Comments on: Long Live The UK Music Scene! https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2007/10/long-live-the-uk-music-scene Lollards in the high church of low culture Fri, 26 Oct 2007 13:10:05 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 By: Marcello Carlin https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2007/10/long-live-the-uk-music-scene/comment-page-1#comment-330485 Fri, 26 Oct 2007 13:10:05 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2007/10/long-live-the-uk-music-scene/#comment-330485 exclusive live performances from the hoosiers ahoy

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By: Pete https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2007/10/long-live-the-uk-music-scene/comment-page-1#comment-330481 Fri, 26 Oct 2007 12:51:28 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2007/10/long-live-the-uk-music-scene/#comment-330481 Too early for the only recently killed TOTP brand to arise. I still think in the UK it is a formidable touchstone of POP, the question is no-one was defending it in its death, so no-one is going to jump up and say they were wrong this soon.

Watch the resurgance of something called TOTP in three years time though.

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By: Tom https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2007/10/long-live-the-uk-music-scene/comment-page-1#comment-330478 Fri, 26 Oct 2007 12:47:14 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2007/10/long-live-the-uk-music-scene/#comment-330478 Yes the much-vaunted TOTP brand hasn’t exactly thrived since the unprofitable hub died off.

I tried to be careful in the piece – though I didn’t do a final check on it – not to refer to the NME as a magazine, or as anything really other than a brand.

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By: Matt DC https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2007/10/long-live-the-uk-music-scene/comment-page-1#comment-330477 Fri, 26 Oct 2007 12:44:45 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2007/10/long-live-the-uk-music-scene/#comment-330477 I don’t think IPC can afford to do that – multi-format media brands (which is what the NME is now) tend to need a magazine to coalesce round, hub/spokes etc. Even if the magazine in question is a loss-leader* and serves as a glorified advert for the website/gigs/clubs.

*I’m not sure this is true, surely the rigid demographic focus now in place means there’s a pretty well-defined readership which is attractive to advertisers?

All of this means the overall editorial quality will carry on bubbling just over the bare minimum required to keep people reading.

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By: Raw Patrick https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2007/10/long-live-the-uk-music-scene/comment-page-1#comment-330454 Fri, 26 Oct 2007 11:31:22 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2007/10/long-live-the-uk-music-scene/#comment-330454 Popbitch claims this week that the NME will be going web only soon. The mag is like a pamphlet these days, not even enough reading for a bus journey.

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By: . https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2007/10/long-live-the-uk-music-scene/comment-page-1#comment-330421 Fri, 26 Oct 2007 08:14:55 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2007/10/long-live-the-uk-music-scene/#comment-330421 The main reason MM went under is that it was really aweful at what it did towards the end, going for the “Indie Smash Hits” style NME pedals now, but in a really cheap and nasty way. It’s a tedious format whether it’s done well or not anyway imo, but your average young indiehead seems to like the current version.

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By: Marcello Carlin https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2007/10/long-live-the-uk-music-scene/comment-page-1#comment-330052 Thu, 25 Oct 2007 15:26:04 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2007/10/long-live-the-uk-music-scene/#comment-330052 A different but parallel ear, perhaps; each probably needed the other to react against.

Putting my day job hat on I note with glee that the gauge used to assess the difference in height of the patella pre- and post-knee surgery is known as the Blackburn-Peel ratio…

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By: mark sinker https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2007/10/long-live-the-uk-music-scene/comment-page-1#comment-330047 Thu, 25 Oct 2007 15:17:14 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2007/10/long-live-the-uk-music-scene/#comment-330047 one of the more complex revisionist pretzels established in the “critical consensus” between late 70s and early 90s re radio one — first championed by jule burchill i’m fairly sure — was that tony blackburn had (since radio caroline) consistently played better music than john peel: viz motown and soul (ie music loved by the working classes) rather than proto-indie (viz hippy-prog-punk-postpunk etc, which was all poshboy music acc.her)

burchill always had a slightly demented loathing for peel, monstering him well beyond plausibility, and even she wasn’t arguing that blackburn’s in-between-song style wasn’t incredibly glutinous and annoying: she just said TB had a better ear than JP

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By: Tom https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2007/10/long-live-the-uk-music-scene/comment-page-1#comment-330036 Thu, 25 Oct 2007 14:47:44 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2007/10/long-live-the-uk-music-scene/#comment-330036 Yeah the really telling contributor in the Garfield book is Nicky Campbell, who was (along with Goodier and Mayo I guess) 100% early 90s Radio 1 and simply could not see why the new management wanted him out.

It is forgotten I think that DLT was an exception not a rule.

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By: katstevens https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2007/10/long-live-the-uk-music-scene/comment-page-1#comment-330034 Thu, 25 Oct 2007 14:46:05 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2007/10/long-live-the-uk-music-scene/#comment-330034 > focusing and promoting the NME brand

I think the live tours have had a lot to do with this – moving the focus away from London, especially.

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By: Marcello Carlin https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2007/10/long-live-the-uk-music-scene/comment-page-1#comment-330033 Thu, 25 Oct 2007 14:44:59 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2007/10/long-live-the-uk-music-scene/#comment-330033 (Andrew xpost)

Less like Smashy and Nicey than you’d imagine. Mostly mainstream Top 40/playlist fare (increasingly biased in the AoR direction, hence “I’d Rather Jack”) with added “quirks” (Our Tune, snooker on the radio etc.) largely designed to retain its original (1967) audience, particularly the housewife contingent. The style of presentation gravitated towards mundane pseudo-mid-Atlantic delivery rather than the “charidee” or “Clifftastic” stuff which no one on the station was actually doing by the turn of the nineties.

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By: katstevens https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2007/10/long-live-the-uk-music-scene/comment-page-1#comment-330032 Thu, 25 Oct 2007 14:43:38 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2007/10/long-live-the-uk-music-scene/#comment-330032 > But Radio 1 doesn’t just play rock and indie!

They do play their fair share of dance/electronica in the evenings. However they have kind of ghetto-ed off hip-hop, grime & dub-step to 1Xtra.

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By: Andrew Farrell https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2007/10/long-live-the-uk-music-scene/comment-page-1#comment-330029 Thu, 25 Oct 2007 14:40:04 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2007/10/long-live-the-uk-music-scene/#comment-330029 My question: what did Radio 1 sound like before?

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By: Tom https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2007/10/long-live-the-uk-music-scene/comment-page-1#comment-330019 Thu, 25 Oct 2007 14:19:50 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2007/10/long-live-the-uk-music-scene/#comment-330019 Well MM went under mostly cos it was selling half what NME was in a shrinking market and IPC presumably realised one title was all they needed!

I argued on ILM at one point that MM went under because Britpop turned out to be the wrong horse to back – it drove off the audience they’d spent the best part of a decade building and Britpop fans just didn’t care much about a weekly press. This argument is generalising from my own experience a bit though.

(The example NME need to avoid following is Select, not MM, tho)

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By: Ass Hat https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2007/10/long-live-the-uk-music-scene/comment-page-1#comment-330016 Thu, 25 Oct 2007 14:11:56 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2007/10/long-live-the-uk-music-scene/#comment-330016 great piece. it’s interesting, in the context of your argument, to think about why the melody maker went under in the late 90s.

since mm’s demise, nme’s been very canny at setting the rock agenda, and pitching itself halfway between serious journalism and teenage rag. but it’s had no real competition. in the late 90s, it was the maker that was going for the market you describe – putting ash on the cover every week, giving out freebies – while nme went off the rails trying to find the next britpop (stool-rock? new new romnatics? godspeed on the cover).

i don’t know why mm went under, or how this affects the argument, but once it did, i think luck as well as judgement played their part, for the nme.

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