Wednesday 12th June

I cannot remember when I first read music magazines.  I used to have a paper round when I was twelve, and my love of music began with the Beatles.  I would regularly scan the Sketch and the Mirror for any news of the Fab Four.  I did deliver quite a few periodicals along with the Dailies, but can’t really remember specific music papers.  In the lower sixth form there were one or two smuggled copies of Oz and IT which featured stuff about music, and I must have glanced at the NME a few times.

Leaving home I started regularly reading NME and carried on for a few years, but it and I parted company when they fell overboard in love with Punk, a movement I felt was destroying much of the music I loved.  I was a regular buyer of Time Out, and City Limits and though not strictly music mags, they had good reviews, both of live gigs and albums.

In the eighties it was Q until I discovered Uncut sometime in the late nineties.  It was a bit more expensive, but the free CD on the cover made up for that.  For a long time I bought both and occasionally Mojo too.  It seemed I couldn’t get enough to read about music.  I was fascinated by the whole scene, especially Americana and Indie.

Of late I have dropped Q, as it strives to be more popular and chases a younger audience.  And to be honest Uncut is starting to get boring, and I find less and less I know the bands reviewed, and less and less do I care.  I still like the old articles, and lovingly read the reviews of the re-releases, tutting over the cost of the more and more extravagant box-sets with their endless bonus tracks (usually shit, which was why they never made the album in the first place).  And if flying to France I like to seek out a Mojo or Uncut special on say Bowie or Beatles in WH Smiths and read it from cover to cover, even though I know most of it off by heart already.

Maybe I just never grew up, but I will probably never stop reading music magazines.h