Morning,
Recently, on X, a New Cue reader got in touch to say that he’d spotted that MOJO magazine was repurposing classic Q magazine features for use under a ‘MOJO Q GOLD’ heading, in this particular case Sylvia Patterson’s magnificent 2018 cover story with The 1975. We explained that he needn’t worry, the archive was now in reliable hands. MOJO’s publisher Bauer own the rights, and since the demise of Q can do whatever they see fit with them. As experts in musical history, MOJO are ideal custodians of that archive. They tell old stories beautifully, and this does look like a peach of a one-shot.
It’s good, too, that Sylvia’s incredible music interviews aren’t gathering dust in bound volumes on the shelves of Bauer’s cupboards: it’s great to see readers reminded of her particular skills. The tragedy is that she isn’t been commissioned by music magazines to produce more of it now. That’s mainly because mass-distribution music publications devoted to contemporary music, where she and other Q writers did much of their best work, no longer exist. But her writing has not diminished. There’ll be a lot of earnest, hairy-knuckled dudes hoping to profile Grian Chatten when the next Fontaines D.C album sends his band into the commercial cosmos. But read that old interview with Matt Healy and imagine what Sylvia Patterson could shape from a character like Chatten. Maybe MOJO will call on her for that task then, too.
I like old music, and I’m reasonably interested in its history too. I write books sometimes filled with biography and hope to soon start a new project devoted entirely to old news. But what has always most excited me is today’s music and the stories behind whatever is happening now. That’s why we started The New Cue: to have somewhere to write about contemporary music as it happens. Because if nobody is here to log the current stories, what will heritage magazines have to fill their pages in the future?
This Friday, we will not be fulfilling that task though. I’m away on holiday currently, Niall is travelling back via a two-day flight delay from his break too, and Chris is having some brutal building work – so there’s no space to pile through all the pre-release promos in order to curate our regular Recommender edition.
Instead, it felt more useful to compile playlists of our favourite songs of the year so far. Here’s mine:
Here’s Niall’s:
https://music.apple.com/gb/playlist/nd-50-of-24-to-16-08/pl.u-9vXyFdRLzy
And Chris:
The rules were that all the songs had to be released this year up until August 16th, and that no artist could be chosen twice unless they’d released two different albums. We tried to avoid duplication, which was surprisingly easy. There’s so much good new music being released all the time. Feel free to use these lists as prompts for your own album of the year choices, which we’ll asking for very soon.
In theory, we’ll have a very enjoyable (as far as I recall) interview with Steve Diggle of Buzzcocks on Monday. I did it last week in his local pub over four hours, ninety minutes of which were recorded. I just need to transcribe it, here in Greece, on the beach.
Enjoy your weekend.
Ted, Niall and Chris.