Production on the NS culture desk this week has slowed to a crawl as we explore the riches on offer over at the Archived Music Press blog. Some dedicated soul has scanned in pages from old issues of Melody Maker and the New Musical Express, dating from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s.
A niche area, you might think, but this was a time when the UK music press was a more adventurous beast than it is today. Amid the bad puns and profiles of long-forgotten bands such as Menswear or Lush (whose single an interviewer breathlessly describes as “the ‘Wake Up Boo!’ of 1996 . . .”) there is loads of passionate, clever and wilfully subjective writing.
Among the highlights are Caitlin Moran’s interview with Courtney Love in 1994; David Stubbs’s prescient review of Oasis’s (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, which deconstructed the band’s schtick just as everybody else was going crazy for them; and Everett True’s review of a Tricky and P J Harvey gig in 1995. You can also see the work of acclaimed photographers such as Kevin Cummins, whose work we’ve recently featured.
Oh! But what’s this? A 1988 interview with the Fall’s Mark E Smith where, in between diatribes on Britain’s north-south divide and the state of Labour (good reading for anyone in the current, opposition-bound party), he delivers this choice soundbite:
“When I want to read politics, I buy New Statesman, it’s as simple as that.”
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