The missing ink

I had lots of life administration to do last Sunday.  Personal finances management (ie pay council tax to maintain the binmen's weekly 6am performance of Stomp), flat cleaning (ie collect the clothing that the missus has strewn aroung the flat (socks draped over lampshades, handbags in the bath, trousers in the oven) and put it all in a big bag that she can shake empty over the following week, like an urban fox with expensive tastes).  I was even going to cut my increasingly alarming hair (the crappiest of all the chores).

Unfortunately two things got in my way.  The first was the inevitable Sunday morning hangover, which now renders me incapable of anything other than watching 17 episodes of Come Dine With Me with the curtains drawn.  But the real killer was this website: http://archivedmusicpress.wordpress.com, which I literally spent hours and hours and hours reading.

It's nothing more sophisticated than a guy putting up hundreds of scanned pages from the Melody Maker and the NME circa 1987 - 1996.  I can see why that wouldn't float everyone's boat.  But if, like me, you grew up completely dependent on the news and reviews in these cheaply printed, ink-smeared rags then it's an absolute treasure trove.

Going though the 1994-1996 vintage material on the site it's amazing how much I remember.  Last year I was forced to go through my childhood memorabilia after a flood from an exploding boiler gave my parents an excuse not to have to store three tonnes of maths exercise books and shoddy renderings of glaciers any more.  Other than a few colourful reminders of how much I used to enjoy drawing the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot (not interacting - I was a stickler for realism) I came across a review of the first ever gig I went to, carefully torn from the Melody Maker and preserved between the pages of a terrible essay on music as a metaphor for love in Twelfth Night.  I needn't have bothered - it's here.  As is the MM's excellently dismissive review of What's the Story (Morning Glory) ("Oasis are fallen, fallen short of the stars. They sound knackered").  They subsequently re-evaluated this position when it turned out that Oasis sold millions of copies when put on the cover and Gorky's Zygotic Mynci sadly did not.

The Oasis flip-flop is an illustration of what a different world the music press was pre-internet.  They could get away with it because if you missed an issue, you missed it.  You couldn't just type the name of your favourite indie concern into a seach box and flick through everything ever written about them.  And as there were no band websites or myspace the only way you could get any information was through the inkies.  I remember pouring over news articles about upcoming albums and trying to imagine what a song called "Pencil Skirt" or "Pull the Wires from the Wall" could possibly sound like.  There were albums I didn't buy because, having considered the tracklisting long and hard, I'd decided they weren't up to scratch.

The lack of concern about a permanent record really comes through in the writing, some of which is frankly terrible.  The journalists insert themselves into interviews and reviews in a manner in which even the author of this blog considers to be self-indulgent.  But this also means that much of it has a liveliness and individuality that is sorely lacking in the post-internet, post-comments-sections-and-trolling age.

One of the things that I assume is the same now as it ever was is the making of terrible predictions.  The press needs to hype to have something to write about, and the law of averages dictates they get it wrong 95% of the time.  Which means there's a lot of sneering to be done by someone reading 15 years (Christ) later.  Almost every page has a reference to a band that, after years of effort, reached the pinnacle of their career with a mention in the NME before sinking without a trace.  Tokyo Ghetto Pussy.  Pimlico.  Buxom.  Brassy.  The Amps.  These are the fallen, and this website gives them the ghost of a tribute.

Got to dash, I've just found a three page interview with the Tindersticks from 1995.  I've already read it, of course.  But I was 14 then, and I read things differently now.