Totally Wired: The Rise and Fall of the Music Press

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Process: The Working Practices Of Barney Bubbles Sept 21 – Oct 23 2010 Chelsea Space London UK Role: Curator with Caz Facey See here. Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges September 26 – November 14 2015 John Hansard Gallery Southampton UK Role: Curator with David Thorp See here. Paul Gorman is interviewed by Mark Ellen and David Hepworth about his new book on YouTube /Word in Your Ear/Word in Your Attic. Exalts the heyday of music magazines, when electric prose reigned and egos collided... Totally Wired does a fine job recounting, and eulogizing...a fertile era when magazines like Creem, Crawdaddy, Pressure Drop, Kerrang! and even boomer stalwarts like Rolling Stone served as a counterweight to the larger culture industry'

An illuminating treatise … Gorman expertly combines first-hand interviews with his own insight from inside the trenches to paint a vivid portrait … essential reading' Communicates and expresses the energy of an intelligent anarchist holding an anti-bullshit device” The Guardian First started reading "my bible", the NME in late 1977, early1978, and religiously never missing a copy through the 80s, until the late 90s, when imo, it started to go downhill. Bold in scope … takes a historian’s eye view of an industry that once made the morally reprehensible mainstream British tabloid press look as pastoral as a parish newsletter'

When NME, the last surviving weekly, closed its print edition in 2018 an era had definitively ended. Music simply no longer occupies the central space in youth culture that it once did. The music press has a curious sort of afterlife, and not just online, in the shape of the heritage and specialist magazines, but they connect with nothing beyond themselves. Popular music and the press that both reflected and shaped it once served as catalysts to private dreams, alternative worlds and unknown pleasures, but those days are now consigned to the history chronicled in this wonderful book.

Herein are documented the rise and fall of scores of music papers, from titans like New Musical Express and Melody Maker to radical papers like Oz and IT, from later, hugely successful, glossies like Smash Hits, The Face and Q to publications that were little more than Xeroxed fanzines, all of them staffed by schemers and dreamers drawn to the bright lights of pop, most of them engaging characters of one sort or another whose work is documented and, to some extent, assessed by colleagues and the author himself. Furthermore, although the emphasis is on the UK, Totally Wired extends its reach to the US with its dry trade journals like Billboard, twinkling teenybop mags like 16 and hard-nosed monthlies like Creem, and where the struggle to outshine Rolling Stone continues to this day. Lloyd Johnson: The Modern Outfitter Jan 24 – March 3 2012 Chelsea Space London UK Role: Curator See here. Barney Bubbles Artworks August 3 – 18, 2017 Fred Perry Henrietta Street London UK Role: Organiser See here.British Design 1948–2012: Innovation in the Modern Age March 31 – Aug 12 2012 V&A London UK Role: Advisor/contributor of exhibits See here.

In that regard, author Paul Gorman has certainly done his homework. Starting with ‘Melody Maker’ in the 1920s, Gorman traces the origins of the music press in both the U.K. and the U.S. He follows the rise of print titles such as ‘New Musical Express’ (whose launch in the 1950s inadvertently invented the Top 40 singles charts) and ‘Rolling Stone’ (that combined music with politics and protest while also commoditising the 1960s even while they were still happening). From there, “Totally Wired” brings us through the 1980s, possibly the high watermark of music press publications (in the U.K. at least), when glossy titles like ‘Smash Hits’, ‘The Face’, and ‘Q’ captured the cultural zeitgeist.

Barney Bubbles: Optics & Semantics August 31 – September 23, 2017 Rob Tufnell Lambeth Walk London UK Role: Curator See here. This multi-million pound business eventually straddled the Atlantic and simultaneously proved a fertile breeding ground for generations of writers, photographers, film-makers and performers who made their mark in the wider world. The music press as we knew it barely exists any more, which makes ‘Totally Wired’ the perfect eulogy – a broad, deep, fascinating exploration of its 100-year lifespan”– Alexis Petridis