Newsgroup: it.arti.musica.rock
Titolo: NME History (In Inglese)

It's '52 and we are jazz. We have to be. There's nothing else. But all
that's about to change. This booking agent bloke called Maurice Kinn has
just taken us over and changed the name from 'Musical And Accordion
Express' to 'New Musical Express'. We are in a bad way, circulation-wise,
and we only cost him a grand or thereabouts. 
When he takes over, big
band leaders like Ted Heath dominate the pages, with hep young cats like
Johnny Dankworth and Ronnie Scott getting the odd look in. But it's all
music that your grandad was into when he demobbed from booting Hitler's
jacksy. Polite. Boring. Strictly squaresville. 
Kinn urges us to cover
more modern sounds, the stuff the kids are buying, on a hunch that a more
populist policy will increase sales. We go for it and roll over bigtime for
the crooners. We back Sinatra when he's supposed to be all washed up and
it's a cute move. The Voice has new Connections and proves he's still the
King Of Cool. He's a narcy bastard and he don't like many people, but he
honours a favour when he sees one, even pressing pause on his pursuit of
Ava Gardner for an hour or two to pen us a firsthand take on his problems
with the press. It's a hot scoop alright, and a pretty good piece too.
But hey, we don't just have the hots for Frankie Baby, we go into bat for
just about anything in a shiny suit that signals screamability. Kinn has
introduced a chart of record sales (launched in November '52; the first
weekly chart anywhere in the world) and, armed with this sure barometer of
public taste, takes up the cudgel against anyone who dares mess with it.
The campaigning spirit for which NME (as we start to call ourselves in '74)
is often later credited, starts way back. 
We are incredulous, for
example, in the May 7 issue of 1954, that the prim old colonels who rule
the airwaves should see fit to ban Johnny Ray's 'Such A Night' because the
'grunts', 'ohs' and 'ahs' are liable to inflame our libidos and make us
horny for a bit of the old unmentionables. 
We like Ray a lot. He's a
bit freaky, what with his sobbing and his hearing aid and all that. The
kids like him too and the dividend comes in the form of the February 4
issue of '55, when we proudly announce that NME now boasts 'the largest
circulation in the world for any music paper' - a sweet 100,000! 
We're
on a right roll now — un-bloody-beatable. Kinn's a sharp dude and his
gossip column, 'Tail pieces by the Alley Cat', can be a bit huffy but he
sniffs out trends early and dictates the scene. On 20 April 1956, he tells
the readers: 'Remember the name Elvis Presley; this young American country
and western singer is destined to emulate Johnny Ray as the teenagers'
delight'. And by Jove, he's right. Elvis is on the cover of the May 4
issue. 
OK, so it's an ad for 'Heartbreak Hotel' but you've gotta give
Kinn credit. He sure can spot 'em. And again the support pays off. On
September 7, NME readers are treated to a treatise on the highs and lows of
instant fame, penned by 'the world's most controversial singer' himself.
'What makes them do this?' we ask in the October 5 issue. And an American
psychiatrist by the name of Dr Ben Walstein is employed to give us the
analytical skinny on this deviant devil's music; rock'n'roll. We play him
Elvis' 'Blue Suede Shoes' which he declares an indication of 'the
adolescent's desire for some degree of privacy' whilst also sensing 'some
sexual component' in Little Richard's 'Long Tall Sally'. He concludes,
"There is nothing particularly harmful about the music as such" and reckons
protesting parents should look to their own insecurities if they can't take
the beat. Cool doc or what? 
Bill Haley joins our debate in '57. The
kisscurl cyclone writes: "There's plenty of room for all tastes, so please
don't knock the rock". But he's wrong. The rock has arrived and there's no
room for owt else. This comes home to us loud and clear when the Alley Cat
gets his claws into an opportunist young Brit Elvis impersonator called
Cliff Richard for waggling his parts suggestively on 'Oh Boy'. "The most
crude exhibitionism ever seen on British TV," declares the Cat and the
readers go barmy. A week later, NME is forced to back down. In a feature
somewhat improbably titled, 'Is Cliff Too Sexy?' we assure those readers
who have deluged the paper with threats never to buy us again that we are
well and truly in Cliff's camp, so to speak. 
The new decade dawns two
years late but it's well worth the wait. The '60s really start on September
21 1962, when NME carries a story about two 13 year old schoolgirls - Sue
and Mary - releasing a disc next week on Decca. Buried deep in the copy,
these fateful words: 'A Liverpool group, The Beatles, have recorded 'Love
Me Do' for Parlophone, which is set for October 5 release.' 
Whatever
news hack knocked that out can hardly have imagined the impact. Suddenly
NME is at the core of a musical and social revolution, the likes of which
we have never seen before and scarcely since. 
As the moptops proceed to
dominate the charts, they kick open the door for a multitude of long-
haired, surly but sexy-as-fuck beat groups to tramp through the NME offices
and onto our pages. 
We are absolutely beatboom bonkers here at NME and
as the conduit for all pronouncements groovy, on November 6 1964, we are
ecstatic to declare that you, dear reader, are literally 'one in a million!
One of the seven-figured readership of each issue of New Musical Express'.
Issue sales are over 300,000 a week, greater, we claim, 'than the combined
total of its three largest rivals'. 
So the kids love us and so do the
bands. Our access to The Beatles, Stones, The Who, Hollies, Byrds, The
Doors, even Dylan makes each issue, in hindsight, historic. We travel all
over the world with The Beatles. We are in the limo with them when they
arrive at Shea Stadium (we help smuggle The Stones backstage), we are on
the set of Magical Mystery Tour, and, in the September 3 issue of 1965, we
recount how we introduced the Fabs to Elvis. 
The payback for this
coverage comes in spades. The readers of NME have been voting in the annual
readers poll since the '50s and Kinn has created a Poll Winners Concert in
celebration. Every year the cream of the crop turns out for the fans, plays
a few numbers and lines up to receive their awards. 
ABC TV starts
picking these up for broadcast across their commercial networks in '61 and
now we hit the motherload. The Beatles first play the Sunday afternoon
shindig at Wembley's Empire Pool in '63. The next three years' line-ups are
halcyon ; '64 includes Cliff, The Dave Clark Five, The Hollies, Swinging
Blue Jeans, The Stones and the Fabs; '65 runs The Beatles, Stones, The
Kinks, Animals, Walker Brothers, Them, Tom Jones and Dusty. But it's '66
that's the daddy: The Beatles play their last ever gig on British soil,
supported by the Stones, Small Faces, Yardbirds, Dusty Springfield,
Walkers, The Who and Roy Orbison. 
Our award shows continue until 1970
but we can't top '66 and eventually pack it in under the strain of battling
superstar egos and international jet-trash unavailability. We return with a
vengeance, though, in the '90s. 
We are ringside at The Stones' folly
Rock 'N' Roll Circus, down the front in Hyde Park when Mick attempts to
make the dead butterflies fly, and present and strangely incorrect as it
all goes tits up at Altamont 
We are at the Isle Of Wight Festivals with
Bob and Jimi, we are with Jefferson Airplane at Bath - the inspiration for
Glastonbury, at the UFO when the Pink Floyd start to officially freak out,
and at The Roundhouse when The Doors get pervy. We are here, there and
everywhere but we are not...how you say? Cool. 
We are still top of the
heap and exceeding sales of 350,000 a week around the time that The Monkees
are imported as a Beatle placebo. But we are losing it somewhat so there is
a shuffling of the pack and a changing of the guard which ends up with a
young fellow called Nick Logan in charge via an innovator called Alan
Smith. Maurice Kinn leaves just after our 21st anniversary in 1973, and
there is a literary blood transfusion as a parade of prosaic, opinionated,
self-consciously hip writers invade the premises. 
We are holed up in
funky offices in Carnaby Street, hub of all happening activity, and Messrs
Nick Kent, Charles Shaar Murray and their compadres recruited from Oz begin
their campaign to prejudice the readership against the tedious mainstream
of rock. 
It is a strategy most would deem daft, if not suicidal, Kent
et al lauding artists far too fucked-up for mass appeal while mocking the
readership for its conservatism. We embrace Bowie and Bolan, the king and
queen of Glam, we adore obscurities like New York Dolls and just plain bad-
ass influences like Lou Reed while spending weeks on the road witnessing
The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin make beasts of themselves. It is not a
pretty sight but it is astonishingly invigorating and by the time Kate
Phillips files a drunken report from London's Queen Elizabeth College that
a band she's just met called Sex Pistols are 'going to be the Next big
Thing. Or maybe the Next big Thing After That', in December 1975, the
ground for revolution has been well and truly prepared. 
The NME is
punk; a fact effectively immortalised when Johnny Rotten sings 'I use the
NME/ I use anarchy' in the Pistols' 1976 anthem 'Anarchy In The UK' and
when that bastion of the ignorant, The Sunday People, wages war upon us in
August of that year, declaring we are "an enemy of our society" and "an
attack on family life". 
Awesome! Logan knows a good scam when he sees
one and has already hired his own punk writers, a pair of genius novices in
Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill, who, having answered Logan's infamous
advert for 'hip young gunslingers', proceed to lionise and terrorise the
emerging New Wave in equal measure. It is now that NME acquires its proud
reputation of building 'em up to knock 'em down as band after band - The
Clash, The Jam, Blondie, The Ramones, Patti Smith, The Damned - excite,
then disappoint our grand expectations. 
But we are there on the
frontline - down at the Roxy and Vortex, harrassed on the boat trip, with
Sid in New York when the murder then overdose stuff goes down. There may be
three other weekly music papers also actively publishing - Melody Maker,
Sounds and Record Mirror - but we rool! 
Elvis dies. So does Sid. And
Marc. And Moonie. Something better change. Neil Spencer is the new editor -
Logan has left to found the pop bible Smash Hits and, later, the style
bible, The Face - while the '70s stagger into a truly weird decade. 
At
the start it's all Weller and The Jam around these parts as far as the
readers are concerned, while the new breed of writers split their time
between pretending to be bohemian (we discover capuccino!), wringing our
hands over the genius of troubled northern types Joy Division and - after
the suicide of singer Ian Curtis - New Order, and struggling to come to
terms with the new pop explosion. 
During punk and the preceding years
of reader-baiting, the charts have ceased to be our touchstone and we now
find ourselves the 'alternative' to the mainstream or, as we have become
known now that there are glossy mags out there covering music, the king of
the 'inkies'. We make considerable hay with the Liverpool scene; Echo And
The Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes are particular raves - and we dabble
with New Romanticism, Paul Morley discovering Boy George and writing the
first-ever Culture Club cover story. 
We do Wham!, we do Spandau Ballet,
but our hearts aren't really in it. Under the brief editorship of Ian Pye,
we try our hand at becoming more about lifestyle than music but that
doesn't really wash (cover stories on youth suicide do nish for our
circulation) and it is only with the arrival of a new editor, Alan Lewis,
and some new heroes, The Smiths, that things start to look up. 
Alan
brings a lighter approach to the paper - we have somewhat disappeared up
our own arses after all - and our absolute schoolgirly crush on Morrissey
and Marr rebuilds reader confidence. Suffice to say we aren't known as The
New Morrissey Express for nothing. 
Some other weird things happen in
the '80s. We try to invent an alternative scene - our own version of punk
you could say - by forcing a coterie of new bands onto a cassette called
C86. It's not entirely convincing and you should get out more if you
remember The Shop Assistants - but it nails our colours to the mast. We, it
said, for better or worse, are indie. 
Oh, there are battles now. As we
move into the '90s, staff meetings are volatile affairs - some factions
fighting for precious feature space to cover this emerging new scene from
urban America called hip-hop, some flying the indie flag and some
championing this other new scene that seems to function around dropping a
tab of something called E and then zooming around the country sweating your
bollocks off in fields, barns, warehouses, anywhere to this fresh dance
sound. 
NME starts a column to cover the latter, called Vibes; the first
column in the world devoted entirely to the new dance culture and the
forerunner of today's dance mag scene. NME is bristling again - young pups
James Brown and Danny Kelly are carving out the terrain between them -
Kelly becomes editor, Brown does a bunch of bonkers stuff on the new
Madchester movement then knobs off to launch Loaded with Alan Lewis. But
not before introducing the world to NME's two new beauties - Stone Roses
and Happy Mondays. A convenient mix of our two major passions - dance and
indie - these two set the shaky foundations for the next revolution that
NME will be central to - Britpop. 
In a conscious echo of an anti-NME
headline published in the '70s in the Sunday People - 'Must we throw this
pop filth at our kids?' - new editor Steve Sutherland - a refugee from
Melody Maker - asks 'Must we throw this Brit at our pop kids?' 
It is
'93 and we realise that there are rumblings of a great indiepop revival
going on that the annual music industry Brit Awards is doing its level best
to ignore. NME takes up the gauntlet on behalf of Suede, Radiohead, Orbital
and Elastica and reinstates the NME awards in 1994 under the deliberately
provocative title, The Brats. 
It's an immediate success. Within a year
the ceremony held at Cockneys in London, sees southern faves Blur just pip
northern upstarts Oasis by four awards to three and we can justifiably say
that we are, once more, at the very beating heart of popular music. 
The
awards re-established, NME presents world debut front covers to Oasis,
Blur, — Manic Street Preachers, Pulp et al and furthers its own brand
equity in 1996 by launching 
NME.COM
, which swiftly becomes Europe's
favourite music website and offers the world a window into our peculiar
obessions. 
So the new century rolls around and it's business as usual.
Ben Knowles is the editor. The staff are out bigging-up new talent - latest
lovelies: The Strokes, The White Stripes, The Vines - before everyone else
pretends they got to them first, and we are pretty much the last mag
standing. Melody Maker, Sounds, Record Mirror... all the weekly press
devoted entirely to broad music coverage have died on the presses, unable
to compete. 
So phew! We are 50. There's not another music paper in the
world that can say that
--------------------------------
Inviato via 
http://usenet.iol.it

ma mi chiedevo.
questi enormi post.
a) li scarichi dai siti.
b) li copii a mano
c) hai un programma di scan+word
?
cavolo, giuro che sono sconvolto dalla quantità di caratteri che offri
a iamr giornalmente. IT e OT e quant'altro.
sono sinceramente preoccupato per lo stato dei tuoi polsi. 
hai almeno una tastiera ergonomica?
spero tu nn voglia leggere polemiche nelle mie righe quanto sincera
ammirazione per cotale sbattimento cotidiano.
:)
madtp