Back in the early 90s I was bored, I was a fan of metal but metal was beginning to bore me, I branched out to buying other rock albums but these were old albums from 20 or 30 years earlier. I knew of the grunge scene and I saw the beginning of the industrial revival around that time and I remember hearing somewhere about how a band called Suede were about to become the next big thing. Other than that I knew very little.
The solution to my problem came in the form of two weekly newspapers. The NME & The Melody Maker., but which was the right one to buy?
I bought the NME first. I wasn't a fan. I found it garish, they were more interested in telling you what was 'cool' they had obsessions with 'cool lists' I found the writers egomaniacs who seemed to think I wanted to read about them rather than the music. In short it was crap.
The following week I bought an issue of the Melody Maker. I saw an in depth article about Nick Drake. I had no idea who Nick Drake was but the way they wrote about him and his music made it sound magical. Not long after that I went out & bought Bryter Layter and it sounded exactly like how I imagined it to sound from reading that article. They were the first magazine I had ever read that called the Smashing Pumpkins utter sh
it. Their album of the week was Tindersticks debut album which I bought & loved..... I had found my brand.
Over the years I kept on getting Melody Maker throughout the britpop explosion. There was your usual Blur vs Oasis coverage & hyping of piss poor britpop bands but unlike the NME Melody Maker were still introducing me to tons of cool stuff. Stuff on the Trance Syndicate, Touch & Go, 4AD, Matador, Merge, K Records, Drag City, Creation, Wax Trax & Domino labels, avant garde bands that would go on to influence the post rock movement like Tortoise, Slint, Flying Saucer Attack & Mogwai, singer songwriters like Mark Linkous, Nick Cave, Will Oldham, Kurt Wagner & Bill Callahan. Hip Hop such as Wu Tang Clan, Jurrassic 5, De La Soul & Tribe Called Quest, the electronic scene that was taking over the UK in the 90s, The Chemical Brothers, Death In Vegas, Fatboy Slim, Underworld, and not to mention shedloads of other bands like Jon Spencer, Urge Overkill, The Breeders, Mercury Rev, The Auteurs and thousands of others.
Sadly it came to an end. The arrival of the internet (Which I first read about in an article in Melody Maker in 1993) meant that sales were dropping. Pop bands like Take That & The Spice Girls filled more & more pages to make it more populist until sometime in 1998 when I stopped buying it altogether. It limped on for another 2 years finally ending in 2000 having been turned into a monthly glossy magazine concentrating on hard rock & metal to compete with Kerrang & Metal Hammer, It didn't.
It hit the stands for the very last time Christmas 2000 with it's final issue with the added indignity of Fred Durst being on the cover. What started off in 1926 as a paper for jazz musicians to get in touch with one another ended being 'merged' with it's long time rival the NME as a bunch of classified ads.
Melody Maker 1926 - 2000 R.I.P.
With that in mind I have decided to attempt to listen to every single Melody Maker 'Album Chart Of The Year' from 1979 to the final one in 2000 and document it here. It won't be easy, what started off as a list of 20 albums in 1979 grew and grew through the years until by the 90s 40 or 50 albums a year were being chosen. I probably won't find all of them (If you can find a copy of Music Of Quality & Distinction Volumes 1 & 2 by The British Electric Foundation from 1982's list you're a better man or woman than me) but I aim to try to hear as many as I can.
I start with the 20 albums from 1979.....