Twenty-years-ago this coming Sunday I walked into a newsagent, picked up a copy of the NME, turned to the album reviews section and saw my name in print for the very first time. It was, by some distance, the most exciting moment of my life up until that point. Some claim given that my then band’s debut album had been released days prior, the issue of Kerrang! that sat beside the NME declared said release to be the product of “your new favourite band”, and it was my 22nd birthday. A very good day.
The ink of music weeklies stained the following twenty years. I passed in and out of NME. I moved onto Kerrang! Somewhere along the way my brain broke – or the scaffolding that was holding it together in the first place fractured and fell - and my memories of both institutions are marriages of excitement and illness, sadness and fun, friendship and fallouts. My memories of NME are haunted by literal ghosts, actual people who were there and who now are not and for whom I’d do deals with the devil to speak to again. As for Kerrang!, well, it’s not time to talk about that… yet.
Because this isn’t a piece of writing about what came after but before. It’s about the first issue of the NME I ever bought, the cover depicting the visage of my fallen hero Kurt Cobain, instigating a torrid love affair with both publication and subject matter that has endured throughout the subsequent years. It’s about a world opening before me, way before the existence of digital world spanning webs, that tore a portal out of my shitty little village and offered an escape from an existence that I knew would crush me if I were forced to stay within it forever. There were people like me! There were photos of them! Maybe I will meet some of them someday! They look like they’re having fun! We will go to gigs together and I will not feel so insufferably lonely!
Not that I’m always on my own. I’ve got Craig. We walk to the newsagent before school every Wednesday, talking about whether Suede will be able to survive without Bernard Butler or whether Elastica will ever make another album. We talk about these things with the uppermost sincerity, like these things actually matter in any way that matters beyond a place in London that sounds magical called Camden, or the immediate vicinity of our weekly pilgrimage. But Craig has got a seriously ill mother at home. My mind is starting to loop obsessive and frightening thoughts. Not a lot of people like us at school. These silly things are our floatation devices.
It’s about replacing my declining interest in organised religion with a new belief system, new idols – Steven Wells, Paul Elliot, Neil Kulkarni, Caitlin Moran, Kitty Empire, Johnny Cigarettes, Pete Paphides, Stevie Chick, Peter Robinson, Simon Price, Ted Kessler, Andrew Harrison, and there’s more, but that’s enough to fill the table at The Last Supper and allign with the religious allegory I’m trying to shoehorn in - and new scriptures to learn. Some of these scriptures, the funniest of them, by absolutely FUCKING MILES, are by my favourite, Steven Wells. These would be written in CAPITAL LETTERS and then some lowercase ones and then SOMETHING ABOUT COMMUNISM which I didn’t know anything about, but it sounded exciting until I learned what it actually was and I realised I was very much not a Communist at all and I actively despised it, but it certainly livened up whatever new release was being eviscerated that week. I have never read writing like this. They are like MISSIVES from THE FUCKING MOON. One week Swells spitefully ends the mainstream career of my favourite indie band Bis. I hate him for the subsequent month. Then he makes me laugh again and I manage to hold two thoughts in my head at once.
Because this is a piece of writing about getting home from town with a copy of the Melody Maker under my arm, the cover of which featured the emaciated-but-unsettlingly sexy form of Richey Edwards shot against the calcium and cartilage lined walls of the Paris Catacombs. It’s about my dad being viscerally repulsed by said image. Banning me from buying any future issues of said paper. “Those pictures will make you mentally ill” he says. LOL. Me buying them anyway. Me finding places around the family bungalow to stash them in. Forgetting where I’d stashed them. The illicitness of this endeavour the cement beneath the paving slabs of a path that I can’t get off now, though until university arrives, I will live in constant fear of having my growing obsession with the abyss exposed. There are signposts to so many books and films I need to see and read. Records that I would pretend to have heard when I do meet my new friends in the photos. Politics I don’t understand but want to. I am frightened. I am always frightened. But I think I like this new flavour of fear.
It's about knowing there’s nothing else I can do with my life now. If I do not see my name in print alongside my heroes – of which there are more journalists than there are musicians - I will surely die. I cannot just listen to music, I have to pontificate on it too. I have to. Where else will these opinions go! You must listen to me! Please listen to me. Please. Listen. To. Me. So I write and I write and I push fanzines into the hands of people who don’t know what a fanzine is and I form a band for a bit and we’re really quite good but I know it’s not going to work out because I enjoy writing about music much more than I do playing it. And I find new bands, because finding a new band that makes you feel like your heart might explode is better than any drug I tried to numb my sadness with all those decades ago. And then one day I put a review in the post to the NME and a month later they call me up when I’m in the supermarket buying a cabbage and my life begins properly. I dropped the cabbage.
And now, somehow, I’m almost 42, surrounded by the debris of the British music press, wishing there was anything I wanted to do with the rest of my life as much as I wanted to do what came before.
Happy 20th birthday to my music journalism career
Bloody great read, James!