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

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.

*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.

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…

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

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

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

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.

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.

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)

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.