Kerrang topples NME as best selling music weekly. Not that we are swamped by music weeklies these days – and at closer inspection this is not a story looking at the collapse of the weekly. The NME has stayed solid, Kerrang has put on a massive 67% spurt in sales. I think this may bear further examination. Is Kerrang any better than it was, has Nu-Metal expanded to such a degree that it can support these kind of sales. Or is it merely the impression I get that Kerrang knows who its talking to, and is more fun? After all, who can hate a magazine called Kerrang!!!!
(I also cannot imagine Kerrang saddling their best of poll with the appalling title Pazz & Jop Poll – and where exactly was the Jazz anyhoo.)
I’ve picked a random Freaky Trigger story about the NME to mention that there is a small exhibition of NME covers in a space in the horrible £1m-5m* flat development next door to both IPC’s HQ and Tate Modern. I felt it is rather slanted towards the recent, but that might be my distorted perspective – I guess even Britpop is 17 years ago. And of course, pre mid 1970s they had newspaper-style front pages, often dominated by an ad, which don’t necessarily lend themselves to huge blow-ups. Still, I do think it’s a bit clumped towards a few eras (punk, Britpop) and events (the deaths of Curtis, Kurt and Amy, but not – I think – John Lennon). But there are a couple of covers from the the conceptual/thematic mid-80s, so the temptation to write that moment out for a more conventional rockist narrative was avoided.
Anyway, absolutely not worth a trip across town for but possibly a quick detour if you’re at the Tate.
*Price variations presumably based in part on whether you get a view of St Paul’s (at least for the moment) or are spending all that money on a glass-walled apartment completely overlooked by the Woman’s Weekly offices.
Oh, and I can’t swear to this, but I have a feeling that there is no Smiths/Morrissey cover in the exhibition, so possibly the no-hard-feelings stage hasn’t been reached yet.