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Q Magazine RIP

Started by pigamus, July 20, 2020, 03:09:51 PM

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wosl

Remember Morris once having a dig after playing some Iggy Pop on his radio show by saying that if he were a Q journo he'd have announced it as being by "Sir Iggington of Popford".

daf

#31
Sounds more like Smash Hits style that.

Though . . .

Wasn't Q started by ex-Smash Hits writers - Mark Ellen, David Hepworth and . .  er . . 'the other one' . . (Coverdale or something?)

That'd explain it.

shiftwork2

I liked Tom Hibbert's description of Hale & Pace as a double act with two straight men.

I wonder what Q stood for?  Aspirational compact disc rock - that's what!

Amazed it was still going, but then I'm amazed that all magazines that still exist are still going.

Gulftastic

Sci Fi Now went last month. I've gone back to SFX.

Custard

I think Q stood for Q as in question

Q: So Stereophonics, what makes this album different to your twelve previous ones?

A: Different songs. Same chords, but different songs

I greatly miss The Word magazine. That was decent. I don't know who is still buying Mojo, but I'll read the odd issue on Readly

mobias

Quote from: Lisa Jesusandmarychain on July 20, 2020, 03:46:57 PM
Mojo next?

Nah there's enough Beatles fans out there still to keep that going for a while yet. Its much more obvious who Mojo is aimed at - older music fans who still buy magazines.

wosl

Quote from: daf on July 20, 2020, 07:27:21 PMWasn't Q started by ex-Smash Hits writers - Mark Ellen, David Hepworth and . .  er . . 'the other one' . . (Coverdale or something?)

That'd explain it.

It was.  Morris might've said Smash Hits (although I still hear it as Q), but yes, I think he'd got Mark Ellen specifically in mind.

daf

Quote from: shiftwork2 on July 20, 2020, 07:42:41 PM
I wonder what Q stood for?

I actually know this - prepare to groan  . . .

It's a pun based on 'Cue the music' - like that Mike Mansfield used to say on Supersonic.

(I've made that up, but I bet it's true!)

daf

Ha! What did I tell you! -

QuoteIn the early years, the magazine was sub-titled "The modern guide to music and more". Originally it was to be called Cue (as in the sense of cueing a record, ready to play), but the name was changed so that it would not be mistaken for a snooker magazine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_(magazine)#Content

(scroll up from content on that link ^ - the main link to the Q page is bust, so I had to do it this way)

wosl

Hepworth and Ellen also had their fingers in the MOJO pie - I've dug out the earliest copy I have, and they're credited as Editorial Director and Managing Editor respectively in that.

dissolute ocelot

It was never quite as bad as some people claimed, it was just what it stood for and the people who read it. It could be funny, but it had questionable taste at best. Ultimately I blame modern bands; the sort of intelligentish rock music Q used to cover in its heyday is almost dead, and if you want to read about Billie Eilish or Little Simz (both in their 2019 top ten albums) why would you turn to Q?

Ballad of Ballard Berkley

Tom Hibbert's interviews were great and the photo captions in the '90s were often very funny. I always remember a photograph of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, flanked by two beautiful topless women, being captioned with: "Not for the first time that day, Noel Redding considered his incredible good fortune."

Which still makes me laugh.

Also...



"I'd leave it about ten or fifteen minutes, if I were you."

ollyboro

Quote from: Ballad of Ballard Berkley on July 20, 2020, 08:41:53 PM
Tom Hibbert's interviews were great and the photo captions in the '90s were often very funny. I always remember a photograph of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, flanked by two beautiful topless women, being captioned with: "Not for the first time that day, Noel Redding considered his incredible good fortune."

Which still makes me laugh.


I remember a photograph of Jimmy Somerville wearing boxing gloves captioned with: "Good with his fists." I think it was a reference to Jimmy's reputation as someone not prepared to take any shit off anyone. Or something.

PaulTMA

Some iconic photography too, like this shot of Flowered Up from 1991:

TheMonk

Quote from: shiftwork2 on July 20, 2020, 07:42:41 PM
Amazed it was still going, but then I'm amazed that all magazines that still exist are still going.
Shame. Used to get excited when seeing a new edition in the newsagent and would purchase it immediately. Then, after being burnt a few times, would flick through to see if there was anything interesting and would decide whether to spend the cash. Eventually stopped bothering with that. Still, good in its day.
I was in a newsagents yesterday. The state of it. They look just like DVD rental stores a few years back. Cheerio print media. Cheerio.

The Culture Bunker

I was a regular reader for a few years (first edition, May 1997, Paul Heaton on the cover) but sacked it off sometime during my last year at uni (2001/02). They had some change in design but it also seemed the whole tone of the writing changed overnight too.

I did buy Uncut for around the same time period too, as their long articles about certain acts were useful in the days before I had internet access, the cover CDs usually had some interesting stuff too, at an age I was just getting into music. Then they retreated into a steady rotation of Beatles/Neil Young/Dylan/etc. I'd say over the last 18 years, I've probably bought a music mag about five or six times.

idunnosomename

Quote from: daf on July 20, 2020, 08:24:19 PM
mistaken for a snooker magazine.
one for the deso thread there

holyzombiejesus

Last time I bought it, it had loads of photos of Courtney Love having her anus waxed and then stripping off in a taxi. I've not even bothered flicking through it in the supermarket for the last decade or so. Always thought it's actual appearance was a bit shit. Uncut too. Mojo looks so much better, just in terms of the design and layout and paper used.

I don't mind Mojo. The cover stars rarely interest me but it's nice to be able to read relatively lengthy pieces on, I dunno, Jonathan Richman.

Neville Chamberlain

Used to buy this regularly from about 1994 until 1999. Stopped buying it when it dawned on me that I actually found it unbelievably dull beyond all human measure.

Jockice

I have it and Mojo on subscription. I rarely even read the things nowadays though. In fact I have several of each from this year lying around not even taken out of the plastic packaging. Even during lockdown I couldn't be arsed reading them.

Custard


Sebastian Cobb

Quote from: Shameless Custard on July 21, 2020, 10:41:47 AM
Shirley Manson has commented
https://www.instagram.com/p/CC4iB0lpMMD/

Pretty funny given the daily mash later went with the equally sexist, but probably more accurate 'Every man over 35 still madly in love with Shirley Manson' about 20 years later.


SavageHedgehog

I read Mojo quite a bit in the mid-00s, because it was in the library at my mum's work. I remember if an artist made any mention of drugs in a profile, it would be the pull quote, no matter how inane. For example Randy Newman said "i was never into drugs. Marijuana was always around but I never liked it much", and the second line became the pull quote.  Not objectionable in the manner of the Manson shenanigans above, but it always seemed a bit pathetic. At the time I liked Mojo on the whole though.

Caveat; I am not 100℅ sure this was Mojo and not Uncut.

Sebastian Cobb

We were mostly into dnb/garage/hiphop in our teens (although some of us liked rock as well) so never really bothered with that. We all knew Mixmag was a load of bollocks and largely responsible for inventing bullshit-sounding sub-genres constantly, The Source wasn't easy to get either, it was all easier to find info on the internet really.

kidsick5000

I wish the state of things was healthy enough to have a decent grudge and rivalry against a magazine.
It was never my thing and I did wonder if there's a tranch of people who'll comfort read the same info over and over, just written differently.
I don't envy them. There's only so much past to mine.b Similar problem Empire faces.
Both victims of nostalgia success. Once you've exhausted 30 Things You NEVER Knew About Sgt Pepper, that Dobbin From Kasabian Speaks Out cover feature was never  going to fly off the shelves.


steveh

Some of the people involved said it went through a particularly tough time when its new German owners decided to focus group everything, I think back in the 2000s, so it turned more into a big name legacy artist magazine whereas before it was a reasonably comprehensive slice through what was being released as albums each month. That must have been the same time as the original founders started Word as a kind of Continuity Q. It then returned to closer to the original format in the last few years, if perhaps lacking the quality of writing in its earlier days. At its peak it was shifting over 400,000 copies a month but closed doing just 28,000.

sevendaughters

Sadly with Rock's Back Pages not being a government-sponsored necessity like water and bridges I've had to find these columns all on my lonesome:

WHO THE HELL DOES [X] THINK THEY ARE?
Tom Jones: https://beatpatrol.wordpress.com/2009/12/07/tom-hibbert-who-the-hell-does-tom-jones-think-he-is-1991/

Jimmy Saville (dark): https://cowlesmedia.london/who-the-hel/

Wish I could find the article here but that header is brilliant:



Ringo Starr (extract): http://slightlyintrepid.blogspot.com/2013/09/im-not-expecting-you-to-comb-bloody.html

Roger Waters: http://www.pink-floyd.org/artint/34.htm

Ambient Sheep

Ach, this is sad.

I bought every issue from #1 to, like most people, the mid-2000s.  It had become increasingly irrelevant and the odd time I did pick one up to flip through, it had simply become a listicle magazine.

As steveh says, The Word magazine was basically Continuity Q and I switched to that pretty swiftly.

Gutted to discover though, through reading the tributes and memoirs on Twitter, that since 2017 the new editor had returned it to being great again.  Sadly I'd long stopped even bothering to flip through it by that time, so I didn't know.  Sorry, Mr. Kessler.