Summer reading: I’m Not With The Band

I’m Not With The Band by Sylvia Patterson

When NME finally gave up the ghost earlier this year, after a last ignominious spell dished out for free outside stations and student unions, anyone under 35 must have wondered why some people were getting so worked up.  After all, the world has changed so much since the paper’s glory days in the seventies and eighties. Back then everything it said mattered - or at least thousands of readers thought it did – and publication day on Thursday was the highlight of the week (or perhaps that was just me).  Now, with instant news, a multitude of views and a plethora of outlets online to get it all, it's doubtful that any single publication – especially on paper – will ever have that kind of influence or reach again. In I’m Not With The Band, Sylvia Patterson writes about her time with the paper, and also with Smash Hits – which if anything, during the eighties, was even more influential (it was certainly more fun) – and in the process explains what all the fuss was about.

She gives an interesting insight into what it was like working in music journalism as post-punk morphed into New Romanticism, and then onto grunge, indie and BritPop – not to mention the infamous “hip-hop wars” which split NME down the middle in the nineties - and there are some good accounts of interviews with some of the big names: New Order, Madonna, Damon Albarn, the Gallaghers … . However, what most interested me was what she writes about her life outside her work - flying out to the States to the opulence of Paisley Park but then returning to one of a succession of squalid flats, some rat infested, some with broken windows, all it seems letting in water – and about her relationship with her difficult mother and sometimes disappointing boyfriends.  Occasionally the accumulation of adjectives becomes a little wearing ("from the countless creative freedoms of the once dominant music and style magazines to the singular agenda of "mean journalism" in a merciless showbiz media", for example), but overall, for anyone for whom, like me, the "pages of the NME were my actual wall paper when I was a bairn" and for many others besides, this will be a fascinating read.

I'm Not With The Band is published by Sphere