Research - History of the Magazine
The New Musical Express, popularly known by initialism NME, created by Theodore Smythson, is a music journalism publication in the United Kingdom, published weekly since March 1952. It started as a music newspaper, and gradually moved toward a magazine format during the 1980s, changing from newsprint in 1998. It was the first British paper to include a singles chart, in the 14 November 1952 edition. In the 1970s it became the best-selling British music newspaper. During the period 1972 to 1976, it was particularly associated with gonzo journalism (self-involved reporting), then became closely associated with punk rock through the writing of Tony Parsons.
An online version of NME, NME.com, was launched in 1996. It is now the world's biggest standalone music site, with over 7 million users per month.Mike Williams was named as NME editor on 31 May 2012, taking over from Krissi Murison on 25 June 2012. NME.com has been edited most recently by Luke Lewis.
The paper's first issue was published on 7 March 1952 after the “Accordion Times and Musical Express” (from 4 October 1946) was bought by London music promoter Maurice Kinn, for the sum of £1,000, just 15 minutes before it was due to be officially closed. It was relaunched as theNew Musical Express. It was initially published in a non-glossy tabloid format on standard newsprint. On 14 November 1952, taking its cue from the US magazine Billboard, it created the first UK Singles Chart, a list of the Top Twelve best-selling singles. The first of these was, in contrast to more recent charts, a top twelve sourced by the magazine itself from sales in regional stores around the UK. The first number one was "Here in My Heart" by Al Martino.
1960's
During the 1960s the paper championed the new British groups emerging at the time. The NME circulation peaked under Andy Gray, Editor 1957–1972, with a figure of 306,881 for the period from January to June 1964. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones were frequently featured on the front cover. These and other artists also appeared at the NME Poll Winners' Concert, an awards event that featured artists voted as most popular by the paper's readers. The concert also featured an awards ceremony where the poll winners would collect their awards. The NME Poll Winners' Concerts took place between 1959 and 1972. From 1964 onwards they were filmed, edited and then transmitted on British television a few weeks after they had taken place. The latter part of the 1960s saw the paper chart the rise of psychedelia and the continued dominance of British groups of the time. During this period some sections of pop music began to be designated as Rock. The paper became engaged in a sometimes tense rivalry with its fellow weekly music paper Melody Maker; however, NME sales were healthy, with the paper selling as many as 200,000 issues per week, making it one of the UK's biggest sellers at the time.
1970's
After sales had plummeted to 60,000 and a review of guitar instrumentalist Duane Eddy had been printed which began with the immortal words 'On this, his 35th album, we find Duane in as good as voice as ever,' the NME had been told to rethink its policies or die on the vine. By the early 1970s, NME had lost ground to Melody Maker, as its coverage of music had failed to keep pace with the development of rock music, particularly during the early years of psychedelia and progressive rock. In early 1972 the paper found itself on the verge of closure by its owners IPC (who had bought the paper from Kinn in 1963). According to Nick Kent (soon to play a prominent part in the paper's revival): Adding to the irony of this review, in the 1960 NME Reader's Poll, Duane Eddy was the winner of the award for Number One World Musical Personality, taking first place ahead of consistent winner Elvis Presley.
Alan Smith was made editor and was given a short period of time by IPC to turn things around quickly or face closure. As a result the paper's coverage changed radically from an uncritical and rather reverential showbiz-oriented paper to something intended to be smarter, hipper, more cynical and funnier than any mainstream British music paper had previously been (an approach influenced mainly by writers such as Tom Wolfe and Lester Bangs). To achieve this, Smith and his assistant editor Nick Logan raided the underground press for its best writers, such as Charles Shaar Murrayand Nick Kent, recruited other writers such as Tony Tyler, Ian MacDonald and Californian Danny Holloway. By the time Smith handed the editor's chair to Logan in mid-1973, the paper was selling nearly 300,000 copies per week and was outstripping its other weekly rivals, Melody Maker, Disc,Record Mirror and Sounds.
According to MacDonald:
I think all the other papers knew by 1974 that NME had become the best music paper in Britain. We had most of the best writers and photographers, the best layouts, that sense of style of humour and a feeling of real adventure. We also set out to beat Melody Maker on its strong suit: being the serious, responsible journal of record. We did Looking Back and Consumer Guide features that beat the competition out of sight, and we did this not just to surpass our rivals but because we reckoned that rock had finished its first wind around 1969/70 and deserved to be treated as history, as a canon of work. We wanted to see where we'd got to, sort out this huge amount of stuff that had poured out since the mid '60s. Everyone on the paper was into this. Led Zeppelin topped the "NME Pop Poll" for consecutive three years (1974–76) under the category of the best "Vocal Group"
In 1976, NME lambasted German pioneer electronic band Kraftwerk with this title: This is what your fathers fought to save you from.... The article said that the "electronic melodies flowed as slowly as a piece of garbage floating down the polluted Rhine". The year 1976 also saw punk rock arrive on what some people perceived to be a stagnant music scene. The NME gave the Sex Pistols their first music-press coverage in a live review of their performance at the Marquee in February that year, but overall they were slow to cover this new phenomenon in comparison to Sounds and Melody Maker, where Jonh Ingham and Caroline Coon respectively were early champions of punk. Although articles by the likes of Mick Farren (whose article "The Titanic Sails at Dawn" called for a new street-led rock movement in response to stadium rock) were published by the NME that summer, it was felt that younger writing was needed to credibly cover the emerging punk movement, and the paper advertised for a pair of "hip young gunslingers" to join their editorial staff. This resulted in the recruitment of Tony Parsons andJulie Burchill. The pair rapidly became champions of the Punk scene and created a new tone for the paper. Parsons' time at NME is reflected in his 2005 novel Stories We Could Tell, about the misadventures of three young music-paper journalists on the night of 16 August 1977, the night Elvis Presley died.
The paper also became more openly political during the time of Punk. Its cover would sometimes feature youth-oriented issues rather than a musical act. The paper took an editorial stance against political parties like the National Front. With the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 the paper took a broadly socialist stance for much of the following decade.In 1978 Logan moved on, and his deputy Neil Spencer was made editor. One of his earliest tasks was to oversee a redesign of the paper by Barney Bubbles, which included the logo still used on the paper's masthead today (albeit in a modified form) – this made its first appearance towards the end of 1978. Spencer's time as editor also coincided with the emergence of Post-Punk acts such as Joy Division and Gang of Four. This development was reflected in the writing of Ian Penman and Paul Morley. Danny Baker, who began as an NME writer around this time, had a more straightforward and populist style.
1980's
In 1981 the NME released the influential C81 cassette-tape album in conjunction with Rough Trade Records, available to readers by mail order at a low price. The tape featured a number of then up-and-coming bands, including Aztec Camera, Orange Juice, Linx and Scritti Politti, as well as a number of more established artists such as Robert Wyatt, Pere Ubu, the Buzzcocksand Ian Dury. A second tape, C86, was released in 1986. The NME responded to the Thatcher era by espousing socialism through movements such as Red Wedge. In the week of the 1987 election, the paper featured an interview with the leader of the Labour Party, Neil Kinnock, who appeared on the paper's cover. He had appeared on the cover once two years before, in April 1985. Writers at this time included Mat Snow, Barney Hoskyns, Paolo Hewitt, Danny Kelly, Chris Bohn (known in his later years at the paper as 'Biba Kopf'), Steven Wells and David Quantick.
However sales were dropping, and by the mid-1980s, NME had hit a rough patch and was in danger of closing. During this period (now under the editorship of Ian Pye, who replaced Neil Spencer in 1985), they were split between those who wanted to write about hip hop, a genre that was relatively new to the UK, and those who wanted to stick to rock music. Sales were apparently lower when photos of hip hop artists appeared on the front and this led to the paper suffering as the lack of direction became even more apparent to readers. A number of features entirely unrelated to music appeared on the cover in this era, including a piece by William Leith on computer crime and articles by Stuart Cosgrove on such subjects as the politics of sport and the presence of American troops in Britain, with Elvis Presley appearing on the cover not for musical reasons but as a political symbol.
The NME was generally thought to be rudderless at this time, with staff pulling simultaneously in a number of directions in what came to be known as the "hip-hop wars". It was haemorrhaging readers who were deserting NME in favour of Nick Logan's two creations The Face and Smash Hits. This was brought to a head when the paper was about to publish a poster of an insert contained in the Dead Kennedys' album Frankenchrist. The insert was a painting by H.R. Giger called Penis Landscape, then a subject of an obscenity lawsuit in the US. In the summer and autumn of 1987, three senior editorial staff were sacked, including Pye, media editor Stuart Cosgrove and art editor Joe Ewart. Former Sounds editor Alan Lewis was brought in to rescue the paper, mirroring Alan Smith's revival a decade and a half before.
Some commented at this time that the NME had become less intellectual in its writing style and less inventive musically. Initially, NME writers themselves were ill at ease with the new regime, with most signing a letter of no confidence in Alan Lewis shortly after he took over. However, this new direction for the NME proved to be a commercial success and the paper brought in new writers such as Andrew Collins, Stuart Maconie, Mary Anne Hobbs and Steve Lamacq to give it a stronger identity and sense of direction, although Mark Sinker left in 1988 after the paper refused to publish a negative review he wrote of U2's Rattle and Hum. Initially many of the bands on the C86 tape were championed as well as the rise of Gothic rock bands but new bands such as the Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses were coming out of Manchester. One scene over these years was Acid House which spawned "Madchester" which helped give the paper a new lease of life. By the end of the decade, Danny Kelly had replaced Alan Lewis as editor.
1990's
By the end of 1990, the Madchester scene was dying off, and NME had started to report on new bands coming from the US, mainly from Seattle. These bands would form a new movement called Grunge and by far the most popular bands were Nirvana and Pearl Jam. The NME took to Grunge very slowly ("Sounds" was the first British music paper to write about grunge with John Robb being the first person to interview Nirvana.Melody Maker was more enthusiastic early on, largely through the efforts of Everett True, who had previously written for NME under the name "The Legend!"). For the most part, NME only became interested in grunge after Nevermind became popular. Although it still supported new British bands, the paper was dominated by American bands, as was the music scene in general.NME started 1990 in the thick of the Madchester scene, covering the new British indie bands and shoegazers.
Although the period from 1991 to 1993 was dominated by American bands like Nirvana, British bands were not ignored. The NME still covered the Indie scene and was involved with a war of words with a new band called Manic Street Preachers who were criticising the NME for what they saw as an elitist view of bands they would champion. This came to a head in 1991 when during an interview with Steve Lamacq, Richey Edwardswould confirm the band's position by carving "4real" into his arm with a razor blade. By 1992, the Madchester scene had died and along with The Manics, some new British bands were beginning to appear. Suede were quickly hailed by the paper as an alternative to the heavy grunge sound and hailed as the start of a new British music scene. Grunge however was still the dominant force, but the rise of new British bands would become something the paper would focus on more and more.
In 1992, the NME also had a very public dispute with its former hero Morrissey due to allegations that he had used racist lyrics and imagery. This erupted after a concert at Finsbury Park where Morrissey was seen to drape himself in a Union Flag. The series of articles which followed in the next edition of NME soured Morrissey's relationship with the paper and this led to Morrissey's not speaking to the paper again for over a decade. When Morrissey did eventually speak to the NME in 2003, he made it clear it was only because the three writers concerned had long since left.
Later in 1992, Steve Sutherland, previously assistant editor of Melody Maker, was brought in as the NME's editor to replace Danny Kelly. Andrew Collins, Stuart Maconie, Steve Lamacqand Mary Anne Hobbs all left the NME in protest, and moved to Select; Collins, Maconie and Lamacq would all also write for Q, while Lamacq would join Melody Maker in 1997. Kelly, Collins, Maconie, Lamacq and Hobbs would all subsequently become prominent broadcasters with BBC Radio 1 as it reinvented itself under Matthew Bannister.
In April 1994 Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain was found dead, a story which affected not only his fans and readers of the NME, but would see a massive change in British music. Grunge was about to be replaced by Britpop, a new form of music influenced by British music of the 1960s and British culture. The term was coined by NME after the band Blur released their album Parklife in the same month of Cobain's death. Britpop began to fill the musical and cultural void left after Cobain's death, and with Blur's success and the rise of a new group from Manchester called Oasis Britpop would continue to explode for the rest of 1994. By the end of the year Blur and Oasis were the two biggest bands in the UK and sales of the NME were increasing thanks to the Britpop effect. In 1995 NME covered many of these new bands, and many of the bands played the NME Stage at that year's Glastonbury Festival where the paper had been sponsoring the second stage at the festival since 1993. This would be their last year sponsoring the stage; subsequently the stage would be known as the 'Other Stage'.
In August 1995 Blur and Oasis planned to release singles on the same day in a mass of media publicity. Steve Sutherland put the story on the front page of the paper. He was criticised for playing up the duel between the bands. Blur won the 'race' for the top of the charts, and the resulting fallout from the publicity led to the paper enjoying increased sales during the 1990s as Britpop became the dominant musical genre. After this peak the paper experienced a slow decline as Britpop burned itself out fairly rapidly over the next few years. This left the paper directionless again, and attempts to embrace the rise of DJ culture in the late 1990s only led to the paper being criticised for not supporting rock or indie music. The paper did attempt to return to its highly politicised 1980s incarnation by running a cover story in March 1998 condemning Tony Blair, who had previously associated himself with Britpop bands such as Oasis, and this received a certain level of attention in the wider media, but was generally not seen as coherent or well-argued.
Sutherland did attempt to cover newer bands but one cover feature on Godspeed You! Black Emperor in 1999 saw the paper dip to a sales low, and Sutherland later stated in his weekly editorial that he regretted putting them on the cover. For many this was seen as an affront to the principles of the paper and sales reached a low point at the turn of the millennium.
2000s. From the issue of 21 March 1998, the paper is no longer printed on newsprint, and more recently it has shifted to tabloid size with full, glossy, colour covers.
2000's
In 2000 Steve Sutherland left to become Brand Director of the NME, replaced as editor by 26-year-old Melody Maker writer Ben Knowles. In the same year Melody Maker officially merged with the NME, and many speculated the NME would be next to close, as the weekly music-magazine market was shrinking - the monthly magazine Select, which had thrived especially during Britpop, was closed down within a week of Melody Maker. In the early 2000s the NME also attempted somewhat to broaden its coverage again, running cover stories on hip-hop acts such as Jay-Z and Missy Elliott, electronic music pioneer Aphex Twin, Popstars winners Hear'say and R&B groups like Destiny's Child, but as in the 1980s these proved unpopular with much of the paper's readership, and were soon dropped. In 2001 the NME reasserted its position as an influence in new music and helped to introduce bands including The Strokes, The Vines, and The White Stripes.
In 2002 Conor McNicholas was appointed editor. With a new wave of photographers including Dean Chalkley, Andrew Kendall, James Looker and Pieter Van Hattem, and a high turnover of young writers. It focused on new British bands such as The Libertines, Franz Ferdinand, Bloc Party and the Kaiser Chiefs who emerged as "indie music" continued to grow in commercial success. Later, Arctic Monkeys became the standard-bearers of the post-Libertines crop of indie bands, being both successfully championed by the NME and receiving widespread commercial and critical success.
In December 2005 accusations were made that the NME end-of-year poll had been edited for commercial and political reasons. These criticisms were rebutted by McNicholas, who claimed that webzine Londonist.com had got hold of an early draft of the poll. In October 2006 NME launched an Irish version of the magazine called NME Ireland. This coincided with the launch of Club NME in Dublin. Dublin-based band Humanzi were the first to appear on the cover of NME Ireland. Poor sales in the Republic of Ireland resulted from competition from market leader Hot Press and free music magazines Analogue Magazine, Mongrel Magazine and State Magazine. This resulted in the magazine's demise in November 2006.
After the 2008 NME Award nominations, Caroline Sullivan of The Guardian criticised the magazine's lack of diversity, saying: "NME bands" fall within very narrow parameters. In the 80s, the paper prided itself on its coverage of hip hop, R&B and the emerging dance scene which it took seriously and featured prominently – alongside the usual Peel-endorsed indie fare. Now, though, its range of approved bands has dramatically shrunk to a strand embodied by the [Arctic] Monkeys, Babyshambles and Muse – bands who you don't need specialist knowledge to write about and who are just "indie" enough to make readers feel they're part of a club. Like everything else in publishing, this particular direction must be in response to reader demand, but it doesn't half make for a self-limiting magazine.
In May 2008 the magazine received a redesign, aimed at an older readership with a less poppy, more authoritative tone. The first issue of the redesign featured a free seven-inch Coldplay vinyl single. Circulation of the magazine has fallen continuously since 2003. In the second half of 2011, the magazine's circulation was 23,924, 66% down on a 2003 figure of 72,442.
