NME at the gate

From New Coke to Blockbuster’s return as a streaming service, brand reboots don’t always work out, but when a relaunch does, it’s often simply down to luck. 

For example, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the vinyl revival began, but once it was established that 12-inch records were cool again, an intersection occurred between middle-aged dads rediscovering album collections stashed in lofts and hipster teens encountering the medium for the first time. Vinyl’s new appeal, especially amongst its youngest consumers, had less to do with the music than ‘collectability’. As heartening as it was to see teens buying Rumours, London Calling or The Dark Side Of The Moon via £30 reissues bought from the few HMV stores that remain, it was their Instagram appeal and opportunities to post iconic sleeves on ubiquitous ‘Now Playing’ plinths.

Consider, then, the associated revival of the NME. I say “revival” but in truth the venerable organ, launched in 1952, never went away. It just ceased, in 2018, to be printed. But as of yesterday the once august weekly newspaper has returned in physical form, relaunched by the brand’s latest owners as a bi-monthly, limited edition magazine, and openly inspired by the resurgence of vinyl and even cassettes.

That’s the marketing pitch, but the NME’s print relaunch isn’t without a modern twist: you won’t be buying it from a newsagent, at least not straight away. NME Networks - part of the Caldecott Music Group (which also publishes Uncut) - will only be producing the new NME in very limited quantities, making them available through the Dawsons chain, which it owns. It’s a deliberate ploy to create exclusivity in much the same way as Nike creates hype (and the occasional riot) with “drops” of limited edition trainers. 

Thus last night at exactly 7.52pm (the original NME was launched in 1952…) those sitting in one of those dreaded online waiting rooms so hated by Taylor Swift fans were given their chance to get their hands on the new NME. Naturally, it sold out straight away.

No details have been given on the size of this NME’s print run, but with a £10 cover price and a promise of a thick, glossy, coffee table-friendly Vogue-like design, presumably they’ve done their homework on how to cover costs. What those of us unsuccessful in getting hold of a copy can’t yet gauge is whether it is any good. Moreover, how this NME stacks up to the NME’s 71-year-legacy.  

Having begun in March 1952 following the purchase, for the princely sum of £1000, of The Accordion Times and Musical Express by music promoter Maurice Kinn, the New Musical Express quickly established itself as the UK’s primary journal of record for contemporary music. Later that year it created the first British singles chart (copying the American magazine Billboard) with Al Martino’s Here In My Heart becoming the first ever British Number 1. 

By the 1960s the NME was selling 300,000 copies a week as the Beat Boom took off, with The Beatles, Rolling Stones and their ilk regularly featured on the cover and at the annual televised NME Poll Winners’ Concert, the Brit Awards of its day. 

In the ’70s the NME took on more of an underground approach to its journalism, with seminal writers like Nick Kent and Charles Shaar Murray joining the staff, with the magazine championing the broadening post-Beatles pop and rock revolution. With punk came further evolution, with cover features on the Sex Pistols and The Clash, and Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill making their names as a new generation of ‘angry young writers’, to use the hackneyed description. Many will consider this the start of a golden age for the NME and music journalism - as carefree and opinionated as punk itself.

The NME wasn’t alone: along with its closest (and, sometimes, bitterest) rival Melody Maker, plus the more heavy rock-orientated Sounds, they vied for the pocket money of spotty youths up and down the country. In 1978 another challenger appeared, Smash Hits, beginning as a poster magazine (and created by ex-NME editor Nick Logan), which would eventually go on to sell a staggering four million copies a fortnight. Around this time a new editor, Neil Spencer was promoted, overseeing a redesign of the NME and shifting the broadsheet further towards post-punk and New Wave, bringing in new blood like Danny Baker (a former NME receptionist and writer for the punk fanzine Sniffin’ Glue), along with the spiky likes of Paul Morley and Ian Penman.

As I began to develop my own interest in music at the start of the 1980s, the NME broadened further, reflecting wider youth interests in the Thatcher era, taking on a notably left-leaning complexion in the process. This chimed with the politics of many of the musicians it covered who, themselves, were capturing the dystopian gloom of young life in Britain in the first half of the decade, a period signified by inner city rioting, CND marches and a decidedly socialist strand to pop. Which, thinking about it now, makes my own debut in the NME more incongruous.

In 1984, my first year of Sixth Form, I decided that my future lay in music journalism. The NME, Melody Maker and, particularly, Smash Hits, had become bibles to me. At the same time, Gary Crowley’s evening show on Capital Radio was essential listening. Deciding that if my ambitions were to be taken seriously I’d need a portfolio of writing samples that weren’t solely made up of reports for the school magazine, I brazenly asked Gary for an interview. Incredibly, he agreed and I went up to the old Capital studios on London’s Euston Road one Tuesday evening. After the interview he asked if I was serious about becoming a music hack, to which I said yes, prompting him to suggest getting in touch with one of his pals at the NME, which I did. 

And so, in early January 1985, aged 17, I went to see the NME’s then live reviews editor: “Er…are you going to see anyone in the coming weeks?” he asked. All I could think of was that I tickets for Phil Collins at the Royal Albert Hall a few weeks later. “OK, do a couple of hundred words on that,” he asked. As the clipping below attests, I managed to get possibly the first Phil Collins live review published in punk’s once-angriest of papers. And possibly the last.

That alone, though, was enough to get me in. The following year, after my A-levels, I got an actual staff job with a new magazine, who liked the cut of my jib. I had the NME to thank for that. Although I only did a handful of things for the NME (I was, supposedly, also trying to get through Sixth Form at the time), it was the start I needed. However, the mid-’80s were a perilous time for the paper. Smash Hits (whom I later did work for) was cannibalising the NME’s pop-minded readership, while the paper itself was struggling to find its editorial identity. Traditionalists on the staff wanted it to continue driving a rock agenda, while more progressive voices championed alternative genres, like hip-hop, all while the magazine continued evolving beyond just music magazine to become a broader cultural barometer.

Music didn’t leave its core, however. In the ’90s, Britpop provided a totemic platform not seen since the ’60s (reaching its zenith with the landmark Blur-vs-Oasis cover in August 1995 marking the simultaneous release of the former’s Country House and the latter’s Roll With It). Music was in rude health again, at least from an editorial perspective, leading to copious coverage in the NME of Madchester and the decade’s mainstreaming of Indie, along with the emergence of American grunge. Into the mix came a further influx to the writing corps, with Steve Lamacq, Stuart Maconie, Mary Anne Hobbs and Andrew Collins joining the roster and giving the paper a new sense of zeitgeist vibrancy.

With the new Millennium came further change, and not all good, either. In 2000 publisher IPC folded Melody Maker into the NME in what many saw as the first death throe of the printed music weekly. Not that there wasn’t plenty for the medium to cover, with new British bands like Kaiser Chiefs, Libertines and, later, Arctic Monkeys. The march of time, though, continued to prove an impossible foe, and by 2014 the NME’s weekly circulation had fallen to 15,000. This prompted the now Time Inc.-owned title to be relaunched as a free magazine in an attempt to boost readership and the advertising the comes with it. The experiment, if it can be called that, lasted just three years before the NME became a digital-only site. While that retained the old paper’s musical news focus, it lacked the journalistic essence that had built its reputation in the heyday of Kent, Shaar Murray, Burchill, Parsons and later, Dannys Baker and Kelly, and the Britpop scribes.

Holly Bishop
Picture: NME Networks

It’s unlikely that their editorial spirit will be revived under the new print venture, so the question is, how will it be relevant? “Although the written word will always play a part in our journalism,” NME Networks chief operating and commercial officer Holly Bishop told the trade magazine UK Press Gazette, “it’s no longer front and centre and it’s naïve to think any different”. 

The 2023 version of the NME will have to appeal to Gen Z, an audience more attuned to consuming content via social media. New music, Bishop maintains, will still be paramount. “An artist can have a meteoric rise on a single track on TikTok, for example. But is there longevity there? It remains to be seen. And actually, what we do know is an artist making music that’s authentic to them, that is good music. It will find a way through, particularly when brands like ours are actively seeking it.”

“NME obviously boasts an incredible print legacy,” Bishop told UKPG. “It’s one of the most recognised titles on Earth in print. We’ve had the biggest icons across pop culture appear on our cover.” But, she adds, the exercise is not without its challenges - “not just in terms of audience engagement, but also production; rising costs, particularly in this economic climate.”

“We aren’t looking to [create] hundreds of thousands of readers out of this print product,” Bishop added. “We know that our trajectory remains firmly rooted in being a digitally-led brand and we are successful in that space. NME.com has got more users than ever before and we obviously can monetise those in the traditional ways with advertising and partnerships.” For that, she says, they’re taking “an atypical, unconventional approach to distribution too. We’re not printing masses of copies because we really believe in the inherent value of scarcity.”

If all this sounds like marketingspeak, and a world away from the 1977-spirit-of-punk NME, it’s because the title is as much a brand these days as a single, identifiable newspaper. NME.com continues to attract some 17 million visitors each month, covering the broad scope of genres as well as television, film, games and other branches of pop culture. Its proprietors have even launched editions in Australia and Asia. The new magazine, however, will be global, “curating the very best of NME,” according to Bishop, “championing emerging artists and bands, and serving as the definitive voice in pop culture”.

That will commence with a first edition featuring on its cover 18-year-old self-taught American singer-songwriter d4vd (David Burke), first profiled by the NME online last September as the “multi-genre visionary turning TikTok attention into major chart success”. It’s a bold opening statement from the latest evolution of a magazine now in its eighth decade. In editions to come, we can expect more interviews with similar cutting edge musicians, culture features and reviews.

It remains to be seen whether the new NME will be able to recreate the urgency it once had, but you have to admire its publishers for giving it a go. The incontrovertible truth is that the world of media has become almost exclusively digital. 

Print journalism has been in terminal decline since the advent of the Internet. Last month The Guardian reported that, as a measure of the state of publishing in the UK, six of the country’s biggest selling physical-format magazines - Heat, Economist, Grazia, GQ, Vogue and Private Eye, along with newspaper supplements - are now all printed by just one single print company, Walstead. 

Between 2010 and 2022, the total number of actual magazines sold in Britain declined by 70% from around a billion copies a year to 309 million, with print publishing revenues dropping accordingly over the same period - from £1.4 billion to less than £500 million, according to Enders Analysis. Those magazines that remain in print form struggle to compete with digital distractions: compare the £6.50 you pay for Mojo, one of the few remaining stalwarts of magazine-based music journalism, with the £4.99 that Netflix’s new monthly, advertising-supported package will cost for all the entertainment distraction that offers. It’s an an apples-and-oranges comparison, of course, given that the handful of quality music magazines still in print continue to represent a tactile experience other mediums will never replicate. That, by the way, is the same experience that got me into the music press to begin with, first as a reader and then as a writer.

The NME’s conversion to digital-only five years ago was clearly part of the decline in print. The eyeballs of young consumers - those between 18 and 30 most coveted by advertisers - are simply elsewhere. British magazine websites last year accounted for less than 1% of the time this demographic spent on YouTube, 4.7% on TikTok and 7.4% on Instagram, according to The Guardian. And that is a problem for online magazine advertising. By 2025 the platforms of just Google, Meta and TikTok will earn more than £20 billion in digital advertising revenues. Compare that to, according to GroupM, the £378 million that magazines in the UK will earn by 2027.

All of which makes the decision to bring back the NME in print format even more precarious. But maybe its new owners might just succeed in appealing to the hipster strand that willingly eschews modernity (like vinyl, old-fashioned film cameras have made a return amongst the same youth demographic). This is probably the target audience for the new NME - consumers more likely to buy an expensive print magazine for its collectability, rather than the journalism inside. That, I have to say, is sad.

How Nick Heyward almost ruined my marriage, and other stories

My wedding, last year, might not have happened at all, thanks to Nick Heyward. Four days after my first date with the woman who is now, thankfully, my wife, she invited me out for a drink. Unfortunately I had other plans: a ticket to see pop’s perennially boyish, melodically gifted, all-round nice guy at The 229 in London. 

Even though I’d only seen Heyward three weeks before, at the Water Rats launch of his Woodlands Echoes album, I chose another evening with him over, potentially, eternal happiness. Thankfully the correct order of things was restored the following Saturday night when Nic - yes, I recognise the confluence of names here… - and I went out for a splendid dinner.

This might sound obsessive - about both - but Heyward has long been one of pop’s most under-recognised giants. Perhaps he prefers it that way. But I know I’m not alone in my regard for both Heyward’s songwriting gifts (if you’ve never heard his solo song Kite, what’s wrong with you?), not to mention his everlasting charm, honed no doubt by his upbringing in Bowie’s Beckenham. 

“I think so many of us have that thought, ‘Why isn’t he right up there?’,” says DJ Gary Crowley, a fan since before Heyward with Haircut 100 made their debut, 41 years ago, with that extraordinary explosion of effusive pop, Pelican West. That record earned a rave review from Danny Baker in the-then punk bible the NME. David Hepworth in his Smash Hits review wrote that the album possessed “winning vocals”, “a sturdy, flexible rhythm section, creamy saxophone” and “poignant, exhilarating and thoroughly British songs”. It would, however, remain the only album by the Haircuts that Heyward would appear on, but it was enough to propel him - and them - to stratospheric levels of adulation...before the singer himself was dumped, seemingly inexplicably, by the band.

Haircut 100 were the perfect combination of music and image, not least of which their preppy Fair Isle sweaters and upbeat, choppy funk (the jumpers, by the way, were a happy accident: rehearsing for an episode of Top Of The Pops in a freezing studio at BBC Television Centre, the band wore them round their necks as scarves. According to Heyward, “our publisher said: ‘You looked fucking great on the monitors. Keep the jumpers.’” And they did).

But, then, the band’s golden-haired, dimple-cheeked focal point was ousted. Sudden fame had not been kind to Heyward, leading to mental health struggles. To boot, resentment had grown within the band over royalties and other legal matters. So he was fired (“I wasn’t in a strong enough place mentally to fight for my band,” Heyward told The Times’ Dan Cairns earlier this year), just as Haircut 100 were on the cusp of something truly enormous. There was even talk at the time of a Monkees-style TV show. 

A follow-up to Pelican West, Paint And Paint, featuring Fox as lead singer, disappeared without a trace. As, largely, did Haircut 100. Heyward didn’t, however. His debut solo album, North Of A Miracle - released in 1983 and produced by Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick, with singles Whistle Down The Wind, Take That Situation and Blue Hat For A Blue Day - commenced a career that has produced a series of gems, albeit on his own terms. 

“He works at his own pace,” says Gary Crowley. “He’s probably picked it up in the last 10 years or so, but personally I’d love it if he was releasing albums every year! You just have to wait really, but you know the quality is always good”. Back in 1985 Heyward himself told Smash Hits that his ambition is always “...to make the kind of LP you can wrap up and give to someone as a present. No duff tracks at all, just 12 shining wonderful singles”. It’s something he has never, since, strayed from.

Gary Crowley speaks to Nick Heyward at The Exchange in Twickenham, 1 May 2022
© Simon Poulter 

“I think he’s so happy with where he is [today], to be perfectly honest,” says Crowley, who interviewed Heyward just over a year ago in a very entertaining evening in Twickenham. “He gets the respect, he gets the adulation, from the ones who know - if you know what I mean.” He adds that while Heyward would get recognised walking down the street, it wouldn’t be to the same extent as a ’80s pop peer like, say George Michael did when he was alive. Plus, given Heyward’s state of mind when he left Haircut 100, you’d expect him to be just fine with that relative anonymity (and basing himself for part of the year in Key West probably helps, too).

4-CD 40th anniversary edition of Pelican West 

Haircut 100, and Pelican West, have never gone far, however. No Heyward gig can be allowed to conclude without at least Favourite Shirts and Fantastic Day, which he plays with crowd-pleasing relish. Perhaps, then, it was always inevitable that this Friday’s one-off show at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, celebrating Pelican West’s 40 years-plus anniversary (marked earlier this year by a super-deluxe reissue box set), would happen. 

For a start it’s not their first gathering: the band first reunited in 2004 for a VH1 special, and Heyward, Jones, Nemes and Cunningham performed Pelican West in its entirety in 2011. But if Friday’s show goes well, could they be tempted out on the road for a longer tour? “There was a bit of a bunfight for tickets for [this] show,” Heyward told The Times, “which we weren’t expecting at all, and it sold out in just hours. The promoter is now saying: ‘Let’s see how it goes and then think about a tour.’ ”

While any so-called ‘heritage act’, reliving the glories of four decades ago, relies on those who adored them at the time for a fix of nostalgia, especially in these equally dismal times, Friday’s show and Heyward’s regular solo performances have afforded an opportunity to marvel at, for me, what their appeal was to begin with: songcraft. I would certainly put Heyward in the same category of melodic ease as arch pop tunesmiths like Paul McCartney, Elton John in his ’70s pomp, and Neil Finn, but there is so much more running through his musical veins.

Appearing earlier this year on Gary Kemp and Guy Pratt’s excellent Rockonteurs podcast, Heyward explained that like many of his contemporaries - including Kemp - he’d grown up listening to progressive rock and fellow Beckenham resident David Bowie. Punk, too, factored in their musical awareness (it’s a frequent theme - ’80s pop stars denouncing the notion that punk came along to do away with prog). In a 2017 interview with freelance journalist Malcolm Wyatt, Hayward revealed that Fantastic Day was inspired by a certain mod band from Woking: “I was pogoing to The Jam! I’d go home inspired by them and others around that time, ending up buying a practice amp and guitar. I locked myself in my bedroom and kept playing D major, C major and G. I had to sing something over those chords, which just happened to be, ‘It’s a fantastic day’. I then thought, ‘Actually, that sounds like a song.” He has also cited The Beatles as an obvious point of reference, and even A Trick Of The Tail, Phil Collins’ 1976 debut as Genesis frontman. 

Gary Crowley

“Nick had all these lovely influences going on with Haircut 100,” points out Gary Crowley, citing elements of Earth, Wind & Fire’s funk and The Monkees’ melodies (and, clearly, charm). You could probably throw in Chic, too. 

Heyward himself has also drawn on the emergence of suburban soulboy bands like Animal Nightlife, Blue Rondo A La Turk, Southern Freeze and even Spandau Ballet as part of what shaped Pelican West. Also, New Wave (Jones was a huge fan of The Clash) - an early single, released by Heyward and Nemes under the band name Moving England, could easily have come from a Talking Heads record. Little, though, is ever spoken about Haircut 100’s influences on others. 

“I’m not sure Wham! would have existed without them,” says Crowley, who knew George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley well, having DJ’d on their first UK tour. “Andrew talks about it in his book [2019’s Wham! George & Me]. They were big, big fans. I think Haircut 100 signposted for George and Andrew as to where they could go. Their influence on Wham! was immense.”

41 years on Pelican West, still sounds as fresh and as vibrant as it did when it was released in 1982. The 40th anniversary box set is worth every penny, even if you know the original album well, with that record given a delightful remastering, and additional discs containing B-sides, 12-inch mixes, a collection of previously unreleased tracks, as well as a stonking live recording of a 1982 Hammersmith Odeon gig. 

Remarkably, though, Pelican West didn’t make it to Number 1 on its original release, peaking at 2, but it remained in the upper reaches of the chart for 34 weeks. Listening to it today, it is still a stone-cold ’80s classic. In his 8½/10 Smash Hits review, David Hepworth also commented that “…you can dance to it. The fact is, you simply will dance to it.”. This Friday evening I’m looking forward to doing exactly the same. And you know what? My wife will be dancing right alongside me.

Have a Word

Thanks to Zoom and its ilk, we have, over these last 14 lurgy-infected months, been given greater insight into people’s home decor than the combination of reading every interiors magazine ever produced, along with a channel showing Through The Keyhole 24 hours a day. Not a news bulletin or daytime TV show goes to air without guests coming “down the line” from home offices, kitchens, spare rooms, garden sheds and so on. Which is why there’s an uncanny familiarity to the screen in front of me: David Hepworth sat before his enviously assembled vinyl collection, Mark Ellen in his study - as they have been, seemingly constantly, over this mostly locked-down year or so, industrially pumping out their highly infectious music and culture conversations under the umbrella of their Word ‘brand’.

David and Mark have, of course, been something of a double act for the better part of 40 years, not only as mid-80s custodians of TV’s Whistle Test, but more significantly, as two of British music journalism’s most influential figures (even if they modestly don’t recognise it). While legendary scribes like Charles Shaar Murray, Nick Kent, Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons still command notoriety for the ‘golden age’ of music writing, it was Hepworth and Ellen who took the pop poster magazine format and made Smash Hits a publication that, at one point, sold more than half a million copies every fortnight, largely because it didn’t take itself too seriously, or the people it wrote about. More about that, and this writer’s brief stint writing for it, later.

We are here on Zoom to talk about how they’ve kept alive the flame of The Word, the monthly magazine they launched in 2003, having previously been responsible for Q, Empire, Mojo and Heat, as well as the Hits’ sister title, Just Seventeen. The Word ran for 114 issues, closing in 2012, but before it fell victim to the creeping erosion of quality periodical-based music journalism, they had enterprisingly branched out into the podosphere. Post-print, the Word ‘brand’ continues as Word In Your Ear and Word In Your Attic (and the forthcoming outdoor fest Word In The Park) - essential listening and viewing online, if nothing else, for the steamingly good time the duo serve up with their symbiotic pub chatter (sample: challenging each other to identify obscure members of hoary old bands based on their names, and distinguish them from other walks of life, such as driving for the Krays).

Anyone who has ever spent time in editorial offices such as those David and Mark have populated (and before Smash Hits, they were at the NME and Sounds in Hepworth’s case, the NME and Record Mirror in Ellen’s) will know that such banter is par for the highly amusing course. “Conversation unites!” declares David. “Word In Your Ear started as a music thing: we’d have live music and then we might have the occasional author, some of the spoken word. And what you found was that spoken words are more popular than music. Music divides people, whereas speech brings people together.” 

More importantly, though, it’s the light-hearted nature of pop that drives their podcasts. “A lot of what we do is just listening to chat, and people talking about their lives, and funny jokes and games,” David says. “If you suddenly came to it and there was somebody sitting down with an acoustic guitar, playing four songs off their new album, people would turn off very quickly. It wouldn't matter how good or bad or indifferent that act was because music divides. Conversation unites. And that's what we deliver.”

Since The Word as a print enterprise folded, and the online products have proliferated, both Ellen and Hepworth have applied their encyclopaedic histories as music journalists authoring various books: Mark produced the hugely entertaining memoir Rock Stars Stole My Life!, while David has been busy with an equally engaging series of tomes examining different aspects of rock music. These include 1971: Never A Dull Moment, an extended thesis on what made that year (as opposed to others, such as my own birth year, 1967) pivotal in rock’s evolution. It has just been adapted into an eight-episode documentary series for Apple TV+. Between them, their books apply the same wry brand of conversation that has made the podcasts such essential listening, diversifying into different flavours, and monetised over the Patreon platform (subscribers of one level of patronage can even receive a dedicated Word-branded Zoom intervention on their birthday). To date, they have produced 392 editions of Word In Your Ear, 115 Word In Your Attic sessions for YouTube (in which guests trawl through their lofts to discuss the records and ephemera collected therein), and have also staged some 60 Friday night Zoom quizzes.

“Good Lord,” exclaims Mark, bashfully, “Is there really a Word ‘brand’? It probably is, oddly enough, stronger now than at any stage. It’s a bit of everything really. When the magazine closed there was no particular thought of continuing to do this kind of thing, but it was Alex [Gold, their erstwhile producer] who said, ‘No, you should keep doing it.” 

I attended my first Word In Your Ear recording on a whim in 2016 whilst visiting London from Paris at the start of my process to move back to the UK. It was a double-bill featuring books about Harry Nilsson and Randy Newman, and I became hooked, to the extent that getting WIYE tickets became an obsession once I was permanently in London. Tickets sold out the minute they were announced on Twitter (and, I’ve noticed, snapped up by largely the same suspects each time). Punters crammed into the function room of an Islington pub to hear authors ranging from hard-core music writers to obscure record collectors discussing their interests. They’ve even had the odd musician, such as Kenney Jones of the Small Faces and The Who, Level 42’s Mark King, and the late Neil Innes.

“Because we love doing it,” says David, “it made sense because we wanted to talk to people. We were interested in their books. And actually, if you were given a room in a pub and you could charge a little bit on the door, pay for all the equipment and the website, and it breaks even, we are absolutely thrilled that it could support itself. We could just carry on doing it, which is a lot of fun to be honest.”

When lockdown occurred, The Word machine had to change tack. “We just thought, everybody’s in the same boat,” explains Mark. “Everybody’s sitting at home surrounded by their stuff. Nobody can claim that they haven’t got time or anything like that. Wouldn't that be kind of amusing [to get people on Zoom]. We started with writer Mark Billingham and carried on from there. And, you know, it just kind of all worked as a format.”

Picture: Twitter/Word In Your Ear

For the most part, Word In Your Ear has focused on music-themed topics and authors, as my bookshelf serves testament. Rarely has an in-person recording concluded without me buying from the trestle table at the main entrance. In the main, they’ve covered the bottomless mine that is rock and pop, but have even ventured into conversations about classical music. 

“Frankly, what we want are good talkers,” says David. “If you get good talkers, they talk about anything, and so that we’re always fishing for good talkers on all kinds of subjects really.” Mark picks up on this:“A lot of what we do is quite niche,” he says. “You know, really obscure books about certain aspects of music. What you need is an author who can make that book full of colourful characters, universally appealing, just a great big, you know, rollicking tale from start to finish. So even if you’re not wildly interested in artists they’ve written about, you still get something out of it, it’s what you want.”

This does, inevitably, raise the question about where the rollicking tales will come from in the future. Not wishing to get all middle-aged dad, the sort of rambunctious stories that began in the 60s and continued, to a point, up until the 90s, seem unlikely to emanate from the current crop of mainstream musicians. “Pop stars are extraordinarily well-behaved now,” David says. “They’re in terrible fear of doing anything that might be remotely considered ill-advised because it might cancel their career overnight. I’ve actually got a lot of sympathy for them.”

All of which brings us to Smash Hits. A week before our Zoom encounter, the duo devoted a tremendous hour to, specifically, the magazine’s 1981 Poll Winners edition, revealing such nuggets as Paul Weller’s favourite TV show that year (Minder), and that the first album Simon Le Bon bought was The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway by Genesis (also the subject of his very first gig). During my own, brief, spell in 1987 writing for “Ver Hits”, it had a well established, unique style. It was serious music journalism, but also required musicians to be less up themselves and not just interested in only talking about what brand of flanger pedal they’ve used on their latest album.

“Smash Hits was perfect for the dawning of the video age,” reflects Mark. “Before, you’d just go on stage and ‘be’ The Stranglers. Now the success of your single depended on a video, which meant an incredible pressure to look as flamboyant and fabulous, and exotic and bizarre as possible. And that just led to a lot of fun with Smash Hits.”

“One of the thinks Mark and I often say is that nowadays you couldn’t do Smash Hits, in this climate, regardless of the decline of print [magazines] and so forth,” adds David. “Smash Hits dealt with everybody as ‘Oh God, Boy George - he’s a funny lad, isn’t he?’ and then ‘Here’s Lou Reed or whoever - they’re a funny lot also.’ Well, nobody’s allowed to be funny any more, because we have identity pop music, like we have identity politics.” “You’d be corrupting the nation’s morals if you are [Depeche Mode’s] Martin Gore in 2021 going on national television in a rubber dress,” quips Mark.

This isn’t an issue of political correctness, either, but for all the variety that still exists amongst today’s pop - not to mention good music - there has been a blandification of the creed. Perhaps that’s because it’s all been done before. Perhaps, also, it’s because there’s fewer people around to report on it, even to gently take the piss. “David and I desperately miss the music press,” declares Mark. “We miss its contribution, we miss the way it coloured people’s view of pop stars. Without the music press there’s no kind of context. [Pop stars] aren’t quite as three dimensional. They’re not as funny.” 

By me: Then Jericho make their Hits debut

Smash Hits, he says, turned pop stars into cartoon characters. “We made them a lot more interesting than they were in real life, you know?”. David picks up on this theme, pointing out that one of pop’s biggest stars at present is Ed Sheeran, but that there’s nothing really that interesting about him. “I know very little about him,” continues Mark, “and I have no great urge to discover any more. But if the music press was around, they’d be constantly trying to come up with some kind of explanation or dimension as to who he is, which could be interesting.”

Even when the Hits was ribbing stars, it was done in a gentle, almost loving way. The nicknames it came up with have stuck with me since: David Bowie was always ‘The Dame’ (a monicker afforded him by Neil Tennant, pre-Pet Shop Boys, when he was an assistant editor); another was Paul McCartney’s ‘Sir Fab Macca Wacky Thumbs Aloft’. Many were the work of the now sadly departed Tom Hibbert. “Tom took over the ‘Black Type’ letters page from me,” recalls Mark, “and I think he just started to give everyone a name. He came up with ‘Lord Lucan of Mercury’ [for Freddie Mercury], which I thought was really brilliant. And that really took off.” 

The Smash Hits’ ‘Sir’ prefix found its way into other arenas: “I remember going to see Queens Park Rangers in 1991, and Les Ferdinand was the big striker at the time. Hearing 27,000 people shouting ‘Leslie Ferdinand, Sir Leslie Ferdinand’, I thought ‘that came from Smash Hits, that’s amazing!’” Bowie, on the other hand, is one of the few stars to have eluded the Hits’ pages as an interviewee. “I think he considered himself a little bit above it,” says Mark, ruefully. “It’s a little disappointing, actually, because he would have been really funny. But, I suppose, he took himself seriously, or at least gave the impression he did.” 

Smash Hits was certainly an antidote to the somewhat ‘worthy’, ponderous music journalism that the likes of Melody Maker and the NME purveyed, along with their sometimes violent aversion to mainstream pop. To the teenage me, typing up ‘pretend’ reviews of records I’d just bought, initially just for the fun of it, my aspirations veered more towards the Hits brand of writing than the NME’s. After a while, I decided that writing about music was where I wanted to be, and my bedroom-typed reviews started to build a portfolio of writing samples. 

Ironically, it was the NME where I earned my first paid gig, contributing the first (and, possibly the last) Phil Collins live review to the paper, all thanks to having a bit of enterprise about me, and asking DJ Gary Crowley for an interview to add to my portfolio of writing samples. Gary, then at London’s Capital Radio, had been at the NME himself, replacing Danny Baker on its front desk. He gave me the contacts, and my career began, even though I’d not yet sat my A-levels. The portfolio worked, and I landed a staff job at a short-lived magazine called LM, joining the month that David and Mark’s better resourced Q launched. LM lasted just a handful of issues, and my stint, nine months, but it was enough to get me into the business - and freelance work at the very magazine I’d been consuming since my early teens. I’d be lying if I said it was easy adapting to the magazine’s distinct style...much to the frustration of the deputy editor I worked with. But, then, I was still just 19.

Also by me: a Smash Hits “live” review

Mark agrees that Smash Hits changed the slightly po-faced approach to music journalism that had been the nature of the broadsheets he and David had come from. “They took everything terribly seriously,” he says. “Part of the absolute joy of Smash Hits was not having to feel that way. We could look at everyone with a combination of affection and a kind of curiosity. There was a kind of quizzical air to it. You know, you love them all [pop stars] but you very fondly sent them all up.”

It makes ua all wistful: “You know, it used to be the best part of a million people in the UK bought a music publication of some kind over the course of a month,” states David. “That simply doesn’t exist anymore - the great engines that drove them, reviews, news and information.” Times have changed, he adds: “That whole world was based around the idea that you had to feel a certain way at a certain time. You were in a constant rush to go out and find out about the big new thing, and to buy the record. It just doesn’t matter anymore. There’s no pressure on you to be first in the queue to discover something.”

The same could be said for music journalism itself. When David and Mark started it wasn’t something you could train for, even at journalism schools. The irony, says Mark, is that today, when there’s no work, there are tons of university courses. “I regularly get people saying, ‘I’m looking for advice on how I get into it’, and I say the same thing, because all of my advice would be ten or fifteen years out of date - go and talk to somebody who’s doing it now, and they’ll tell you it’s a very different thing. I’m simply not qualified.” He takes me back to my own origins in the trade: “You know, to encourage some 16-year-old to think they’re going to write a 3,000-word piece about whoever they particular admire and get paid for it, is deceiving themselves.”

David agrees. “I’ve got a very old fashioned view of all that, which is that you couldn’t - as we did - now just read the music papers and think ‘I can do that’. I can teach myself to write a 400-word review, I can teach myself to write a feature, I can teach myself to write a news story, but if you then have to go and spend three years at college doing a media studies course, then it’s likely you haven’t got the basic tool required to be able to do it in the first place.” And he adds: “I don’t think you need to be taught that kind of stuff - you either intuitively do it or don’t bother.” 

“If you’ve got the kind of nouse, the energy and the enthusiasm,” says Mark, “write your own magazine. If you’ve got a sensational blog, people find out about it.”  David says that the online world is where energy and enthusiasm for music permeates today. “The only difference is that you used to have to work with people who bought ink by the barrel, who had a fleet of lorries and a distribution network in order to express yourself, or get your opinion out there. Nowadays you don’t have to. You can go on Twitter, you can go on Facebook. You can write your own blog.” Now, there’s a thought.

All things Word-related can be found at wiyelondon.com, including tickets for the splendid Word In The Park extravaganza in July.

Accidents can happen

Every Christmas, the shelves of the big book emporia bow with a barrage of dreary footballing memoirs - stocking fillers for dads, mostly, and invariably ghost-written by Fleet Street hacks. Rarely, if ever, are they of much real interest. Occasionally, a Roy Keane or Peter Crouch might come along with something mildly controversial or amusing, but for the most part, they chart a similar trajectory: local park ➤ boys club ➤ youth team ➤ first team ➤ different clubs ➤ retirement/management/punditry. 

So it’s quite an event when a football book comes along that is genuinely worthy of note. The last, I recall, was Black And Blue, the intentionally uncomfortable read by Paul Canoville, Chelsea’s first black player. It recounts his troubled youth but also, more dramatically, his even more troubled debut for the club: away to Crystal Palace, in April 1982, he was subjected to a torrent of racial abuse - from his own fans. A month later, he made his home debut against Luton Town at Stamford Bridge, a game I was at. His arrival on the pitch was met by monkey chants and bananas thrown from the home stands. It sickens me to this day.

The following year Chelsea signed a diminutive Scottish winger from Clyde, whose mercurial talents would eventually limit Canoville’s appearances. But, at the same time, the newcomer befriended Canoville, even taking on the racist abusers, despite receiving death threats himself for his effort. “I couldn’t not intervene,” Pat Nevin said in 2017. “At the time the black players were being told to shut up about it when a lot of them wanted to talk about it. Me speaking about it may have sounded brave - unusual - maybe I was the only one at the time, but it was my background.”

Nevin is certainly unusual, which is what makes his memoir The Accidental Footballer so eagerly-awaited. The Glaswegian has long been a refreshing counter to footballing culture. In the Chelsea dressing room he was called “Weirdo” - a tag he now laughs at - purely because he read the NME and The Guardian, and listened to Joy Division and the Cocteau Twins, rather than Shalamar and Kool & Gang, or whatever his bubble-permed teammates had on their Walkmen at the time. Most entries in the footballing oeuvre follow a refrain of ‘It’s is all I ever wanted to do’. Nevin had other ideas. As a child he wanted to be a teacher like his brothers, or even a professional writer. While his book’s title suggests an unplanned career path, his reluctance to play professionally came more from his love of the game: “I didn’t want anything spoiling my love of playing.” Speaking on a Zoom webinar to publicise the book, Nevin says that in his career he’s worked with plenty of footballers who’ve fallen madly out of love with the sport. These same issues might have warded him off, but didn’t. Football pulled him in, taking him first, as a professional, to Clyde, then Chelsea, Everton, Tranmere, Kilmarnock and Motherwell.

At the end of the 1987-88 season Chelsea were relegated, and Nevin was sold to the Merseyside club, but he remains today a popular figure at Stamford Bridge. This is partly down to the five years he spent there, including three seasons as part of a formidable trio with Kerry Dixon and David Speedie, producing 200 goals between them. The trio contributed to the club’s promotion out of the old Second Division, but couldn’t prevent it yo-yoing back down again, leading to Nevin’s departure. He didn’t, though, cut his ties completely, and continues to work for Chelsea TV, the club’s website and matchday programmes. Thankfully, things have moved on since the disgraceful days of Canoville and Nevin’s playing days together, and the Bridge is mostly a more socially reconstructed place, with the club doing much in football’s fight against racism.

As the book and, indeed, the Zoom webinar underlines, Nevin is one of football’s rarer coves. Eloquent and clearly intelligent, his BBC radio commentaries demonstrate a view of the game that is thankfully bereft of the monosyllabic cliches of his peers (an apocryphal tale has it that he once accepted a bet - possibly from Danny Baker - to work David Bowie references into his commentary of a Scottish league game some years ago, allegedly with statements such as “He’s a terrific Station To Station player”. Nevin has been asked by this blogger to confirm the story, but would be delightful if true). 

Music, however, remains his passion. He still gets a buzz, he says, from discovering new material, especially music you’ll not have heard of. On the wall behind him as he talks on Zoom, Bowie’s Heroes is placed prominently, along with My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. Each chapter of the book is a song title - The Mighty Wah’s The Story Of The Blues, Elvis Costello’s I Don’t Want To Go To Chelsea, London Calling and numerous Bowie titles, and so on - as it covers the first three phases of his playing career, in Glasgow, London and Merseyside. Each is a convenient fit to the narrative, but it does also emphasise Nevin’s encyclopaedic musical knowledge. 

Pat Nevin: the Johnny Marr years

The webinar meanders between questions about football and questions about music, with anecdotes about writing for the NME (he even shared a flat with that publication’s Adrian Thrills early in the day) and attending John Peel’s birthday parties (despite having played for arch rivals of Peelie’s beloved Liverpool). In his playing days he bore little resemblance to anyone else in the game, looking more like one of the indie rockers he obsessed over. A picture of Nevin in camel overcoat and black beret bears more than a passing similarity to Johnny Marr. He even appeared in a Fuzzbox video. 

So, you could say that in a world of sheep-like social conformity, as football is, Nevin was - and remains to this day - a refreshing alternative. “I loved being called ‘Weirdo’,” he recently told The Times’ Henry Winter. “I remember taking Simple Minds’ album [1982’s New Gold Dream] into the dressing-room, saying, ‘You should listen to this,’ and it was, ‘Get that shit off’. Seven years later they’re all listening to Simple Minds.” Today he will occasionally DJ in clubs, playing Joy Division and the butterfly it produced, New Order, amongst his decidedly well-curated set lists.

After music, one of Nevin's other big differentiators from regular footballing folk is that he’s a deep thinker. Not that all footballers are brain dead, of course, but at the core of The Accidental Footballer is an unease with the sporting world around him. Preferring a night out at the Royal Ballet, rather than Stringfellows, would have marked a player out in the 1980s and, frankly does still. We shouldn’t, here, discount the fact that professional, elite football still doesn’t have an openly gay player, not that Nevin is. But football has never managed difference well. Chelsea’s Graeme Le Saux, who cites Nevin as a role model, was frequently the subject of homophobic innuendo, simply because he, too, read The Guardian, could string a sentence together, and didn’t pursue the same lifestyle as others in the sport. Just the other day my girlfriend remarked that you never see any professional players of an Indian or Pakistani background. How things have come since Paul Canoville made his debut, though after the apparent booing during the taking-the-knee gesture before Chelsea’s game at Aston Villa last Sunday, we may not have come as far as we’d like to think.

Paul Canoville in action

The Accidental Footballer shows a football professional whose view of the game, limited to just the three phases of his career, is one of contrast. Journalistically, it recalls the highs (and lows) of playing and balances them with the cultural upheavals of the period. At 58, Nevin is proud of his roots and the principles he acquired from growing up in an East Glasgow tenement. His dad boxed, and taught him how to do likewise. When he lost a playground fight with five other boys, he joined his brothers in exacting revenge, one by one. For such a relatively small feller, he never shirked. It’s what has empowered Nevin to take up causes, such as the racism Canoville faced, even confronting members of the National Front. The same with tackling the homophobia he and Le Saux faced, simply for being…well, nothing more than different.

“We’ve not fixed racism,” he told the Royal Blue Mersey Everton fan site in an interview about The Accidental Footballer. “We’ve come a decent distance but we’ve not fixed it within society. We’ve certainly not fixed homophobia. But when a footballer comes out, that will normalise it further. There’ll be a hell of a lot of people like me, standing shoulder to shoulder, fighting for the cause. It will be great to see when it happens.”

One of the more uncompromising sections of the book focuses on the historic sexual abuse scandal that emerged in 1996 surrounding Celtic Boys Club. Nevin trained with the club himself as a youngster, but was released for being too small. Revelations by former Scottish international-turned talkSport presenter Alan Brazil, that he’d been abused by a club coach, reverberated around the game, opening up the path to wider allegations of abuse at other clubs, Chelsea included. “I couldn’t not write about what happened at Celtic Boys,” Nevin told Royal Blue Mersey. Ignorance, he says, was the result of a lack of eduction. “That level of ignorance does not exist anymore, which is great, but it’s really sad that it took that to actually happen.” He says that none of the kids involved were to blame: “Certainly not the ones who suffered from it, but neither were the other kids who weren’t abused.” Paedophiles, he says, are good at hiding. “They’re manipulative. So I had to write about it, although there were plenty of other things in the book I enjoyed writing about more than that.”

Indeed there are. Music, largely. His friendship with Peel - even sitting in for him on Radio 1 - his regular DJing sets at The Victoria pub in Dalston, the gigs he worked around his playing schedule (even travelling to Paris midweek to see the Cocteaus), or even being excused the second half of a Chelsea game to get to see New Order. But even in his music life, Nevin’s stance on things could attract trouble - he once had a knife pulled on him at a Clash concert by a thug who took issue with his campaign against racism. He still stands against it, and wholeheartedly embraces the institutional approach football now takes against it. “The great thing now is that I don’t have to stand up there shouting and bawling in front of everyone else,” Nevin told Sky Sports recently. “There are better people doing it now. Raheem Sterling can do it. Marcus Rashford can do it. But I do feel vindicated that I was there saying it all the time.” Nevin remains active with the Paul Canoville Foundation, and he is clearly pleased that things have moved on since his teammate’s horrific 1983 debut. “You won’t see a banner for me at [Stamford Bridge] but you will see one for Canners and that is great. I don’t need a banner. Canners, for what he did, needed a banner. It is so important.”

By focusing on his playing years, which ended in 2000 after returning to his native Scotland to turn out for Kilmarnock and later Motherwell, The Accidental Footballer draws attention to Nevin’s time in the game when things, like the player himself, were different. The Premier League was only eight years old when he retired, and he’d largely missed out on the astonishing wealth that professionals today command. Not that he seems bothered. He’s a proud working class Glaswegian, whose principles are solidly based on a fairer society. 

To return to my premise, he remains one of my favourite people in football and, for those five years he graced Chelsea’s numbers, for his history at my club. But, mostly, he’s one of my favourite individuals - erudite, intelligent, principled but not hectoring, and with - without doubt - the finest Zoom background you will ever see a footballer, past or present, putting on show.

The Accidental Tourist is out now, published by Moonray.