Just read an article in the Graun about the demise of the print version of the NME. The article has zero perspective on NME's heyday and its moment of defining impact on British music culture - which was of course championing punk in the 1970s.

Don't think they've ever had a better group of music journalists either - Tony Parsons, Julie Burchill, Paul Morley, Charles Shaar Murray and my own favourite, Nick Kent.
They could be bloody irritating and pretentious - especially Morley and Burchill - but were always worth a read.

I'm not sure championing punk is anything special. Music fads come and go.
What's great is to have 100 years of popular music fads to choose from. I'm listing to Artie Shaw's big band right now and after that Van Der Graaf Generator (who were a big influence on John Lydon).
Never a dull moment.

Pawn Hearts, fantastic album, got it in 1972 at the age of 12, yes i was an odd child. A Plague Of Lighthouse Keepers one of the best sides of an album ever, and no guitars as i recall. People think the album title has some deep meaning but it came from Dave Jackson who one day used the spoonerism when he meant to say he was going to finish some horn parts.

Do people still get music magazines?

Feel like i missed the boat on the nme, used to get kerrang when i was a little emo kid around about the year 2000, stopped getting that when they knocked the free cd's on the head.

One of Rod's finest along with The Vintage Years..

Same, the free cd's used to be ellish.

Even better played live. The video on Youtube (the remastered one) is seriously top banana, although as far as their songs go, Man-erg and La Rossa just nick it for me.

I guess you had to be there then. At the time punk felt like a revolution and a call to arms, rejecting rock excess and prog noodling in favour of bands formed by people who 'couldn't even play properly.'

Sure, like a lot of revolutions punk threw out the baby with the bathwater and was often a triumph of form over substance, but in terms of a youth culture rejecting what had gone before it was massive. Musically there's a case can made that the Britpop era bands were as good, maybe better, than their punk equivalents, but then Britpop was a marketing slogan at best.

Oh I was there all right, and I had no problem with the "new music"; but it wasn't the first clean-out I'd witnessed, and I hope I'm not so full of myself as to believe my generation lived out the One True Revolution.
I'm not in the school that considers punk kicked out prog. Prog had run its course by 1976 and all but a couple of its core groups had disappeared up their own arseholes, so there wasn't much left to kick out. The music that was popular when messrs Rotten and Co. arrived in their tanks was the Same Old Drudge. And it was still there when they left.

PS: that doesn't mean I think the best prog groups at their height were anything less than awesome.

NME, Sounds and Record Mirror , the highlight of our weekly visit to the school library in the late 70s.

Burchill?? Ffs.

I bought it religiously between the ages of 15 and 19 until I moved away. Hardly anywhere in the town apart from Smiths used to sell it, if it sold out it was a right mission trying to get a copy. In pre-internet days there was only that and the other mags (Sounds/Melody Maker), and John Peel that informed you about anything new musically.

Sad that it's gone but there's very little place for printed stuff now.

I'm not actually saying that, but hey ho. I started buying records in the late 60s/early 70s - a wonderfully creative and diverse time when record companies signed hundreds of bands because the money men had no idea where the music was going and a band like Jethro Tull could have a number one album despite trying a different musical style on virtually every track.

Despite that, and despite me being an 'old hippie' in my mid-20s, Punk's iconoclasm (and the way NME journos wrote about it) was exciting. It wasn't the first generation-defining British youth culture based around young guys (and the occasional girl) playing guitars, but it was certainly the last.

The 70s was a great decade , probably the best ever, for lots of reasons, certainly the best time to be a bloke. As you say Punk was the last British youth cult and that added to the industrial unrest and football hooliganism, none of which I'm glorifying by the way, was I believe a reaction to the changing times and insecurity about the future around at the time, it was the beginning of the last rites for the British working class as we knew it.

It was in the 1980s that it all started to go wrong though.

I always preferred Sounds when punk took off, they got onto it faster and generally embraced it whereas the NME seemed a bit ambivalent. But I was a 14 year old year zero merchant and with hindsight the NME had a much more balanced view than Sounds. I did like their post-punk coverage though. The likes of Morley eventually disappeared up their own arses but from '78 to '84 there was some great writing in the NME.

Hard not to be a little bit nostalgic but when you can read something like The Quietus and click to listen to everything they're writing about it's easy to see why printed music papers have died out.

I agree and was going to say so myself but, errr, I wasn't sure of my facts.
The last one in Britain at any rate. Probably the last one anywhere that didn't include the word "motherfucker".

Wayne County and the Electric Chairs did a song called Mean Mutha Fuckin Man. Bit of Sladey spelling but surely that has to count?

You can tell you're a bunch of old men. They've been quite a few musical 'revolutions' since punk, just not with guitars. Some with the attitude to match.

Opinions eh.

That's why I said guitars Guilty as charged.

There's been a few, acid house for one, but not that many if you discount metropolitan sub-cultures that have hardly registered in places like Hartlepool.

Are you telling me Trimdon isn't a hotbed for new grime artists? (Done in my best Ian Hislop impression!)

Trimdon has always been a hotbed of grime.

You no doubt already know that one of the scene-changing groups in France in the late 1990s was the group NTM. Not saying they weren't shite or owt but the initals NTM stand for nique ta mère IOW fuck your mother (a common insult in arabic but that's beside the point).
I think we might be on to something here.

Had no idea about those motherfuckers Monty, I've tried getting more into French music but with a few honourable exceptions it is dire stuff.

Anyway, who was the earliest person to slip a bit of mfing into a tune that actually got properly released?

There were few American R&B (old sort)artists that released very sweary versions of songs for jukebox play only and I know Isaac Hayes had it in the original lyrics for Shaft but was persuaded to half drop it. Who came out with a full blown motherfucker first though?