Q magazine – Blood and Porridge

October 10, 2024October 10, 2024

A bash with Ash

The passage of time is a strange and frightening thing. When they first got airplay on Britain’s Radio 1, the three members of the indie-pop-punk-rock band Ash were still at school in Downpatrick, Northern Ireland. At that point the combined ages of their three members, vocalist and guitarist Tim Wheeler, bassist Mark Hamilton and drummer Rick McMurray, must have added up to a number in the low 50s, similar to (perhaps less than) the average age of a member of the Rolling Stones back then. In other words, they seemed stupendously young to me.

So, it was a shock when I went to see Ash perform at Singapore’s Hard Rock Café last Friday night and discovered that suddenly all three are now well into their 40s. How did that happen? Surely, it was only a few months ago that I bought their first album after reading a good review of it in Q magazine?

But actually, that was back in 1996. Where does the time go?

I think it was also in the now-defunct Q magazine, in the 1990s, that I read how Ash were rumoured to be the favourite band of a young Prince William. Well, it has to be said that Ash in 2024 have weathered the years rather better than their royal fan, who these days is first in line to the throne. Unlike the follicly-challenged Prince William, Wheeler and Hamilton still have full heads of hair – although, suspiciously, McMurray sported a baseball cap throughout the gig.

The many Western expats present in tonight’s audience looked of a similar vintage to Ash and Prince William — teenagers back in the 1990s but now middle-aged. Incidentally, the crowd also contained a fair sprinkling of Singaporeans. From what I can gather, this was Ash’s fourth visit to the city-state, so they’d evidently acquired a few local fans too.

Tonight was the first time I’d attended a gig in the Hard Rock Café. I’m not a fan of this particular dining franchise, though I have to admit they did a good job of transforming it from a restaurant to a concert venue – a venue with an old-fashioned ‘small, sweaty club’ vibe, which was especially welcome in Singapore, where too often you have to watch bands in sedate, sit-down establishments, stuck among endless rows of seats, unable to move about and shake a leg. The café could have done with a higher stage, however. I felt sorry for the shorter Ash fans. Jammed behind taller folk, probably all they could see of the band were the tops of Wheeler and Hamilton’s still-hirsute heads.

One other feature of the Hard Rock Café I wasn’t thrilled by was its bar prices. A small glass of Carlsberg beer cost 14 dollars, which meant you’d be paying in the region of 30 dollars for something approximating a pint, a costly sum even by Singapore’s standards. Presumably because the café wanted to do some normal Friday-evening business beforehand, Ash didn’t come onstage until ten o’clock, with the doors opening for the gig at nine. I arrived shortly after nine, saw the prices, popped out again and headed along the street to the craft-brewery bar-and-restaurant Brewerkz, where a pint cost me a slightly less eye-watering 23 dollars.

When I returned to the café just before ten, it was mobbed. Since I wouldn’t see much of the band from the back, where the bar was, I decided to forego further boozing, burrowed my way through the crowd, secured myself a spot about two yards from the barrier before the stage, and stayed there for the show’s duration. Even there, my view wasn’t perfect – I saw Wheeler and Hamilton’s upper halves, though they often vanished when excitable people in front of me waved their arms in the air, and I needed to stand on tiptoe to see McMurray at his drumkit.

And mounted on the wall above my head was an example of the rock-and-roll memorabilia that famously decorates the Hard Rock Café franchise all over the world. This was the drumkit of Rob Blotzer, drummer with the 1980s hair metal band RATT. I’d completely forgotten about the dreadful, poodle-headed RATT until I saw that drumkit. But now I remember them again. Thanks for that, Hard Rock Café.

The omens were not good when Ash began the gig. Firstly, a forest of hands shot up around me, clutching smartphones, all filming, and I had a sickening premonition of being surrounded by dozens of tiny glowing screens, each showing a tiny glowing image of the band, for the next hour-and-a-half. Secondly, it quickly became obvious that there were sound problems, with Wheeler’s vocals almost buried by the noise of Hamilton’s bass. Thankfully, most of the phones were soon lowered again – the crowd had just wanted some footage of their heroes coming onstage – and, a few songs in, the sound-mix became more balanced.

And what followed was very enjoyable. The crowd, at least where I was, had fun and Ash looked like they were having a good time too. Unlike a number of bands I’ve seen at gigs in various parts of the world, this band gave the impression that they knew, and appreciated, where they were. For example, at one point, McMurray told the audience a funny anecdote from the previous time they’d played Singapore.

Also, due to the fact that I was standing near one of the main speakers, I was left partially deaf for the next 24 hours. Which was a pain in the arse at work the next day, but surely a sign that I’d been to a good gig.

The 40-something Ash fans in attendance must have found it a nostalgic treat, because half of the 18-song setlist came off the two hit albums of their early years, 1977 (1996) and Free All Angels (2001). These songs included Angel Interceptor, Goldfinger and Girl from Mars from the former and Shining Light, Burn Baby Burn and Sometimes from the latter. Oh, and the famously Jackie Chan-referencing Kung Fu from 1977 got an airing too. (I’m sure Ash were delighted when Kung Fu actually got used in a Jackie Chan movie, playing during the bloopers reel at the end of 1995’s Rumble in the Bronx.) To give proceedings a slightly more up-to-date feel, they also played three tracks from their most recent album, 2023’s Race the Night. When, between songs, Wheeler mentioned the album they’d ‘recorded last year’, an Ash fan behind me remarked in a loud and serious voice: “Surprisingly good!” So maybe I should check it out.

Alas, the Ash album I like best – the guitar-heavy Nu-clear Sounds (1998), which was released between 1977 and Free All Angels, got a mixed reception from the critics and had disappointing sales – was represented by just one song tonight, Wildsurf. I would have loved to hear them play more songs off it, especially the singles Jesus Says and Numbskull, which I think are cracking tunes. The same thing happened last November when I went to see the Manic Street Preachers (they played only one song from my favourite Manics album, 1993’s Gold Against the Soul) and Suede (ditto for my favourite Suede album, 1994’s Dog Man Star). Maybe this is a quaint Singaporean curse I’ve fallen victim to.

September 2, 2024September 2, 2024

No way-sis

From wikipedia.org / © Will Fresch

I’ve just Googled ‘the universe’s smallest sub-atomic particle’ and been told that, from what we currently know, the title belongs to those classes of particles known as quarks and leptons. So, let me say that even a quark, or a lepton, is considerably bigger than the amount of enthusiasm I can summon about the news that legendary 1990s rock band Oasis have reformed and will embark on a five-city / 17-gig tour of Wales, England, Scotland and Ireland in the summer of 2025. (The tour has already sold out, which suggests some folk are more enthusiastic about the reunion than I am.)

Oasis have not been a thing since 2009, when the arguing, quarrelling, sniping and feuding that’d always featured in the relationship between the band’s two mainstays, Mancunian siblings Noel and Liam Gallagher, finally went supernova – as opposed to going Champagne Supernova – resulting in the band’s break-up and the pair not sharing a stage or studio since. From 2009 until recently, they’ve only acknowledged each other’s existence by flinging insults. Liam, the younger and less cerebral Gallagher, has frequently called his older brother a ‘potato’ and referred to his post-Oasis band the High Flying Birds as the ‘High Flying Smurfs’. Noel, meanwhile, has memorably described his little brother as “a man with a fork in a world of soup.”

Oasis first appeared on my radar in the mid-1990s, when I was working at Hokkai-Gakuen University in Sapporo, capital of the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. A student approached me one day and inquired if I was ‘Bra’ or ‘O-aaa-sis’. (No, I’m not trying to indulge in Sofia Coppola-style mockery of how Japanese people speak English – I’m simply describing how the student, with her pronunciation, sounded to me at the time. I’m sure my Japanese sounded even weirder to her.) I realised she wasn’t referring to a lady’s undergarment but to British rock / pop band Blur. She was also talking about Oasis, with whom – if the British press was to be believed at the time – Blur were locked in the bitterest and most vitriolic rivalry since the Hatfields and the McCoys. (Noel Gallagher once remarked, “I wish Blur were dead, John Lennon was alive and the Beatles would reform.”) Not very familiar with either band – there was no Internet in those days and it was much harder to keep up with events in the UK – I visited Sapporo’s Tower Records soon after and bought a couple of their albums.

How would I answer that student? Was I Blur or Oasis?

© Creation Records

The Oasis album I bought was 1994’s Definitely Maybe and by my reckoning it’s a very good record. It’s not particularly innovative, with the ghosts of the Beatles, T-Rex and Slade never far away, but it has several memorable toe-tappers and stompers like Columbia and Supersonic and one genuinely great track, Live Forever. The latter made me think that if I was a teenager, I could seriously fall in love with these guys. The song encapsulates those feelings of hope and optimism you have in your teens, no matter how humble or ordinary your origins, about your whole life being ahead of you and great things possibly awaiting – no more so than when the refrain kicks in near the end, “Gonna live forever!”

The songs of rock’s previous big thing, the Seattle-centred grunge movement, had been introspective, melancholic, downright miserable at times, and on April 5^th, 1994, less than five months before Definitely Maybe’s release, its biggest star Kurt Cobain had blown his brains out. So, in Britain at least, young music fans must have been ready for something more joyous.

Hope was also in the air politically. After a decade-and-a-half of Britain being ruled by the Conservative party – peachy for anyone living in booming, investment-heavy south-east England, crap for anyone living in the now-post-industrial rest of the country – and with the current Tory government of John Major looking clueless, a brighter future seemed to be on the cards. The Labour Party was reinventing itself as ‘New Labour’ and, mindful of the prevailing Zeitgeist, its shiny, photogenic young leader was keen to rub shoulders with Oasis, Blur and other representatives of the country’s burgeoning new rock scene that’d become known as ‘Britpop’. That smiley, nice-seeming Prime Minister-in-waiting was called Tony Blair… Well, okay. We know how that worked out.

From wikipedia.org / © Raph_PH

I also acquired Blur’s Parklife (1994) and liked it less. If Oasis drew on the Beatles for inspiration, then the spark for Parklife-era Blur was another 1960s British band, the Kinks. This resulted in a number of chirpy, quirky songs that I found irritating and made me agree with Noel Gallagher, who slagged them off as ‘chimney-sweep music’. That said, the title song (‘Shite–life’ as Liam once dubbed it), which has actor Phil Daniels babbling non-stop while singer Damon Albarn shouts “Parklife!” every so often, has been stuck in my head ever since. Even today, when I find myself in a work-meeting with a superior who drones on endlessly, their voice dripping with meaningless corporate jargon, I have to fight off the urge to shout “Parklife!” at half-minute intervals.

Anyhow, though I regarded Blur’s album as the weaker one, I still liked them. This was because I could remember seeing them live – at London’s Brixton Academy back in 1992, when hardly anyone had heard of them, on a bill that also included the Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine and Dinosaur Jr. I thought they’d been all right.

So, during the Blur vs. Oasis wars, I ended up neutral.

The 1990s continued. So did Oasis, Blur and the Britpop craze, which spawned dozens of bands I only have vague memories of now: Cast, Kula Shakur, Ocean Colour Scene, Heavy Stereo, Sleeper, Echobelly, Dodgy, Menswear, Mansun… Actually, I’ll admit to having a strange fondness for Mansun’s song Take It Easy Chicken.

© Creation Records

In 1995 Oasis unveiled their second album, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, which went on to sell 22 million copies worldwide and became one of the decade’s most acclaimed records. I wasn’t impressed, though. The opening number (and first single) Roll with It seemed shockingly generic to me – no wonder Damon Albarn nicknamed them ‘Oasis Quo’ – and it also spawned one of the world’s worst jokes: “Why did Oasis choose soup on the menu? Because they got a roll with it.” Some people adore the anthemic Don’t Look Back in Anger and Champagne Supernova but I’ve always found them overwrought. And while initially I thought the ballad Wonderwall was quite nice, I got sick of it after hearing it for the 10,000^th time. (My partner and I were in a restaurant a fortnight ago when, from a speaker, Liam started intoning, “Today is gonna be the day…” We groaned and rolled our eyes.)

(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?’s huge, if in my opinion undeserved, success meant Oasis became even more of a rock-and-roll behemoth, doing all the customary rock-and-roll things. Cocaine-fuelled excess? Check. Infighting? Check. Disappearing drummers? Check. Hanging out with Johnny Depp? Check. Marrying Patsy Kensit? Check. With so much going on, it was inevitable that the band’s third album, 1997’s Be Here Now, would (a) be presaged with more, over-the-top hype than ever and (b) prove a bloated disappointment whose sales were only a third of those of its predecessor. It brought the band’s ascendancy to an abrupt end and helped pop the bubble of Britpop itself. Afterwards, Oasis made more albums and I think I’ve heard most of them. But I can’t remember a single song off them.

© Creation Records

The band’s boorish, obnoxious image put me off them too. And when people criticise Oasis for boorishness and obnoxiousness, it’s basically Liam they’re complaining about. While some of the abuse he’s doled out raises a smile – grumbling, for instance, that Florence Welch from Florence and the Machine “sounds like someone’s stood on her f**king foot” – there’s other stuff he’s said and done that just makes him seem like an arsehole. An incident at Q magazine’s awards ceremony in 2000 where he heckled Kylie Minogue by yelling ‘lesbian!’ at her is also a reminder that, over the years, a fair amount of homophobia has issued from the younger Gallagher’s gob.

Yet, despite this, many journalists and critics have given Liam an easy ride – even when they’ve been on the receiving end of his loutishness. One possible reason why is the belief that because he comes from an ‘authentic’ working-class background in Manchester, Liam is somehow the ‘authentic’ voice of the working class. Therefore, if you criticise his antics, you’re being ‘class-ist’. Indeed, this argument has re-ignited in the wake of the news about 2025’s reunion tour. The British media is suddenly full of commentators accusing other commentators, ones not delighted by Oasis’s return, of being snobbish and anti-working class.

But I don’t think any of this holds water. For one thing, I’ve known working-class people who’ve also been unimpressed by Liam’s yobbishness. And, in my time, I’ve seen plenty of middle-class and upper-class people make knobheads of themselves, and their social status didn’t make me think they were any less arseholey than the Oasis frontman.

From wikipedia.org / © Alexander Frick

Tellingly, Mark Lanegan – singer with 1990s grunge band the Screaming Trees and somebody whose upbringing in Ellensburg, Washington, sounds much tougher than the Gallaghers’ in Manchester – didn’t have a high opinion of Gallagher the Younger. In his 2020 autobiography Sing Backwards and Weep, Lanegan recalls how in 1996 the Screaming Trees supported Oasis during a North American tour. At the tour’s start, Liam accosted Lanegan with a mocking cry of “Howling Branches!” – Howling Branches, Screaming Trees, get it? Lanegan described his response thus: “‘F**k off, you stupid f**king idiot’ was my brief blasé retort, spoken as if to a bothersome mosquito.”

This was not the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Lanegan came to detest Liam so much that he wrote: “I couldn’t believe someone hadn’t beaten, knifed, or shot him to death by now, such was the reckless, witless, and despotic nature of his insufferable façade.”

So, I wasn’t subject to even a fleeting moment of temptation to spend hours in a Ticketmaster queue and shell out eye-watering sums of money to see Oasis perform next summer. As far as I’m concerned, the band have only one really decent album behind them. Besides, I’m not sure they’ll even make it through the tour. Noel may well bail out before the end, deciding that occupying the same airspace as his tosser-ish brother again is more than his sanity is worth.

© Food Records / Virgin Records

Finally, returning to the old Blur-Oasis rivalry, I have to say I’m now in the Blur camp. I think they’re the better band because, in the end, they’ve produced more good songs that Oasis have: This is a Low (1994), He Thought of Cars, The Universal (both 1995), Beetlebum, Song 2, Death of a Party (all 1997), Coffee & TV (1999), Out of Time (2003)… Incidentally, given that Oasis were always supposed to be hard-men northerners while Blur were poncy, studenty southerners, the video for The Universal, inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), makes Blur look far more disturbing than their Mancunian adversaries ever looked. Damon Albarn and co. make great Droogs.

But if I had to choose one band that represented the peak of Britpop, it wouldn’t be Blur or Oasis. No, it’d be Sheffield’s Pulp, led by the sublimely sly Jarvis Cocker. Pulp’s Common People (1995), for instance, brilliantly captures one of the indignities of being working class – that of having moneyed people trying to ‘slum it’ by hanging out with you in order to look cool. No wonder that in 2004 Common People received the ultimate accolade – William Shatner sang a cover version of it. I can’t imagine the former Captain Kirk ever wanting to wrap his tonsils around Wonderwall.

© Island Records

July 31, 2020August 10, 2020

Exit Q

This week saw the publication of the final issue of Q, the British monthly music magazine that’d been on the go since 1986. You could argue that it’d been as much a victim of Covid-19 as, say, Terence McNally, John Prine or Tim Brooke-Taylor. In recent years Q had struggled financially and the lockdown in Britain caused by the virus and consequent lack of sales dealt the killer blow. Its editor since 2017, Ted Kessler, reflected in its last issue, “We’d been a lean operation for all of my tenure, employing a variety of ways to keep our head above water in an extremely challenging print market. Covid-19 wiped all that out.”

That’s a shame because for a decade-and-a-half, from the late 1980s to the early 2000s, Q was a fixture in my life. Buying it every month was both an ingrained habit and something I looked forward to.

It was launched in the mid-1980s by David Hepworth and Mark Ellen – the latter’s claims to fame include playing bass for a short time in the 1970s Oxford University band the Ugly Rumours, which had one Tony Blair as its singer. You mightn’t have expected Hepworth and Ellen to start up something like Q, aimed at older music fans, because previously they’d edited the shiny, teen-pop weekly Smash Hits. However, they’d also spent the 1980s hosting the BBC’s long-running highbrow rock-music show The Old Grey Whistle Test (1971-88) and on July 13^th, 1985, helped to present the BBC’s coverage of the Live Aid concert at Wembley Stadium. Indeed, it was in response to something Hepworth said during the broadcast that Bob Geldof made his famous “F*ck the address!” outburst on live TV.

Hepworth and Ellen angled Q towards an older readership because they realised that pop and rock music were no longer just a young person’s game. By the mid-1980s, folk who’d spent their teen years listening to Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and the like were well into their forties and those who’d been old enough to enjoy the soundtrack of the Summer of Love were pushing middle-age. Furthermore, a new innovation, the compact disc, was causing many older records to be reissued in a new format and older people were spending money on older music again – buying on CD what they already owned on vinyl, a technology that suddenly seemed obsolete. Unsurprisingly, the ‘reissues’ review section in Q was almost as long as its ‘new releases’ review one.

At the same time, the existing British music press seemingly offered nothing to anyone who was older than their mid-twenties. The teenybop magazines, pursuing an audience interested only in New Romantic bands like Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet and Wham – a movement I have to say I found unspeakable, as well as unlistenable – certainly didn’t, and the ‘serious’ music weeklies like the New Musical Express and the Melody Maker treated anything recorded before the advent of punk rock in the mid-1970s as the music of boring old farts.

No doubt reading Q in the late 1980s marked me out as a boring old fart too (I recall the NME once describing Q as a ‘living death of a magazine’), but I preferred its more measured, less partisan and less pretentious style and its willingness to cover with an open mind a range of musical genres from a range of eras to the attitude of the highbrow weeklies. The NME particularly got up my nose, its scribes broadcasting their musical preferences (and personal politics) in such an annoying, self-conscious, stuck-up and patronising way that I sometimes wondered if they were all clones that’d been grown from the cells of Rik Mayall’s character in the TV sitcom The Young Ones (1982-84). I actually enjoyed much of the music that the NME championed, like punk, new wave and indie, but my two favourite musical genres at the time were heavy metal and goth music, both of which the NME loathed and ridiculed, dismissing their fans as gormless morons. So yes, by 1986, I was ready for Q.

That’s not to say Q was toothless. Some of the most scathing pieces of musical journalism I’ve read appeared in its pages, though they were effective because the writer simply recorded was seen and heard and allowed the ‘stars’ in question to talk and string themselves up with their own words. I’m thinking of an article about an American tour attempted by late 1980s teen heartthrobs Bros, in which the brothers comprising the band, Matt and Luke Goss, came across as delusional and out-of-their-depth plonkers. Or a piece about Simply Red doing a concert in Cuba, in which the Q journalist had to deal with the mood-swings of a megalomaniacal, self-pitying and generally bloody awful Mick Hucknall. Or an encounter with the Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan, in which Corgan’s behaviour was such that the interview’s strapline was Marvel at the horribleness of Billy Corgan!

This ‘give-them-enough-rope’ approach, along with a strong dose of sarcasm, was evident in what for me was Q’s best regular feature, Who the hell does… think he / she is?, which ran until the late 1990s and was often but not always written by the late Tom Hibbert. This involved a unflattering interview with one of the ‘characters’ who were fixtures of British popular culture at the time – prominent in British TV, radio, comedy, sport, music, publishing, journalism or politics, but not showing much evidence of the talent that, in a rational world, would have secured them that prominence. The rogue’s gallery getting the Who the hell… treatment included Jeffrey Archer, Bananarama, Simon Bates, Jeremy Beadle, Gary Bushell, Barbara Cartland, Jeremy Clarkson, Edwina Currie, Jim Davidson, Eddie ‘the Eagle’ Edwards, Samantha Fox, Hale and Pace, Neil and Christine Hamilton, Benny Hill, David Icke, Bernard Manning, David Mellor, Michael Winner and not one, but two Starrs, Freddie and Ringo.

The interviews with those last two people were particularly memorable. An unhinged Freddie Starr ended up raving, “Jesus Christ tried to please everyone. And look what happened to him. Am I right? Am I right?” Whereas Ringo Starr, taking umbrage that in 1992 Hibbert still wanted to talk about the Beatles, raged: “That was 30 years ago, man. I’m still making records and you can hear that I’m a great musician on the new record, Time Takes Time, if you can ever be bothered to mention it. This is an actual bloody legend in front of you.”.

And it’s fascinating, if extremely disturbing, to note how many of the Who the hell… interviewees were later revealed as paedophiles and sexual abusers: Max Clifford, Gary Glitter, Rolf Harris and, worst of all, Jimmy Savile. Of Savile, Hibbert wrote: “People are loath to speak ill of Sir James. The man is a saint, millions raised for charity; he is the kiddies’ friend, ever on the telly placing a Jim’ll Fix It gong around the neck of some abashed youngster who’s just been a hovercraft pilot for a day. It is churlish, cynical beyond belief, to suggest there might be something untoward about the benevolent one. But isn’t there, perhaps, some oddness afoot. You hear tales, entirely uncorroborated, of course, whispered in sniggers at dinner parties…” To which Savile retorted that there were no skeletons in his closet because “I got knighted and that proves it, doesn’t it?” The wizened old monster then started bragging about his promiscuity with the ladies: “You can’t be in a disco with 600 birds in Aberdeen and stopping overnight and faithful to one f*ck in Leeds…”

Incidentally, an interview Hibbert did with Savile’s good friend Margaret Thatcher also appeared in Who the hell… Asking her what her favourite sort of pop music was, she professed to liking How Much is that Doggie in the Window?

© Paul Rider

Q was lucky in its timing, for the anodyne, superficial music that dominated the charts during the early and mid-1980s was later, partly at least, dislodged by Madchester and grunge. And then the Britpop phenomenon hit the country in the mid-1990s. In other words, music got rockier again, and with bands around like the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays, Nirvana and Pearl Jam, Oasis and Blur, Q had proper rock stars, displaying proper rock star attitudes, as material for entertaining articles and interviews. During the 1990s, the magazine also established the yearly Q Awards Ceremony, which became famous for the raucousness and rudeness of certain invitees. For example, John Lydon heckled Phil Jupitus and Johnny Vegas as ‘Teletubbies’, and Liam Gallagher called Chris Martin of Coldplay a ‘plant-pot’ – quite right too.

I spent a good part of the 1990s living in the Japanese city of Sapporo, and between 1993 and 1998 I bought every issue of Q from my local branch of Tower Records. Just before I left Sapporo, I donated my collection of back issues to my mate, Steve Burrow. I hope he’s still got them, as they would be worth a fortune today. A little later, I went to Ethiopia and worked there for the Voluntary Service Overseas organisation, and my brother in Scotland was kind enough every month to post me the latest copy of Q after he’d finished reading it. I think those Q back issues, from 1999 to 2001, ended up sitting on the shelves of the volunteers’ library in the central VSO Office in Addis Ababa. Who knows? Maybe they’re still there now.

But I lost interest in Q in the early noughties, partly because every issue seemed to indulge in that most pointlessly bloke-ish of things, compiling lists: ‘The 100 best albums of all time’, ‘the 100 best gigs of all time’, ‘the 100 best drummers of all time’, and so on and so forth. I know I’m guilty of putting the occasional list on this blog, but at least I don’t charge people money to read them.

In truth, Q was running out of interesting things to write about. By now the popular music scene had become a lot duller, thanks in part to the rise of identikit pop stars spawned by TV reality shows like Pop Idol (2001-2003), The X-Factor (2004-present) and The Voice (2010-present). These non-entities were products of what I like to think of as ‘the Simon Cowell conveyor belt of karaoke’.

That’s not to say that there wasn’t good music still around, but people were accessing it on the Internet and making the discovery and enjoyment of that music a much more disparate and individual experience. The days when large numbers of people suddenly hooked onto the same musical craze, which the old-style music magazines would then cover and capitalise on by selling loads of copies, were dead and gone. The Internet too was where people were increasingly turning to for information about music. Indeed, it was ironic that Q, a magazine partly created by new technology, the CD, was scuppered by new technology too.

That’s said, I’ve heard good things about Q under the editorship of Ted Kessler during the past three years, and I wish I’d dipped into it again while it was still there. But it’s too late now.

That’s not to say, of course, that good writing about music doesn’t exist anymore. It does, but you’re more likely to find it online than on the (ever-thinning) magazine racks of your local newsagent. That’s why I recommend you click onto – and if you like it, donate to – the Quietus.