NME
New Musical Express is a British music, film, gaming and culture website, bimonthly magazine, and brand. Founded as a newspaper in 1952, with the publication being referred to as a "rock inkie", the NME would become a magazine that ended up as a free publication as well as a webzine, and the brand has also been used for their NME Awards show, the NME Tours and the former NME Radio station.
As a "rock inkie", NME was the first British newspaper to include a singles chart, adding that feature in the edition of 14 November 1952. In the 1970s, it became the best-selling British music newspaper. It became closely associated with punk rock through the writings of Julie Burchill, Paul Morley, and Tony Parsons. It started as a music newspaper, and gradually moved toward a magazine format during the 1980s and 1990s, changing from newsprint in 1998.
The magazine's website NME.com was launched in 1996, and became Britain's most popular commercial music site on the web, and had 1.6 million users worldwide in 2006. With newsstand sales falling across the UK magazine sector in the early 21st century, the NME magazine was relaunched in 2015 to be distributed nationally as a free publication. The first average circulation published in February 2016 of 307,217 copies per week was the highest in NMEs history, beating the previous best of 306,881, recorded in 1964 at the height of the Beatles' fame. However, in March 2018, the publisher announced that the print edition of NME would cease publication after 66 years and become an online-only publication. In July 2023, the print edition of NME was revived, now as a bimonthly release.
NME was acquired in 2019 by Singaporean music company BandLab Technologies, which put all of its music publications under the NME Networks brand in December 2021, when the company was restructured.
History
The paper was established in 1952. The Accordion Times and Musical Express was bought by London music promoter Maurice Kinn for £1,000, just 15 minutes before it was due to be officially closed. It was relaunched as the New Musical Express, and was initially published in a non-glossy tabloid format on standard newsprint. Under the editorship of Ray Sonin, the paper began publishing artist interviews, industry gossip and, 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. Sales of the magazine jumped by 50%. The first of these singles charts 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.1960s
During the 1960s, the paper championed the new British groups emerging at the time. The NME circulation peaked under Andy Gray 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 a 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 transmitted on British television a few weeks after they had taken place.In the mid-1960s, the NME was primarily dedicated to pop while its older rival, Melody Maker, was known for its more serious coverage of music. Other competing titles included Record Mirror, which led the way in championing American rhythm and blues, and Disc, which focused on chart news. The latter part of the decade the paper charted 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 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.
1970s
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 was on the verge of closure by its owner IPC. According to Nick Kent :Alan Smith was made editor in 1972, and was told by IPC to turn things around quickly or face closure. To achieve this, Smith and his assistant editor Nick Logan raided the underground press for writers such as Charles Shaar Murray and Nick Kent, and recruited other writers such as Tony Tyler, Ian MacDonald and Californian Danny Holloway. According to The Economist, the New Musical Express "started to champion underground, up-and-coming music....NME became the gateway to a more rebellious world. First came glamrock, and bands such as T. Rex, and then came punk....by 1977 it had become the place to keep in touch with a cultural revolution that was enthralling the nation's listless youth. Bands such as Sex Pistols, X-Ray Spex and Generation X were regular cover stars, eulogised by writers such as Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons, whose nihilistic tone narrated the punk years perfectly." 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 Melody Maker, Disc, Record Mirror and Sounds.
According to MacDonald:
Led Zeppelin topped the "NME Pop Poll" for three consecutive years 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 same year 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 it was 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 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 and Julie 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.
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 – 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.
The paper also became more openly political during the time of punk. Its cover would sometimes feature youth-orientated issues rather than a musical act. It 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.
1980s
In the 1980s, the NME became the most important music paper in the country. It released the influential C81 in 1981, in conjunction with Rough Trade Records, available to readers by mail order at a low price. The tape featured many then up-and-coming bands, including Aztec Camera, Orange Juice, Linx, and Scritti Politti, as well as many more established artists such as Robert Wyatt, Pere Ubu, the Buzzcocks and Ian Dury. A second tape titled C86 was released in 1986. From 1981 to 1988 the magazine released 36 cassette compilations.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, Chris Bohn, Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Barney Hoskyns, Paolo Hewitt, Don Watson, Danny Kelly, 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, 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. Many 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 many 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, consisting of 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 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, Andrew Harrison, Stuart Maconie, Mary Anne Hobbs and Steve Lamacq to give it a stronger identity and sense of direction. Lewis prioritised readership over editorial independence, and Mark Sinker left in 1988 after Lewis refused to print his unfavourable review of U2's Rattle and Hum, replacing it with a glowing Stuart Baillie review intended to be more acceptable to readers. 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 Lewis as editor.