Memories were stirred by the rather sad news that NME - which was still New Musical Express when I first started reading it - is to become a freesheet from September.
Britain's once-mighty pop weekly boldly says it is kicking down the doors to the future. But it's hard to escape the underlying statistics - sales down from 75,000 only 10 years ago to a meagre 15,000 now. It once sold more than 200,000 weekly, though today's online presence reaches seven million users a month.
Even thinking of NME in troubled times for the printed press takes me back to when my fondest dream was to work for such a publication.
The first shot at fulfilling this ambition was modest enough and ended in humiliating failure.
My pal Len and I were heading for London. We'd both left the dead-end clerical jobs we knew were beneath us and would set about making an impact in the Smoke.
There was no need to worry about how to accomplish the 250-mile journey, Our little town in County Durham had a busy long-distance haulage firm whose drivers could often be persuaded to take on board local lads, sparing them the need to hitchhike down the A1.
We had no accommodation arranged and no jobs to go to. It didn't matter. There was work a-plenty Down South and I, in an y case, was going to get myself hired by a pop music paper.
What led me to believe I could get anything better than a clerk's job has long since slipped from memory. The escapade was aborted in any case when my mother, who knew of our plan, "bumped into" Len's mother, who did not, and said "isn't it a shock about the boys?". The weight of parental pressure did the rest and we remained in small-town Shildon, newly unemployed and with tails between legs.
After a spell on the dole, we were back in familiar dreary desk jobs, me in a slaughterhouse, Len in a factory, and life went on much as before until we pulled ourselves together, he to train as a teacher as I crawled under the usual radar to blag my way onto a local newspaper.
The notion of working for a rock or music weekly stuck with me. As I once described at my old Daily Telegraph blog, I later made a more promising but equally unsuccessful attempt to join the cream of the music press, Melody Maker.
At least that attempt produced an all-expenses paid trip to London for an interview. But the nearest I would ever get to fulfilling the dream was to moonlight from my day-to-day reporting work to write about folk music for the Telegraph.
I hope NME's decision to opt for free distribution works and is not just a disguised step towards extinction.
In a classic manifestation of age-fuelled prejudice, I cannot regard the modern music scene as being a patch on the vibrant, inventive era of long ago when I'd devour not only Melody Maker and NME but Disc and Music Echo, Record Mirror, Sounds and anything else I could get my hands on.
Melody Maker, NME and the short-lived Sounds contained seriously good writing as well as a lot of pretentious twaddle. I remember enjoying the work of Colin Welsh, Colin Irwin and Jerry Gilbert. I quite liked some of the twaddle, too. And I went on reading the papers long after the music on which they reported had ceased to hold much interest.
Melody Makers published for the last time in 2000, the others died long before it. But NME lingers, its website seen as mattering in music. If I have the slightest piece of advice for its publishers, it is that they should make a case study of Time Out and avoid the errors it has made since going free.
"fharvey", commenting at the indispensable Press Gazette site, where the NME story is currently the most read item, hits the nail on the head: "Time Out's circulation may have rocketed, but sadly its content has dramatically deteriorated. What's-on listings - its original main raison d'être - have become exasperatingly uncomprehensive in the print edition, obliging hapless readers to spend ages trawling website data instead. The editorial tone has semi-dumbed down, and it has largely abandoned hard news and ditched the letters page."
Onwards, NME, but try to stay upwards ...
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