Picture from Vive Le Rock

Only recently I wrote about how the once trusted music magazine NME is on the bones of its arse having just resorted/relaunched as a free publication and how useless the idea of a print magazine is these days to the young music fan. I used to write for a long forgotten Nottingham music fanzine called Night Flight that fizzled out a few years ago and I was recently asked about the possibility of relaunching it and I expressed the opinion that it would be a silly idea. Leftlion has been around for just over ten years and struggles as a monthly magazine and used to be quarterly, this meant that the website obviously had more up to date content but despite a slight drop in quality they are still going and still popular. It helps that they started covering music when Night Flight vanished (it was Night Flight that repeatedly took the piss out of Leftlion for its lack of music coverage calling it a 'catwalks and cocktail bars' paper) and are taken more seriously but I don't think there's room for another locally focussed magazine. I stand by what I said in my previous blog that we simply don't need a new music magazine, or at least I don't. The existing publications are not full of enough content to warrant their price as far as I am concerned and I tend to buy them on the odd occasion there's a feature on David Bowie or some such music maker I care enough about to spend this sort of money on.

It is strange therefore that a new print magazine should happen to come out while the first editions of the NME are still clogging up the doorways to music shops as if to symbolise the death knell of paper magazines. Louder Than War has existed since 2011 as an online magazine/blog dealing with reviews and features publishing a call to arms manifesto stating their independence and has since built up a reputation and respect within the music industry. To suddenly take such a risk seems equal parts brave and ridiculous but if you have a look at the decreasing section devoted to music in the magazine racks then maybe they have a point. NME is now the music world's Metro and Word disappeared in 2012 so there isn't really anything to replace it since Q vanished up its own arse at some point in the last decade. Titles like Mojo and Classic Rock don't look to the future and of course there's the Internet to pick up all the readers who want their music news straight away rather than waiting until publication day. This is where Louder Than War and others scored because they could have something available (without the restrictions of a word count) within the hour. When I interviewed David Nolan about his biography on Jake Bugg I was the last person that day to talk to him, yet I beat the Nottingham Post and BBC local radio to it because NottinghamLIVE was able to wait for me to transcribe it and have it there for people to read on their phone or tablet on the way to work the next day.

Because it was a first edition and I am missing a proper music magazine in my life, (I still enjoy and prefer reading physical editions) I went out and invested £4.99 in Louder Than War to see if it was going to be worth it in the future. With a banner advertising INDIE - ALTERNATIVE - POST-PUNK - WEIRD above the mast head and Ian Brown as the cover person it certainly looked like the sort of thing I would buy. At the moment they are only going for quarterly so the price isn't too intrusive (cheaper than a packet of cigarettes and I can always find the bunce for that) yet I do think that if they keep to this standard it won't be long before Louder Than War becomes a monthly magazine. Perhaps a little advert heavy, (I know nothing about running a magazine so will assume that this might subside once sales pick up) LTW is the music magazine that the shelves have been crying out for with plenty of reviews, features on the established (Morrissey, Happy Mondays) and the current (Sleaford Mods and Kagoule ensuring reasonable sales in Nottingham at least) and writers that aren't trying to be too clever or entertain each other (NME). It was a brave risk to take but one that will pay off in the long run.

The Sunday Alternative Podcast #57 is available from here

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October Housekeeping

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