Tom Dunne: A glimpse at the glory days of the music press  

Ted Kessler's memoir, Paper Cuts, is a great read on his time with publications such as NME and Q magazine

Q magazine closed in 2020, marking the end of an era for the music press. 

January and February are traditionally bad months for musicians; gigs all but disappear, revenue streams dry up. As our beloved piano player, Pat, used to say; “January, not a sausage!” He would say this, passing his credit card, stoically towards the bar.

I think of him every year at this time, as music hibernates. Not a sausage to be earned again till spring. So, I take comfort in long, hungry, walks and, increasingly, audio books, mostly about music, the latest being Ted Kessler’s Paper Cuts.

Ted was a music journalist at the NME in the early 1990s and then Q magazine up to mid-2020. We have only rough dates for when his career started, but a precise date for when it ended: July 28, 2020, the day Q closed, with Ted as its editor, when music journalism as we knew it shut up shop.

It is subtitled ‘How I Destroyed the British Music Press’, but it is not Ted that pulls that trigger. That honour falls to what he calls the “content abyss”, the internet and its voracious appetite for new content, which it will neither question nor pay for.

It is a fascinating insight. I suspect that when future historians, by then “woke” to their core, come to analyse the “UK Music Press 1980 -2020” they will be quite taken aback. It was, very often, the schoolyard in inky print.

Music journalism was often where some of the sharpest writers, like Caitlin Moran, would cut their teeth. It was easier to hone your skills on music you didn’t like than music you did. Hence, the put-downs were acid. This was hilarious, once it wasn’t about you. And if it was, well, the caves of Borneo were never quite dark enough.

Ted Kessler

But realistically it wasn’t about the acts being reviewed. It was about the writing itself. It was trying to entertain and captivate regardless of the music. As a band you had to try and see such attacks almost as an honour. “We’ve been filleted, but we’ve been filleted by the best.” Kessler joined NME at the start of Britpop, when there was much to fillet. The days of Oasis at 10 Downing Street and Creation Records offices snowed in all year round and interviews with Mark E Smith where he asks, “Kessler? Are you a Jew or a Nazi?”.

Fun was had. He travelled to Cuba with Shaun Ryder and Bez of the Happy Mondays. The trip was exactly the disaster you would have expected; missed flights, incoherent interviews, drug deals. Years later, both maintain that they have never been to Cuba.

The fun couldn’t last but watching the changes unfold in the industry is fascinating. Seeing the NME shift from having three covers a month featuring “core” bands to just one a month as it struggles to find bands that enough of its audience care about is grim. And it’s even worse at Q.

Q, at its launch, in 1986, had revolutionised the music press. People were replacing their old vinyl with CDs and were happy to reacquaint via long-form interviews with these old acts. At its peak it was selling 200,000 copies a month.

But times changed. As new magazines like Mojo made inroads on the heritage side, Q’s attempts to maintain a more contemporary edge proved difficult. Its core audience did not really like hip hop, the now burgeoning music form. The era of the list was born; Q’s 20 Best of Whatever, became an almost monthly feature.

To make matter worse, hip hop didn’t really like Q. Ted tells takes of interviews with hip hop acts either not happening at all, or, happening hours late and limited to 15 minutes with an almost comatose star.

The corporate-inspired “management meetings” make for uncomfortable reading. Hotel suites booked for brainstorming sessions. Should Q incorporate a “Cooking with the Stars” section? Should the readers write the reviews?

Despite these heavy blows, Ted’s passion for that music press burns as brightly as ever. The NME was like a train, he says, extolling you to climb on, meet the people making this great music, discover their lives, their loves, their passions and see where it takes you.

That music press was always more Bill Hicks than Bill Gates. It could not possibly have existed in our current social media world. One issue of NME would have generated about nine years of Twitter meltdowns. But, oh, how we would have laughed. Good luck with the book, Ted.