PANTHEON

Melody Maker, 1982

So recently there was the passing of arts + culture magazines The Face and 4Columns (both of which I had written for) And then came the announcement of the acquisition / gutting of a bunch of music magazines by some horrible company – among them Alternati…

A great critic, but one whose work I have not read much of And when I have read it, more often than not I disagree.

Here's what Brian says about Bryan Ferry's "You Go To My Head" And here's another occasion on which he reviews the singles, for Sounds

Yes, it's Mr.

From 1987....

Now here's a thing that puzzled me for a while...

My time at Melody Maker overlapped with the final year or so of Brian Case being on the staff.

I've posted here before about Mick Farren's famous "The Titanic Sails At Dawn" polemic.

Not interested here in rock writers in their current haggard state, of which there are innumerable examples on YouTube.... but rather, rock writers in their original pristine prime.

I am obsessed with the advertisements in the old music papers - the New Wave era is particularly rich for the semiotician and lover of graphic design trends, but then so is the Old Wave era.

RIP Mr Kershaw...

Sadly I don't have the whole Mackenzie singles page, nor do I recall where it came from (the year must be around 1987).

Via the YouTube channel Yesterday's Papers, a motherlode of musicians guest reviewing the Singles for Melody Maker and New Musical Express and Sounds - all from the 1960s or the early 1970s Slightly reduced in impact by the host of the channel reading them

Picking up on the "mean review" thing, as with the Tin Machine II beat-down... it struck me that music journalism is much closer to real-life fan (or anti-fan) chat than it is to literary criticism or other forms of arts reviewing.

Apparently there is a new documentary on David Bowie - I think it's about the later years of his life, making a case for his continued creativity - and at one point, they present the journalist who wrote the brutal take-down above with his own words.

At the event in North London for Rip It Up and Start Again in 2005, I remember a voice in the audience piping up - apropos of absolutely nothing that the panel were discussing - to cry out: "ABBA were better than the Velvet Underground!"

Saddened to hear of the death of Jack Barron - who wrote for Sounds and then NME among other places - after a long illness.