eoiny says:

In 1989 I completed my Inter Cert and moved schools. My new classmates had bands like Sonic Youth and Pixies scrawled across their school bags, and tattered copies of Melody Maker under their arms. My copies of Smash Hits suddenly seemed childish, and to help with fitting into a new school, I ditched the Hits, and bought Melody Maker.

What an education! Melody Maker opened my ears like no other publication before or since. The journalists were like heroes to me. This was before myspace or streaming songs on the net… The writing dictated what music you bought, I placed all my trust in Melody Maker. I would read all the articles and reviews voraciously before deciding what cassettes to buy. Within a few years I was listening to music from The Pixies, My Bloody Valentine, Mercury Rev, Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, New Order, Saint Etienne, Primal Scream… the list is endless.

At that time the writers were king, journalists like Simon Price, Simon Reynolds, Taylor Parkes, Everett True (Plan B), Neil Kulkarni and the editor Alan Jones all shaped my musical education. True’s missives from Seattle at the height of Grunge really felt like a writer in the eye of a storm.

Melody Maker also treated Brit Pop with a critical distance that was lacking from other publications (stand up NME!), here’s a quick excerpt of Kulkarni’s review of Kula Shaker’s album;

“….Well, fuck the kids. The kids will put this album at Number One. The kids are wrong. The kids are stupid. And, most importantly, “The Kids” DON’T FUCKING EXIST; the fallacy of consensus is created to pull as many tenners as possible into the slipstream, carried along by momentum and NOTHING ELSE. And this month’s high- push-product is Kula Shaker and, Christ all mucking fighty, they’re the worst of the lot…” *

This is typical of the scathing, sardonic writing that epitomized Melody Maker. The paper didn’t suffer fools gladly, its’ writing was passionate whether it was praising the music or ripping it apart. In the pages of Melody Maker the pen really seemed mightier than the sword.

It’s reign eventually ended, Jones went on to edit Uncut, and Everett True gave us the fantastic Plan B.

We need another Melody Maker.

* http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=41&threadid=1936

Colin says:

had to be smash hits, where else could you get all the latest info on E-17, posters and stickers all in the one place!!

Ticket is alright though!

Ken Smith says:

The shortage of thrills growing up in this country 20 years back was so severe that virually any publication dealing with pop culture was poured over, analysed and loved to the very last paragraph.

NME, Sounds, Melody Maker, Smash Hits, even No.1, ferchrissakes but the top of the heap had to be Select magazine.

Maybe this is an age thing, I was 17 when it first appeared in the summer of 1990 but this felt like “my” magazine. You remember that feeling? Virtually impossible now to have that kind of intense connection to a publication. Sure, it got lame and tired at the end as all music mags do (Foggy Notions excepted) and especially when Oasis took over as editors but a few things do stand out from the early days. Let’s go fully retro and do a Top 5, shall we?

5. Guner Behich was on the cover of the first issue. He was the fucking cover star! Fantastic! Issue one was a tribute to Prince and this guy Behich was some kind of nutjob who thought he was the Purple One. I always loved that wonderfully daft decision, it was like “ok, Prince is obviously never going to bother talking to our magazine or any other rag on the planet. Hey, I know, let’s get that bloke down the pub to dress up like him for cover No.1!!!”
Within a year, they are reduced to putting Wendy James from Transvision Vamp on the cover. In her bra, mind…

4. Graham Linehan. Was he pinched from Hot Press or was he just going over to London at that time anyway? Who cares? Linehan wrote the best reviews for the bands you never heard of at the time and made you immediately go out and buy those records. His review of Mercury Rev’s “Yerself is Steam” was so breathtakingly exciting (Remember, Ireland in the early Nineties, not much else happening) that I literally begged people for small loans of cash so I’d have enough to buy it in Freebird. Still have it, on blue vinyl yet! Apart from yerself Jim, no other reviewer has had that instant effect on me. That need to have it NOW effect.

3. Hysterically overblown articles about the British scene at the time. From Sept. 1991, just before Nirvana exploded into public consciousness with “Smells like…” this little beauty…
AMERICA SURRENDERS! British bands trounce US charts!
What musical force of nature are they talking about here? Why, none other than EMF and Jesus Jones, of course. Oh, yes.

And Shoegazing. Sweet, melancholy Shoegazing, the scene that ate itself…so many lists in Select at that time. So many lists of so many bands that so few cared about BUT… there were many scary-starey girls who fronted those bands and who made ideal wallpaper for student walls at the time. Remember the glorious Lush, Cranes, Bleach and Slowdive? No? Oh…

2. But as if to make up for this very OTT accounting of the Brit scene, they were always very fair to the Irish at that time too. Awarding the Fatima Mansions “Viva Dead Ponies” album of the month in November 1990 brought Coughlan to the attention of a much wider audience than he had previously “enjoyed” with Microdisney. For me, that’s the best ever Irish record (besides “Loveless”) and if you haven’t heard it for a while, stick it on. Bugs fuckin’ Bunny, indeed…

Also, in October 1991, making Feile ’91 the festival of the year was so cool! I was at that festival, my first one, and here was a magazine I loved giving it credit!! Incredible!! It got a 6 page spread and one of the pics shows the festival crowd relaxing on Thurles Main St. soaking up the sun. Always loved that pic, shows a load of ugly beer bellies lovingly curling up beside 9 or 10 cans of Carlsberg on a hot afternoon. Sawdoctors fans, y’see, waiting in town before their heroes take to the stage…

One band that never made it to Feile, or anywhere else for that matter, was Into Paradise. Featured in the April 1991 issue, there’s an intentionally (?) hilarious quote where the singer opines “we were never into the self promotion bit” while, on the opposite page, there’s the band posing in Dublin’s Wax Museum with fucking James Joyce and WB Yeats!!! The band were never seen again after this high point in their career…

1. Anyway, to keep on an Irish vein and the reason why Select is the all-time greatest music mag for me is…The Would-Be’s!!! Oh yes, the greatest ever band from Co. Cavan had a full-page spread in the very first issue. And I was madly in love with the sax/trombone player at that time…Ahh, sweet memories…

Magazines, music and sex…these are the ties that bind!

Brian says:

The only magazine I have ever subscribed to was called Comes With A Smile.

It came to my attention after featuring a demo of an M. Ward song I loved on one of the free CDs. But I continued to buy it for the simple reason that although I didn’t know a dozen or so artists interviewed in every issue, I knew I’d find some new favourites. That was the level of trust it warranted. Though the cover-mount CD only featured live or unreleased tracks aimed at bands’ die-hard fans, it was also a great litmus test – if you could be blown away with a b-side, then what were their albums like?

It was a quarterly aimed at a select few while managing to cover a huge range of acts in the length and depth they deserved. I don’t know what the circulation was, but it became an unlikely setter of standards, eventually finding its way to North America and clearly winning the respect of the artists involved.

Great photography and good, solid writing might seem like obvious things to get right, but it went that little bit further. Like having no rating systems on the reviews, so you couldn’t just skim over them. It was an unusual shape too: not quite a hardback, but it looked (and still looks) perfectly at place on a coffee table or book shelf. In that sense they were designed to last, which makes scrounging out the ones you don’t have through eBay a worthwhile exercise.

But like most labours of love, it was a cottage industry based out of some guy’s flat, overcrowded with CD-Rs and unopened mail. I can imagine the heartbreak of toiling over those issues only to get a vacant look and the words “never heard of it” whenever someone asked what you do.

From time to time I still meet people where, just by mentioning it, you find it instantly creates some strange, fraternal bond; a forgotten cult whose members can’t get nostalgic without dreaming of its reappearance.

Unfortunately I don’t think it ever rose above word-of-mouth level, but I will remember it as an education that made you feel like you were doing the discovering yourself. There was little ego, agendas or advertising – a mix that enthralled its readers but ultimately hastened its demise.