ROCK PAPERS FOR BRITS

New Music News died over six months ago now. For a while there it looked like it was going to make it. It was the first intrusion into the strangehold of the Big Three (NME, Melody Maker, Sounds) for ten years. Trade papers, as they are sometimes cynically known (the inference being they are as much ‘for’ the record industry as for the readership) are a unique product of British reading habits, weekly nationwide rock newspapers, and of our historical place in the music and our geographical size.