Everything about Melody Maker totally explained
Melody Maker, published in the
United Kingdom, was, according to its publisher
IPC Media, the world's oldest weekly
music newspaper. It was
founded in 1926 as a magazine targeted at
musicians; in
2000 it was merged into "long-standing rival"
In its issue of March 6, 1965,
MM called for
The Beatles to be
honoured by the
British state, which indeed happened on June 12 that year when all four of the band were awarded the
MBE.
By the late 1960s,
MM had recovered its momentum, targeting an older, more sophisticated market than the teen-oriented
NME (which sometimes poked fun at the earnestness of its rival, dubbing it 'Monotony Maker'). Considerably more bulky than its competitor, it had a much larger and more specialised advertising section, in the pages of which many
soon-to-be well-known groups would advertise for musicians to join them, and ran pages devoted to "minority" interests like
folk and jazz, as well as detailed reviews of musical instruments.
A 1968
Melody Maker poll named
John Peel Best Radio DJ, attention which
John Walters much later revealed may have helped Peel keep his job despite concerns at
BBC Radio 1 about Peel's style and obscure record selection.
1970s
Its circulation continued to increase, and by the
1970s, under the editorship of
Ray Coleman,
MM was selling 250,000 copies a week. Critics such as
Richard Williams,
Chris Welch and
Steve Lake were among the first British journalists to write seriously about popular music, shedding an intellectual light on such artists as
Steely Dan,
Led Zeppelin and
Henry Cow, while the veteran
Max Jones continued the paper's coverage of jazz.
The Melody Maker was strongly supportive of the
glam rock and
progressive rock movements of the early 1970s. However, when punk came along around 1976,
Melody Maker lagged behind rivals
Sounds and
NME in embracing the upheaval; of MM's staff, only
Caroline Coon was strongly positive towards the new music. It took some years for the paper's sales and prestige to recover.
1980s
By 1983, the magazine had become more populist and pop-orientated, exemplified by its modish "MM" masthead and its choice of
Eurythmics'
Touch as the best album of the year. Things were to change, however. In February 1984
Allan Jones, an irreverent journalist noted for his sardonic, boozy interviews with the likes of
Lou Reed and
Ozzy Osbourne, was appointed editor: defying instructions to put
Kajagoogoo on the cover, he instead led the magazine with an article on up-and-coming band
The Smiths.
In 1986,
MM was further invigorated by the arrival of a group of journalists, including
Simon Reynolds and
David Stubbs, who had previously run a music
fanzine called
Monitor from the
University of Oxford, and
Chris Roberts, an exile from
Sounds, who established
MM as the more individualistic and intellectual of the music weeklies. This was especially true after the "hip-hop wars" at
NME - a schism between enthusiasts of progressive black music such as
Public Enemy and
Mantronix and fans of traditional white rock - ended in a victory for the latter faction, the departure of writers such as
Mark Sinker and
Biba Kopf, and the rise of
Andrew Collins and
Stuart Maconie, who pushed NME in a more populist direction.
1990s
While
MM continued to devote most space to
rock and
indie music (notably
Everett True's coverage of the emerging
grunge scene in
Seattle), it was willing to cover
dance music,
hip hop and less commercial genres such as
post rock and
electronica. Even in the mid-1990s, when
Britpop had brought a new generation of readers to the weekly music press, it remained less populist than its rivals, with younger writers such as
Simon Price,
Taylor Parkes and
Neil Kulkarni continuing the 80s tradition of iconoclasm and subjective, opinionated criticism. The paper printed harsh criticism of the likes of
Ocean Colour Scene and
Kula Shaker, and allowed dissenting views on
Oasis and
Blur at a time when they were universally praised by the rest of the music press.
The magazine retained its large classified ads section, and remained the first port of call for bands seeking musicians, and musicians seeking bands. Many of the groups covered in
MM (most famously
Suede) had originally been formed through ads placed in the paper itself. It also continued to publish a section featuring reviews of musical equipment and reader-submitted
demo tapes - though this often had little in common stylistically with the rest of the paper - ensuring sales to the kind of jobbing musicians who would otherwise have had little interest in the music press.
In early 1997 Allan Jones left
MM to edit
Uncut. He was replaced, somewhat controversially, by
Mark Sutherland, formerly of the
NME and
Smash Hits, who "fulfilled his boyhood dream"by editing the magazine for three years. Many long-standing writers left, often moving to
Uncut, with at least one writer,
Simon Price, departing specifically because he objected to a new edict that all coverage of
Oasis should be positive. Its sales, which had for some time been substantially lower than those of the NME, entered a serious decline.
In 1999,
MM was relaunched as a glossy
magazine, a move which in retrospect hastened its demise. It folded in 2000, officially merging with the
NME (long published by the same company,
IPC Media), which took on some of its
journalists and (initially) its musical instrument reviews section.
Bands using MM adverts
Advertisements in
Melody Maker helped assemble the lineups of a number of major bands, including:
Trivia
The name of the French band
Daft Punk was inspired from a lukewarm
Melody Maker review, branding their first efforts under the name Darlin' "a bunch of daft punk".
Further Information
Get more info on 'Melody Maker'.
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