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.

David Bowie: the Brilliant Adventure

This isn’t the first and won’t be the last time that I offer you, dear reader, thoughts on another posthumous David Bowie release, but since the old girl’s untimely demise on 10 January 2016 there hs been no shortage of reminders of why, musically, he was one of the most intriguing figures of the rock era. It’s an interest that inevitably appeals to the committed fan like me, but also provides the opportunity of discovery to those who’ve hitherto been indifferent throughout the six decades in  which Bowie spent time in recording studios.

Cynics will argue that the box sets and remastered reissues are exercises in reselling what's already been bought, but within each new package marketed since Bowie’s death there has usually been something to justify the outlay (always a tough ask - pricey editions of classic albums, offering alternative mixes and outtakes barely different from the established tracks rarely bring anything new). For some of us, of course, no justification is required, but the latest package - the fifth in a series of retrospective gatherings of original and live albums plus extras - is genuinely enticing. 

Brilliant Adventure (1992-2001) covers a period in which Bowie had to compete with Britpop, a not always fruitful exercise, despite his exalted status and the fact that many of that era’s bands were consciously doffing caps to the very era from which Bowie sprang forth. Brutally, he simply wasn’t  fashionable any more. That extraordinary run of albums, from Hunky Dory to at least Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) meant nothing. By the time the 1990s came along, David Bowie was simply another middle-aged rock star, one of those superannuated Live Aid veterans with nothing new to say. In fairness, the albums that comprise Brilliant Adventure would never match the creative zenith of the 1970s, but they don’t come up short for eclecticism - as did, frankly, every album he had committed to tape. What confounded critics at the time was there appeared to be an attempt by The Dame to look relevant, with the drum’n’bass of singles like Little Wonder suggesting cultural appropriation. The truth is, being the music magpie that he was, Bowie had always drawn influence from whatever genres took his fancy.

And so, Brilliant Adventure - which includes the albums Black Tie White Noise, Outside, Earthling, Hours and the Buddha Of Suburbia soundtrack - skips through a varied palette, from conventional pop to rock, electronica and other more ‘urban’ sources. They also reflect a maturing and, at times, more reflective Bowie, celebrating his marriage to Iman, and starting to loosen any residual hangups that may have been lingering about Being David Bowie. That is also reflected in Bowie’s live performances at the time, reflected on Brilliant Adventure with the terrific live album recorded in June 2000 at the BBC Radio Theatre in London as a companion to that year’s legendary Glastonbury headline performance. It was originally only available as a third disc in a limited-edition version of Bowie At The Beeb, which contained featured BBC sessions from the ’60s and ’70s. Notable to these live sets in 2000 was the breadth of ‘classic’ Bowie songs from his imperious phase, reflecting a relaxed reconnection with the big hits from that time that he’d try to move away from.

But the big draw of Brilliant Adventure is Toy, a semi-mythical album of new versions of songs from the very beginning of Bowie’s career, reworked by the singer and the touring musicians he was working with as the new century began. Recorded shortly after Glastonbury, the album was originally intended to be released in 2001, but the record company decided against it, for reasons probably best explained by them at the time. Returning to and revising early-career material is nothing new: Nick Mason put together his Saucerful Of Secrets outfit with Gary Kemp, Guy Pratt and others to perform the music of Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd, shedding remarkable light on the band’s early psychedelia with surprisingly current impact. Toy follows a similar philosophy, featuring new interpretations of tracks first recorded between 1964 and 1971, when Bowie was - pun intended - toying with a variety of musical styles, from Anthony Newley-style vaudeville to beat pop. 

He consciously returned to this era in 1999 when he appeared in an episode of VH1’s Storytellers and resurrected the frenetic Can’t Help Thinking About Me, the first time it had been performed in 30 years. This inspired the idea for Toy, taking his then-stage band (which included Gail Ann Dorsey, Earl Slick, Mike Garson and Sterling Campbell) into the studio and playing the old songs ‘live’, selecting the tracks with the best takes for the album. “The songs are so alive and full of colour,” Bowie said in 2001. “They jump out of the speakers. It’s really hard to believe that they were written so long ago.” 

Despite his enthusiasm, the Toy tracks didn’t appear until 2011 when they were leaked online, but from today we get to hear them - for most of us - for the first time. Toy is not revelatory: it may be a ‘lost’ album, but the songs are ultimately and obviously not new. But they do represent a phase of Bowie’s life that I have taken inordinate pleasure from, when he was happy in his own skin, happy in life, and comfortable with his legacy.

“I’ve pulled together a selection of songs from a somewhat unusual reservoir and booked time in a studio,” he wrote at the time Toy was originally due to be released. “I still get really elated by the spontaneous event and cannot wait to sit in a claustrophobic space with seven other energetic people and sing till my tits drop off.” That in itself indicates the carefree nature of Toy, seemingly - and, simply - having fun, a notion that rock stars, and especially rock stars with Bowie’s history - are not normally known for. For those weaned on Let’s Dance, Heroes, Life On Mars?, The Jean Genie, Changes and more, only the utmost completist will already be familiar 1967’s Silly Boy Blue, the groovy I Dig Everything from 1966, or the cover of Here Comes The Night recorded in the early 1970s. It still gives some sense of hearing new music. Even if it’s new-old music.

You could argue that, like 1973’s Pin Ups album, a stop-gap of questionable covers, retreading old material was nothing more than an exercise in rehashing but, at risk of sounding blinkered, it doesn’t feel like that. As his statement suggested, he was really having a laugh, the side of ‘Brixton Dave’ that has endeared him to me almost as much as the music. After the Toy sessions there were two more new albums, Heathen and Reality. And then, on the German leg of the tour for that last album, Bowie abruptly disappeared from view amid health concerns, only resurfacing, seemingly out of nowhere, with the incredible The Next Day in 2013, and then the semi-mystical event that was Blackstar, released on Bowie’s 69th birthday. Two days before his death.

Toy might, then, have a sentimental value, as all of the posthumous releases have. But it does plug a hole in our knowledge of David Bowie’s work. It certainly doesn’t feel like a scraping of the barrel, but it hardly represents a collection of missing gems. “Toy is like a moment in time, captured in an amber of joy, fire and energy,” says co-producer Mark Plati, who worked closely with Bowie in the 1990s. “It’s the sound of people happy to be playing music.” And he adds: “From time to time, he used to say ‘Mark, this is our album’, I think because he knew I was so deeply in the trenches with him on that journey. I’m happy to finally be able to say it now belongs to all of us.”

Toy is released today as part of the Brilliant Adventures (1992-2001) box set. An expanded three-CD edition, Toy Box, will be released on 7 January next year, the day before what would have been David Bowie’s 75th birthday.

End of the Q

On 8 September, 1986, I started my first proper, grown-up job after secondary school. It required moving from London to the quaint Shropshire town of Ludlow to join the staff of a soon-to-be-launched magazine, LM. Leaving home at 18, just as my school contemporaries were doing the same, but heading off to university instead, I became a staff writer on a publication aiming to tap into the so-called men’s lifestyle market, drawing on the apparent mid-80s young male obsession with music, fashion and culture.

The difference, however, between us and, say Face or i-D magazine - the-then big two - was that they were embedded in Soho, while we were trying to compete from a cattle market town in the middle of nowhere, backed by a publisher best known for computer games magazines for teenage boys. Worse was to come, however. A month after I arrived in Ludlow, EMAP - the stable responsible for the mighty Smash Hits - launched Q, the self-styled ‘Modern guide to music and more’. Founded by Mark Ellen and David Hepworth, who’d been responsible for turning ‘ver Hits’ and Just Seventeen into two of the best-selling magazines on Planet Earth (I’m not kidding - at one point Smash Hits was shipping more than four million copies a fortnight), Q instantly established itself as the magazine to aspire to.

For a start, it had advertising. Major advertising. The sort of advertising that publishers courted more than any other - lucrative, big-spending brands like Coca-Cola and TDK (this still being the nascent years of the Compact Disc). Secondly, Ellen and Hepworth - by now, stalwarts of British music journalism (they were the 'muso' Whistle Test presenters who anchored Bob Geldof’s sweary bit during Live Aid) - had credibility in the music industry. Not that my magazine didn’t: it had drawn writers from the pages of Melody Maker, She and My Guy, plus this former Boots the Chemist part-time shelf-filler and school magazine writer (i.e. 'inexpensive') and was aiming itself at a 17-plus demographic. We had plenty of music, from the Psychedelic Furs and Frankie Goes To Hollywood to Level 42 (my first big-name, Top 40 interview, y’all), but steered consciously into non-music topics, such as an entire issue focused on The Big Scary Thing of its day, HIV/AIDS.

Q, on the other hand, had a different brief. For a start, it was an out-and-out music magazine aimed at the older consumer (CD-buying types in - gasp! - their 30s who, yes, may have been into Dire Straits, but because of the CD, were repurchasing their record collections to experience them with pristine digital sound™). For many of Q's readers, it was about reconnecting with the artists of their teenage years. Hence Q’s first issue featuring Paul McCartney on its cover and an interview with Bob Dylan, with Rod Stewart, Paul Simon, Elton John and Genesis following on the fronts of the next two issues. We might look back upon this now as the emergence of Dad Rock, but as Hepworth himself pointed out in a recent eulogy in the New Statesman to the child he co-parented, Q was as much a reflection of the growing acceptance that the classic rock era was, in fact OK. Not that Q - which publishes its final edition today - was ever going to be a shrine to the hoary and the old. Over 414 issues and 34 years, it evolved into something more than a platform for wistful nostalgia, pushing into a more eclectic reflection of contemporary music, whatever labels that might draw.

Wrapped up in our own launch over at LM, we were, perhaps, somewhat market-ignorant as to what was going on in the very music press we’d all grown up on. Melody Maker, the NME et al had become, at times, a little outré for their own good, like bolshy students from ultra-middle class backgrounds just trying to be edgy. Q did it differently. If it interviewed Mick Jagger - an achievement in itself - it would do so with both reverence but also the gentle, impish fun Ellen and Hepworth had honed at Smash Hits. The writers they drew on - also EMAP regulars - bought into the philosophy. One of the magazine’s greatest features became the monthly Who The Hell Does XXX Think He/She Is? interview written by the genius that was Tom Hibbert. With each issue he’d meet - and ever-so gently rib - contemporary cultural figures of the '80s and early '90s such as Jeffrey Archer, Samantha Fox, Jeremy Beadle or Kate Bush (whom, along with Ringo Starr and Boy George wouldn’t take too fondly to Hibbert’s profiling). He even got Ronnie Biggs and Jimmy Savile, the latter clearly before the world knew better.

Ultimately, though, Q readers wanted to read about music. They were musically literate and, unlike the readership of Q’s junior sibling/forebear Smash Hits, looking for more than what colour a pop star’s socks were (though don’t mock it - such ephemera, alongside song lyrics, was absolutely core to the Hits’ phenomenal success). The core Q audience wanted to read about new albums from The Who or Ray Davies as much as hear them wax on about Won’t Get Fooled Again or Waterloo Sunset. They wanted to read about Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen, but also about Hüsker Dü and the Beastie Boys. Pink Floyd going out on tour again mattered as much to them as some whipper-snappers from Ireland coming along with an album called The Joshua Tree. Yeah, whatever did happen to U2?

Humour was one of the key ingredients Ellen and Hepworth imported from Smash Hits. As someone who has, in recent years, spent an inordinate amount of time in their company at recordings of their Word In Your Ear podcast (itself salvaged from the now-defunct magazine The Word), I know what gentle fun they are responsible for. Pop music and pop culture in general is, to them, a thing of bemusement more than intense Guardian-style navel gazing. Thus, the Hits' comedy tagging that bestowed David Bowie with ‘The Dame’ moniker and McCartney as ‘Mr Fab Macca Whacky Thumbs Aloft’ found its way into Q. Such japery very often served to let the air out of the pomposity that rock music often attaches itself to. In his New Statesman piece, Hepworth recalled the unbridled joy at some of Q’s caption writing: “The picture of Led Zeppelin in full flight with Robert Plant howling into the microphone was headlined ‘The Hoarse Foreman Of The Apocalypse’. Of course it was. The one celebrating the unlikely pairing of Toyah [Wilcox] and Robert Fripp, ‘Mr Chalk Loves Mrs Cheese’. Couldn't be anything else.” Plant, for one, would have liked that. The Fripp/Wilcox view possibly less so.

The reason that Q always did well, though, was that it hired the very best music writers. As an aspiring schoolboy hack in the early 1980s, I looked up to the clique of music journalists whose bylines appeared consistently in the NME, Melody Maker or Sounds. Many found their way into Q, like Danny Kelly (now a colossus of sports radio, but editor of the NME when it ran my first ever live review). Later on, Q added extraordinarily entertaining writers like Andrew Collins and Stewart Maconie. Their appointment coincided with that glorious Britpop period, when it became OK to like guitar music again, as Oasis, Blur, Pulp and the like strode the world with a British swagger not seen in a generation. It would, though, still take a while before Q stalwarts like Eric Clapton, Sting, Springsteen and The Beatles disappeared from its covers to accommodate the new breed: The Stone Roses appeared on the front of Q46 in July 1990 (before subsequent editions falling back to the Stones, the Floyd and McCartney), with Suede the next cover stars of their time in February 1993. Q, though, has never since tried to be hipper than you, daddio. In latter years it has found space for Lady Gaga, Ed Sheehan and Jake Bugg, as much as maintaining a healthy recurrence of the Wellers and Gallaghers of this world. And while, under more recent editorship, it has sought to become less dependent on the tried and tested, and even delved into murkier waters than Q readers of my vintage might have found comfortable, it has never tried to be pretentious. As a good music magazine should be, it has always presented new acts and old equally as points of genuine editorial interest.

Strangely, though, it hasn’t been changing musical tastes and listening habits that has done for Q: it’s been - like half the economy - COVID-19. “The pandemic did for us and there was nothing more to it than that,” wrote Ted Kessler, the magazine’s final editor. German conglomerate Bauer, its latest owner, had evidently tried to sell the title, but in these times of waining interest in print media overall, Q has, from today’s final edition, gone the way of so many others. The long-term decline of print journalism is one thing, but so, too, is the future of music journalism. British music journalism came of age in the 1970s, when the NME, Melody Maker, Sounds and others moved the rock era on, embraced punk and New Wave, and then espoused the varieties of pop in the '80s. Sure, it became politicised by the Thatcher era, but then pop became politicised in the Cool Britannia era when Tony Blair hosted Noel G at No.10. Politics was, however, never core to the music press, even when movements like Red Wedge were trying to engage a disaffected youth. The fact remains that the youth today have found other things to obsess over, and it's not quite what direction the 1975 will take with their next album.

Gratuitous plug for a mate of mine who finally made it into Q in 2018

The demise of Q is, then, also a reflection of the demise of music journalism as a must-have in people’s lives. This is where the relevance of a monthly print magazine like Q is questioned. Even though it has, for some time, been readily available as an iPad edition, digital consumption is dropping off. Sadly, the traditions of print journalism - certainly the traditions that inspired me to sit down at a typewriter at the age of 15 - are ebbing away. The attrition is slow, but it is there.

Q, however, appears to have fallen victim to the accountants’ scourge, as publishers continue to find ways to offload venerable, traditional properties that might still have an audience, but not the kind of paying audience they once had (Q sold more than 200,000 copies a month at its peak, it’s circulation in more recent times just above 40,000). "Frankly, [Q] was never really built for the tappety-tappety world of digital," wrote Hepworth in his New Statesman piece. "When somebody put on a record by Aphex Twin, chief proof reader and leading Dylan scholar John Bauldie would look over his glasses and shout, ‘Will somebody get that fax?’ in gleeful emulation of a disapproving adult. That was the magazine’s secret sauce. Nobody was trying to be hipper than thou or younger than they were, and nobody was trying to pretend they liked things that they didn’t." And that was, indeed its charm. It was written for me by people like me. They knew what they liked, but weren’t afraid of reading about something they didn’t know they would like.

It’s here I should mention the reviews section of Q. As entertaining as the features always were, the reviews - actually, the thing that got me interested in music journalism as a career in the first place - were always well considered, evenly scored and mostly respectful. A ’three’, while clearly not a ‘five’, was still not a bad result. But while that remained Q’s constant, over 414 editions, other tides were shifting. The bottom line, then, is that its original brief could never be adapted to changing tastes.

Even after the McCartneys and Claptons had been swapped for the U2s and the Radioheads, and then the latter for increasingly more contemporary names, contemporary sources of information about music had changed, too. The sad aspect of this is that under its last editor, Ted Kessler, Q had moved so far away from its ‘old fart’ origins, that it was providing - for those who were interested - a still indispensable digest of what was on-the-money-sharp in music land. This wasn’t what Q was launched for, but it had evolved over 34 years into something that still represented the very best of music journalism. To quote Joni Mitchell - once as core Q demographic-interest as you could find - “Don't it always seem to go/That you don't know what you've got ’til it's gone.”