a new arrival on the sc^}e has a certain fascination.

New Music News died over six months ago now. For a while there it looked like it was going to make it. It was the first intrusion into the strangehold of the Big Three (NME, Melody Maker, Sounds) for ten years. Trade papers, as they are sometimes cynically known (the inference being they are as much ‘for’ the record industry as for the readership) are a unique product of British reading habits, weekly nationwide rock newspapers, and of our historical place in the music and our geographical size.

I never did find out if the staff at NMN felt like us when we started Sounds in ’70, fumbling around with a layout that owed more to Melody Maker than some new spirit of discovery, being snarled at by NME and MM reporters (or ignored: “Humm a person, what person? I see nobody.”) Why such intense rivalry existed never got cleared up, except that capitalism does work and crude competitiveness is its'just rewards. Anyway that was long before Sounds turned into HM freaks (Lord, we were still running to Edgar Broughton and Marc Bolan dates—well Steve was any way). NMN started in the middle of a battle between Melody Maker and their owners IPC over the appalling pay the latter gave the former: a conflagration that ended with typewriters being hurled by staff through (closed) office windows (the office has for many years been what looks remarkably like a POW camp, a single story building surrounded by barbed wire, I kid you not, and unlikely to fill even the greatest rock doyenne with enough enthusiasm to type: the quick brown fox). The assistant editor quit. The editor, writer Richard Williams, gave the finger sign to his proprietors. On second thought, being an urbane chap, he more likely wrote a succinct memo.

In the midst of this exciting bun-fight (the only exciting thing that had happened in MW’s Stalag 34 for years) NMN was launched in a design that bore a suspicious similarity, some said, to the MM “re-design.” This was waiting in the wings— and still is it seems—backed by a hefty advertising campaign, while fists flew and edicts erupted as fast as trees could be felled to supply the raw materials to write them on. Meanwhile at NMN one-time hippie, now entrepreneur Felix Dennis smiled as typewriters caught fire (not literally) under fingers of a bunch of writers glad for employment, enthusiastic and seeing a chance to bust open the monopoly the Big Three had enjoyed lazily for years.

Its approach, in the end, wasn’t much different to the existing papers: interviews with the great or middling, attempts to ferret out new trends (thereby helping to make them); the normal round of reviews. The staff was culled from known sources and included lan Birch who had just split from the dismal fracas at MM and Giovanni Dadomo, longstanding freelance and poet and the only person I know who has never cared a damn about Elvis Costello’s lyrics. It’s his music, he says, and so condemned Trust on the basis that it wasn’t adventurous enough. What NMN had on was that quaint British characteristic of support for the underdog plus its own esprit des corps as it battled to at least gnaw at the ankles of the Big Three.

The crunch came some weeks after MM came back on the stands. Its return interrupted NMN’s use of that portion of readership and Dennis, seeing his wage bills not being outdone by income, closed it down at a few hours’ notice. Leaving a tired and frustrated staff shocked that they weren’t at least given the benefit of a financial cooling off period to let readers re-adjust after the return of MM.

This story highlights the historical short life expectancy that any paper trying to intrude into the field has been faced with over the years. Buying a weekly paper becomes a habit and readers tend not to be revolutionary, or fickle. Meanwhile, while writers on the weekly papers at least are/were (before they got the job) aficianados of rock culture, their owners certainly aren’t/never have been. Straight business men, these, with 2.3 children, a home in the better suburbs and a music centre, maybe, for the odd Andy Williams album. One seriously wonders at times where this lot were in 1960. Maybe even then they were having their pin-stripe suits steam-ironed.

It’s also a fact that a new paper coming into the market tends to stick to the familiar format—usually to get advertising. Trax is no different in that respect (although current issues of 47 pages hold only 10 adverts while the MM’S 48 pages has 25 and NME’s 60 pages has 30). Where ij may well succeed is that in intervening into the Big Three’s hold it comes in with its sights down the small end of the telescope: The London Music Paper. Instead of going for a straight overall challenge it’s contained itself to the capital and will attack only one area of the total readership of the other three. Its size is slightly smaller, too, than NME, MM and Sounds. This may work in its favor since they’re all rotten for reading on the underground or buses: the person next to you tends to react as though being devoured by an octopus, all attempts to contain the pages ending in a dismal display of grovelling on the floor and they slide out). Its biggest failure so far is its cover, which is done magazine-style but on paper, which seems to flatten color and reduce it to the condition of 1940’s posters. A gloomy feeling of ration books pervades this week’s issue (the 4th) withToyah Wilcox looking— perhaps suitably—as though she’s been embalmed. Trax’s emphasis is on London gigs, reviews and venues, on the film and music listings in the city that so far have been the sole domain not of the music papers per se, but of the leftists and middle class intellectuals’ cultural watering hole Time Out. Their writers include—as usual—a fair smattering of ex’s. Brian Harrigan, ex-news editor from MM and Mark Ellen, a fresh faced ex-NME freelance (reportedly told not to darken their doors again when he went off to earn a crust at NME). NME’s Giovanni Dadomo pops up again here, asdoesNMN’sTom Nolan.

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Issue 4 bills the use of Spandau Ballet as a feature' not because of their place in the New Romantics field so1 much as the fact that—yes folks—they live in London; the most interesting thing about a Shock (a mime band) feature is the headline (culminating in “they make records on which they don’t play,” perhaps not surprisingly for a mime group); an article on the waiter character from Fawlty Towers (the TV output of Monty Python’s John Cleese gives a hint that future issues may broaden interviews away from just music). Trax is, when all is said and done, respectable. A spin-off from Girl About Town (a huge money-spinning give-away that exists solely off adverts for secretarial jobs). Aimed obviously at a readership they see as having grown out of the existing music papers, I suspect its existence worries the Big Three more in terms of the advertising revenue it may pinch than any esoteric considerations.

This same week 3 look at NME, MM and ■Sounds reveals there has been little alteration in their game plans. Sounds are still the champions of HM, exploiting the more cloth-brained elements in its readership. It has a strong sense of projecting its staffs in-fighting, as well as rampant sexism. It has no pretentions to be other than mildly cretinous in an effective way. It does this with a sense of professional authority.

MM still staggers under the weight of its own particular brand of lethargy, though this week’s issue proudly announces its move from Stalag 34 which may mean... something? Unable to decide whether it’s going to try to take the NME on on its own terms, or try to retain a sliding readership based somewhere on two fields: those who take music seriously (Genesis fans etc.), and fairly conservative students who don’t like NME’s self-advertised “anarchy.” When the re-design was still operative, Richard Williams planned to bring in Simon Frith as a special features editor, a role which would have at least revolutionized the approach of the rock press to its subject matter. Alas, the palace debacle put pay to that. Now, even the exaltation into that position of the anarchistic and erratic writer Allan Jones has done little but dull his acerbic edge (renowned for reducing his life, to a series of nasty physical confrontations with musicians who after thrusting their fist in his face promised to upend him over a Fender).

NME continues to lead the field and to parade its holier than thou, so-called street credibility in a not always digestible way. Visually they keep trying out new ideas (many of them nicked from the early alternatives of punk, not to mention harping back to the halcyon hippie days of Oz and Ink—from whence sprung many of their original befe no/r writers. Then, mere toddlers... They still cpme in from left field when the mood takes them, this week for a quick round-up of the latest Anti-Nazi League initiative in the face of facist groups commandeering recruits at rock gigs, plus coverage on their news pages (amidst the usual group split stuff) of the Black People’s Day Of Action, a massive march through London against a racist fire attack which killed 13 black teenagers at a party. It’s this that gives them their cr;edibility —a sense of being in touch with both black and white readership that the others certainly do not have. Yet despite its attacks on the nasty face of capitalism, its contradiction remains that it is owned by the biggest publishing house in Britain (likely in the world), its internal politics tend towards individualism (any attempt to gather support for a recent wage demand by freelancers for the paper met with stony silence) and it hardly ever (by nature of its symbiotic relationship to the record companies’ advertising) explores that particular brand of capitalist enterprise. So it’s still tied to everything it berates.

Meanwhile, the man who shifted its perspective in the first place from a paper which simply reflected the charts to one that reflected (and then became a part of) a culture, Nick Logan, has launched The Face. A magazine that free floats between the Big Three and the alternative DIY magazines. More of it and them next month when with three dollars from CREEM’s overspilling coffers I search the waterfront (Oh, OK then one trendy alternative bookshop in North London frequented by leftist sociologists, punks and the odd New Romantic) and stagger back with a bunch of • DIY’s for a consumer’s guide. Why does the boy from Shangri-La bite? Can there really be an anti-establishment interview? Enjoy a Reality of horror? ,