
I learnt a lot from the music magazines, and I think that they shaped my young mind more than I would actually like to admit. I paid more attention to what people like Nick Kent, Mick Farren, and Charles Shaar Murray said, thought, and did than I did my parents, teachers, or peers. For in my young mind the hip young gunslingers of the NME were my peers, and I wanted to I inhabit the same world of anti-establishment, intellectual criticism as did they.
Nearly 40 years on and I find myself the editor of this weekly newsletter, as well as a daily blog based around those jolly nice people at Gonzo Multimedia. Gonzo has such a diverse and rich back catalogue that I find myself like the euphemistic kid in the candy store. Rob Ayling, the Gonzo big cheese, has given me carte blanche to write what I want, as long as it is vaguely connected with the Gonzo multiverse. So I have, and I have dragged my poor long suffering wife, and my friends Richard Freeman, Graham Inglis and Dave Curtis along for the ride. I have even co-opted Gonzo guitar star Paul May of the mighty Atkins May Project into writing gig reviews for us. But I want more.
I have always been somewhat OCD, and I would admit that during my mis-spent youth I fetishised music to perhaps an unhealthy extent, but I loved the music pages back then. And now I have the opportunity to build this weekly newsletter into the same sort of anarchic, crazy-passionate mish-mash of news, reviews, and debate that I used to love so much. I have already had several respond to my call for new writers, and I shall be putting them to work in the next few weeks. But do YOU fancy trying your hand at being a rock journalist?
The contemporary music business has changed beyond all recognition, and music may not ever be as socially and economically as important as it once was. But emotionally, sociologically and spiritually it still speaks to me, it still speaks to you, and I suspect it still speaks to a lot of people. Gonzo is a fine example of the new breed of record companies. Let’s make this newsletter into something really special together.
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