The Long Read: Confessions Of An English Music-Pirate
By Paul Rayson UK Consumers Of Illegal Online Music On The Decrease runs the headline from 18 September in M Magazine, which is published by PRS for Music Limited, the UK music copyright collective. Whatever. Personally, I’ll never know why more people don’t have supermassive music collections. You can illegally download hundreds of thousands of […]
Ardent Mythology: Following The Libertines
By Alexis Late A lot of well-worshipped musicians tend to have a web of mythology encompassing them. Sometimes it’s created by scandal loving press and is, not surprisingly, flawed or exaggerated; sometimes it’s unearthed by fans through intimate obsession, or woven by the artists themselves, as they make their manifestos public. The Libertines were a […]
NME then vs NME now
NME then Marquee Moon review by Nick Kent (NME Feb 1977) Cut the crap, junior, he sez and put the hyperbole on ice. I concur thus. Sometimes it takes but one record – one cocksure magical statement – to cold-cock all the crapola and all-purpose wheatchaff mix ‘n’ match, to set the whole schmear straight […]
A response to ‘For Whatever Reason’ | A photograph of Plan B and Careless Talk Costs Lives magazines from 2001-2009
My Facebook feed has been full of commentary following my repost of Annie Gardiner’s excellent ‘For Whatever Reason…’ (Access) (an installation of copies of NME magazine from 1989-2008). My response is above (the piles lying: male-female-both). This, I feel is WAY more representative of music being made during the 2000s than that piles of NMEs. But who […]
Editorial from The Legend! #4, 1985
At the start of this year, I started a Tumblr blog and began posting recollections there – half-remembered, faceless – of events that had happened to me in the past. My friend Vincent Vanoli drew some wonderful illustrations to accompany the vignettes – being French, occasionally a word would become lost in the translation but that […]
Mosman Alder – Humdrum Star (Dew Process)
The whole music scene thing, it’s all a façade, really, said my landlord one morning, or something like that. He always says things like that whenever we meet in the kitchen. You know, that the government fabricated the war on drugs (the real one, not the band), that the students coming up seem dumber and […]
MY POMPOMS ARE TOO DROOPY: some thoughts on Alex Turner, the music press, and moving on.
Alex Turner’s Brits acceptance speech was everything that rock’n’roll is meant to be: unpredictable, dumb, funny, exciting and attention-grabbing. But it was so much more than that. It was a call to arms.
The FULL story of the 10 records David Nichols took round to The Legend!’s house in mid-1986
By David Nichols The full story needs a caveat. Over the last ten years I have found my celebrity accelerated in some quarters (from a 0 to a 1) by a story in which I apparently am a major hero. I visited Calvin Johnson in Olympia in April 1986. He gave me some copies of […]