Back when I was a wee lad it was trad to have a comic weekly delivered. Before I had discovered the joys of Lee/Kirby Marvel Comics, I used to follow the sequentially rendered adventures of (A) bold British Tommies who were fighting the Hun (B) fabulously gifted footballers who were beating the Hun at soccer. However, I was not then, as now, very interested in these pursuits. I would invariably "take" whatever comic contained the very least in the way of football and fighting the Hun. I would favour the ones where someone has a mystic amulet or a steel claw, or ghost-hunts, whatever.

As the football and Hun-fighting was a tried-and-tested formula (still is, hardly a day goes by without someone English mentioning winning the World Cup in 1966) whichever comic I subscribed to would inevitably "merge" with another, more popular comic, which would have more football and Hun-fighting and less weird adventures featuring a blokie with a mystic amulet.

This was usually unannounced. One day, the paperboy would suddenly deliver the Fighting Chums instead of Action Chappies, and my initial puzzlement would disappear when I would espy the words "and Action Chappies" written in slightly smaller letters ‘neath the emblazoned logo of Fighting Chums. Even when I was about eight I was not dumb enough to believe that Fighting Chums had merged with Action Chappies due to some altruistic desire on the part of the publishers. I would invariably cancel Fighting Chums with undue haste.

At time of writing it has just been announced that the longest-running UK music paper, The Melody Maker, has "merged" with New Musical Express. Do they think we’re blinking stupid or something? I could see through this kind of bullshit when I was but knee high to a knee! Any fool can see that Melody Maker has gone down the dumper. I mean why hasn’t the "combined" paper been renamed "Melody Express" huh? And what, exactly, is all this guff about "affectionately known as The Maker"? Have you ever heard anyone call it "the Maker" in conversation? Me neither.

I always hated the goddam Melody Maker. This has little to do with the fact that I wrote the Best Pop Cartoon Ever for it’s rival, New Musical Express (I use the expression "rival" somewhat loosely, since NME has been outselling Melody Maker by a country mile for some decades now). I have hated Melody maker for as long as I remember.

Because it was always so blasted serious.

I believe the Blasted Seriousness Of Melody Maker has done more harm to young people than the Bible, marijuana, Harry Potter Books and Communism combined.

It has led to an entire generation of indie-wuss musicians who had been weaned on this specious crap. We now have folk walking about the place who are massively deluded by popular music. Melody Maker killed Kurt Cobain, as surely as they had pulled the trigger themselves.

The biggest clue to how shit the music press has got lately is the fact that, a few years back, the UK Labour Government introduced the notion of Rock Schools and Job Creation Scheme type things, you can go to college and learn all about how to do rock. Do you think that if the Sex Pistols, or the Stooges, Beatles, Hendrix, or any of those dudes had turned up at fucking ROCK SCHOOL in their day they would have been shown anything but the door? We will be condemned to eternal mediocrity. No Mr Brown you cannot set your hair on fire. No Mr Vliet you cannot lock these guys in a house and make them learn your far out stuff, letting one of them go shopping once a week but only if he wears a dress. No Mr Jerry Lee Lewis thou shalt not play thy guitar with thy foot. Had early Manic Street Preachers shown up, they would have been dismissed as hopelessly out-of-touch, even though their music nowadays sounds exactly like what would come top of the class in a rock school. I’ll tell you who else would have gone down a treat; Phil ‘cheeky cockney inaction-chappie’ Collins.

Perhaps I hated the Melody Maker, instinctively, from birth, but my earliest recollection of hating "The Maker" was in the mid-70s. I was reading the letters page, and some silly twerp had written in complaining about the charts. Why oh why oh why was a shallow work of ephemeral pop music fluff like "Calling Occupants Of Interstellar Craft" by the Carpenters higher in the charts than "Wondrous Stories" by Yes? No shit. Someone actually wasted a stamp on that. I meantersay apart from the fact that The Carpenters have stood the test of time and Yes have not, what essentially is the difference between those two above-mentioned songs? They are both light rock ballads about vague away-with-the-fairyfolk concepts. What separates them is nought but the "our music is serious and yours isn’t" unwarranted airs of cultural superiority which was endemic to Melody Maker.

It was round about this time as I embarked upon my plan to destroy the Melody Maker Folk Rock Contest. They used to have these "Folk/Rock Contests" you know, various heats running up and down the country. Some of my friends (one of whom later became a famous 80s pop star) were in a band which entered. I tagged along. What I saw astonished me.

Band after band would troop on and play for 15 minutes in front of a panel of judges.

The judges were usually:

1. someone from Melody Maker
2. someone from the students union (yep, they were always held in further education establishments, you know what I’m saying?)
3. someone from the company who made the PA system (!).

The year in question, the Caerphilly Amateur Jimi Hendrix vied with the Cwmbran Amateur Focus. Dozy, the Neath Amateur Slade, had the Melody Maker Folk-Rock Contest Welsh Heat all sewn up. The winners would inevitably be a band who sounded like one which was currently big-time. The winners of the regional heats would all go on to a big final held in that London. The eventual winners would never be heard of again.

Ah, Dozy, what became of ye? Fame is a fickle mistress is it not?

My butty Greil Marcus has stated that punk is not invented, it is discovered, each time anew in a different form. As I stood and watched, I thought, "I bet if someone got up onstage and just played a load of inept shite they would get the most applause, such is the bogusness and tedium of this event". I was, unbeknownst even to myself, discovering punk rock for myself.

So myself and some pals decided to destroy the Melody Maker Folk/Rock Contest as a situationist act, or as it is known in Pontypool, "a daft laugh". The next year, we got roaring drunk and strapped on borrowed instruments that we could not play. The drummer read NME onstage as we were setting up. Hey, rebellion!

Our improvisation consisted of me and Rhino Marsh mouthing alternate words of the title, O WOT A BEAUTIFUL CUSTARD CREAM TAAAAART, we were going to do this over the top of some minor "chaos" for our allotted 15 minutes, but we got carried away and inserted howling feedback, synth set at random, screamed creamed-cacophony and mayhem, with a guy I’d just met in the bar that day on bass. Extracts from: "The Lords Prayer", "Remember You’re A Womble", "Girl From Ipenima" the Croesyceiliog School Song and god knows what else…… How fucking DARE you sit there and judge us, who the fuck do you think you are, no one ever gets anywhere after winning one of these competitions anyway whiiiinnnnee crashhhhh splang! Six months before Sex Pistols, at All-Tyr Yn tech. Honest. We got the most applause. A man asked us, "Were you trying to do something like Can? Didn’t quite come off until towards the end did it?" My co-cartoonist Chuck Death, whom I was not to meet for several years, was in the audience that day.

I like to think we actually destroyed the Melody Maker Folk Rock Contest, and who knows, perhaps we did. The next year it moved from Newport to Cardiff, the year after to Swansea, then out of Wales altogether. We followed it, got roaring drunk, played gross bullshit. People, who we didn’t know, elsewhere in the UK, began to join in (I heard tell of "Banana Lopez And The Brazilian Bunch" in Leeds, who wore sombreros, rattled maracas, and went "yariba andele andele" for 15 minutes). In a matter of a few years, the Melody Maker Folk Rock Contest was no more.

That whole idea, of having "contests" of being able to judge on behalf of other people, typified the Melody Maker attitude. Of course, this type of mentality occurs elsewhere in the arts, but never has it been more firmly embraced than on the pages of what nobody called "The Maker".

A year or two after The Bank Clerks (hey we’d even pre-empted the noowave naming convention of calling yourself after an occupation) invented/discovered punk at All-Tyr-Yn tech, the Melody Maker thoroughly missed the boat on the punk rock, despite having been given an advance warning shot across the bows by the glorious "O Wot A Beautiful Custard Cream Taaaart". Being the "proper musicians who can play their instruments really well" music paper, they wanted no part of an Earth-shattering movement which gave not a quark about the playing of instruments really well, really badly, or at all. Consequently, they became a laughing stock, the music paper of mouldy figs and squares. But what to do? The response of Melody Maker was to adopt typically myopic blinkered academic approach. Since music wasn’t about playing your instruments really well any more, it must instead be about movements. After all, hadn’t punk, which swept their beloved prog-rock aside with it’s swearing and trousers with words on, been a movement? Well, yes. So what we must do, reasoned the Melody Maker, is to try and invent and/or discover another movement! This they tried to do… for twenty-odd years!

A prime example was BLONDE: In Melody Maker, everything had to have some kinda raison d’etre, some stupid justification. If they liked, say, The Darling Buds it couldn’t be just "they are nice tunes and the singer is a cutie", they had to invent a "Blonde" movement and offer up pseudy reasons why the "blonde" movement should exist. Trouble is, once you’d been roped in to one of their specious movements (which could last mere weeks and have a mere handful of participants) you were dead in the water as soon as that decreed movement was over or more often than not utterly failed to catch on.

NME indulged in this movement-inventing silliness also (anyone remember "Skunk Rock"?), but with, it must be said, a higher success rate (not that it’s in any way a thing to brag about). For some reason, NME has become increasingly like Melody Maker in recent years. Maybe this is a major tactical error or something to do with that pesky space-time continuum, I dunno. Today’s young people have no need for the indie pop wuss music press, for the Internet has taken over as a forum for them to express how sorry for themselves they are. Go to any indie-juve message board and you will find no end of postings saying "I’m bored", "I’m bored as well". "Why don’t you try surfing the internet?" "Oh you just don’t understaaaand".

Other great stupid movements invented and/or championed by Melody Maker include:

ARSEQUAKE; The Butthole Surfers, World Domination Enterprises, and several other 80s bands. Blasty Firsty sorts who had nothing in common apart from being very noisy became Arsequake, according to the, ahem, "Maker". Doomed from the start that one wasn’t it? What dullard, even an indie dullard, would subject his or herself to the woeful misunderstandings that would inevitably follow upon declaring oneself an "Arsequaker" in public.

PROG ROCK made Phil Collins a star. Need I say more?

YOB ROCK. Some buddies (and former housemate) of mine, the 60ft Dolls, were working class. Of course, this being Melody Maker, they couldn’t just say "they are working class and quite good" they had to go calling it something. For kids who had grown up with middle class indie pop wuss music, it was actually a novelty that a band be working class. Despite the fact that the vast majority of 20^th Century musical innovation (i.e. jazz, rock, blues, reggae) was working class. I was asked by a 60ft, who was irked at being reduced to a shallow cartoon in this manner, to write in and point this out, and happily did so under a pseudonym which I have forgotten. It came as no great surprise when some pretentious 6^th form twit parried my erudite suggestion with "what about the Rolling Stones?". Yeah, so what about them? I was talking about innovators, not Bo Diddley impersonators, you overeducated shithead.

ROMO; sort of glam-rock for the nineties. At three members it holds the joint record for world’s smallest youth cult along with the one formed by my mate Poohbear and his two pals which consisted of the taking of acid, going to the Horse And Jockey in Pontypool, drinking orange juice and staring people out all night. Romo’s 3 members were Simon Phillips, Dickon Edwards, and one of Huggy Bear (see below). Nuff said.

Also there was RIOT GRRL, which was not invented by "The Maker" but was championed by them. Riot Grrl was started by some Americans as the inroads made by the women’s liberation movement meant that women could make indie-wuss, musically unadventurous, joyless, simpering self-important, self-deluded and just plain sorry for itself music as well. Some poshos from the South of England called Huggy Bear were boosted by MM as one of their journos was playing the "understanding male" card in an attempt to get a shag. I am sure those of you who have attended liberal arts establishments and/or owned dungarees are familiar with the phenomenon of "new men" behaving in such a manner.

As we Welsh do not like posh people from the South of England trying to boss us around, for obvious historical reasons, their gig at Newport TJs has passed into legend. Wales took ‘em, of which I shall write more extensively elsewhere in a projected piece entitled "The Psychic Assassination Of Huggy Bear" (meanwhile see my webpage for some exemplary heckling from that evening).

The Melody Maker account of this event, by one Sally Margaret Joy, was the most anti-Welsh racist piece of shite I have ever read in a music paper. It could have passed for the work of Goebbels, with its melodramatic talk of the dead eyes of the women taking their children swimming. After sorting out an on-stage fracas, John Sicolo, TJs manager quoth "setting feminism back 20 years tonight" into the microphone. By the time this had passed thru SM Joys fetid mind it had become "there’s a lot of benders in here tonight"! On reflection I don’t hate MM enough, do I?

Melody Maker has often attempted to take the piss out of the Welsh by stringing lots of LL’s together and saying "boyo". Just as black people do not say "ahs a comin’ masssa" and Scots do not say "hoots mon", Welsh people do not say "boyo". Not even the most dismal TV Sitcom uses it nowadays so where the Hell did Melody Maker get it from?

So farewell then Melody Maker, they failed to notice punk rock happening for the first time, even though it was happening right in front of them.

One theory as to why I never got anywhere in showbiz is that I have transgressed an unwritten law by destroying the Melody Maker Folk Rock Contest. That would certainly explain a lot. Be that as it may, if I‘d only been able to figure out how, I would have destroyed the Melody Maker itself. But now there is no need. With the 21^st Century only days old as I write, there is no more Melody Maker. I find this to be very right and proper. Of course there are several other things that should not exist in the 21^st Century, such as orange cardigans, Margaret Thatcher, and any form of government other than a Worldwide Socialist Utopia, but hey, it’s a start.

(Brand name Melody Express owned by © & ® Mesrrs Morton and Death, brand managers, Melody Express).

You can see more of Colin at his website.