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I’m really jazzed about getting my hands on the first finished copy of Totally Wired, my history of the music press which is published by Thames & Hudson this autumn. Designer Daniel Streat has done wonders with the day-the-world-turned-dayglo jacket concept and my choice of cover star Poly Styrene. There are 60 or so illustrations, […]
Working on my forthcoming book The Rise & Fall Of The Music Press has brought home to me the brilliance of publications and journalists who have been marginalised in the story of the media sector inaugurated by the launch of The Melody Maker (as it was then known) in 1926.
This is, I think, an exclusive. Much mentioned in the story of punk, I’ve not seen this ad published since it appeared 46 years ago. Tucked away at the bottom of page 66 of the September 13 1975 issue of British music weekly Melody Maker was a relatively nondescript line advertisement offering the lease on […]
Fittingly Britain’s most surprising rock star has found his way to Britain’s newest and most surprising city, where high tech meets ecologic, where concrete meets conservation, where the silicon chip meets the fibreglass rod… Steve Taylor, South Of Watford, Summer 1983, London Weekend Television While putting the finishing touches to my forthcoming book about The Face […]
Today is the 40th anniversary of the gig at central London venue The Marquee by the Sex Pistols which generated their first substantial media coverage, a prescient 200-word review by Neil Spencer on page 31 of the February 21, 1976 issue of the New Musical Express.
These jaunty photographs were taken by Barry Plummer in the spring of 1979 for a Melody Maker interview with Malcolm McLaren about the just-released soundtrack for the Sex Pistols’ biopic The Great Rock N Roll Swindle (beset by financial and creative difficulties, the film wasn’t released for another year). McLaren was accompanied by Vivienne Westwood; […]