New Statesman decided to have a crack at NME this week asking ‘Why aren’t young, new acts getting any space on new music’s real estate, the front cover of the New Musical Express?’. The timing could have been better. Little point moaning NME don’t put new bands on the cover the same week they go and do exactly that.

Happy to say after my own moaning a couple of weeks ago that this week’s issue is a cracker. Featuring Palma Violets on the cover, it’s exactly what NME should be about. The interview is bonkers, the pictures are fantastic. It feels exciting, a band who play in a cramped basement on the Lambeth Road. Marvellous stuff. There’s a fair bit of the sort of crap the website likes so much, a bit about Lady Gaga’s arse, a whole page dedicated to what’s the best Beatles single, but on the whole it’s what you want to see. A nice summit feature with industry ‘insiders’ and the lovely Tim Burgess have a conflab in a pub, pages of people in bands picking their favourite new bands…

A bit in Radar had me whooping with delight. “When Tall Ships first blipped onto our radar,” writes Barry Nicolson, “they reminded us a little of DC math rock doyens Q And Not U…” Magnificent. That’s the sort of talk we expect from NME.

Anyway, much more like it, but don’t think the ABC will waiver too much due to my purchase. And I won’t be buying it next week mainly because it’s business as usual with The Libertines on the cover, but hey, it’s a start.

It did occur to me when I was picking up my print copy that I could have bought it digitally. That counts towards circulation, right? The one thing I’ve not embraced on the iPad is replacing my print reading. I’d like to, the thought of everything appearing magically in the same each day, week, month, appeals. But something’s stopping me. Cost.

Case in point is NME. The print version is £2.40, the digital mag £2.49. The logic is lost on me. An extra 9p for what? The digital version costs IPC nothing, it’s all done for the print version anyway, just needs converting, maybe a bit of extra coding, but it’s hardly going to break the bank.

Much more sensible would be to bang out the digital version for 49p. I’d subscribe for that sort of cash and as I understand it, it all counts towards the title’s ‘reach’. How many digital only copies does it do a week? Hardly any I’d wager above and beyond the print subscribers who get the digital verison for free. And what’s the use of that? It’s like owning two cars and trying to drive them both to work.

IPC’s problem has always been not eating itself, but how can you worry about digital sales carving up print sales when the circulation is in freefall anyway? Sit around and watch the NME die or actively do something about it? Decisions decisions. So come on IPC, be bold. Just look at Q’s current subscription offer, 12 issues for £12. That’s bold. Mental, but bold. Dip your toe in the water, digital NME for 49p. Who’s in?

An age ago I was asked if I’d like to contribute to a book about the magnificent Talk Talk being put together by Chris Roberts and Toby Benjamin. The book was published recently and it is a fantastic piece of work. My contribution is in stupidly good company sitting alongside wise words from famous people such as Guy Garvey, Robert Plant, Paul Hartnoll, Alan Wilder, Sir Peter Blake and Luke Rhinehart.

My contribution appears below in its unedited entirety. All told it’s just a blip in the book, which offers a fascinating insight into the myth and legend of Talk Talk. It’s selling out fast, but copies are still available at spiritoftalktalk.com if anyone fancies. Money very well spent if you ask me.

If you took a ruler to my life you could probably draw a line through the experiences that have shaped me as a music writer. The transistor radio for Xmas when I was seven or eight, the delights of a drifting Radio Luxemburg signal, the tape recorder thing with ‘Top Of The Pops’, Peel under the pillow. When I was 13 I discovered I could do a truly remarkable thing. I could buy a ticket and stand in a room to watch live bands.

The Lower Common Room at The University of East Anglia was a great place to see bands when you were chest high to everyone else as the dancefloor was skirted on three sides by steps. I learnt the hard way that standing on those steps was best, and not just because I could see the stage. The first live band I saw was Altered Images in 1981. I stood right at the front, by the PA, and as a result I was stone deaf for three days.

After that first gig live music came at me like an avalanche. The paper round wages were squeaked to the pips as I sucked up everything and anything that passed thorough the LCR and with it, although I didn’t realise at the time, my future career was beginning to take shape.

Talk Talk touched down on Friday 12 November 1982. I remember going reluctantly, they really weren’t my thing, but a live band was a live band. It all seemed a bit New Romantic to me, not make-up and frilly blouses, but something spinning out of a Duran Duran leftfield falling vaguely between Tears For Fears and A Flock Of Seagulls. Little wonder really. If I was paying proper attention I’d know they’d supported Duran Duran the previous year and their debut album was knob-twiddled by their producer Colin Thurston.

Although it was all high-hitched bass guitars, electronic drum solos and ELP keyboard mountains, it was Mark Hollis, who despite his Tony Hadley-ness early doors, had a voice that cut through the electro pop and, even to my young ears, seemed something out of the ordinary. Even though the memory is pure murk, I recall they eeked out their set by extending tracks. I liked that, liked that what we were getting was something different from the recorded incarnation. I didn’t think too much about Talk Talk after. It was a box ticked.

By the time the ‘It’s My Life’ album arrived I was working behind the counter of a record shop. The title track fair stopped me in my own tracks. They were still two years away from hitting their stride with 1986’s ‘The Colour Of Spring’, but ‘It’s My Life’ seemed light years ahead. Looking back, it was their ‘Creep’. You can hear everything they were about to become in that one track.

But again they failed to get under my skin. That moment finally came with ‘The Colour Of Spring’, which didn’t enter my life properly until 1992. I’d moved to London and was living in a friend’s flat in Muswell Hill while holding down a drab day job and beginning to dabble as writer. Among my friend’s CDs was ‘The Colour Of Spring’. I remember thinking I should give it a go. Don’t know why. Perhaps my fleeting flirtings over the years helped. Part of me hoped they would finally sound how I imagine they sounded in my head. Sounded like what was waiting to get out.

Duly taped and snapped into my Walkman, the morning commute suddenly became less of trudge. A proper drum kit (that intro to ‘Happiness Is Easy’ still gives me goosebumps), glorious thrumming keyboards and huge swollen strings. I loved how it all just built and built before locking down into magnificent head swirling romps. Soon I was listening to it over and over, twice on the way to work, twice on the way back. Couldn’t stop listening. Still can’t.

What happened between ‘It’s My Life’ and ‘The Colour Of Spring’ is a bit Robert Johnson. Radiohead had it between ‘The Bends’ and ‘OK Computer’. There are few bands who manage to make these kinds of stellar leaps.

So back to the ruler. In no small way Talk Talk are one of the reasons I became a music journalist. The line passes, in particular, through that November evening in 1982. It was when I realised that I had an opinion beyond ‘that was good wasn’t it?’. I knew I’d heard something special, just took me a while to work out how special.

Now, call me daft, but this is NME. New Musical Express? Since when did you need to be dead or over 40 to get on the cover? We’ve got Mojo and Uncut for that sort of thing. Hell, Uncut is in the next office to NME, surely they could sit down and concoct a cohesive plan? Tell you what, NME does the new stuff, Uncut does the old stuff. How about that? I’m sure with ABCs as they are, IPC don’t need NME trying to run Uncut out of town, especially when Uncut do it all – circulation included – so much better.

When I was a kid, between Peel, the music press and local indie record store, you had all bases covered. The only problem was affording it all, chuck Record Mirror, Smash Hits, Select and Vox into the mix and you were starting down the barrel of an expensive habit.

The weeklies were where my money went, usually two from five. Usually Melody Maker and NME. Correct me if I’m wrong, and I’m sure people will, but I can’t recall a ‘retro’ cover when I was a nipper. Lennon was no less influential back then, but he had no place on an inkie cover. With our buying power the way it was, you put someone like that on the cover and no sod would buy it. It’d be two from five with whoever was foolhardy to put an old front and centre missing out.

Sure, we got the influences thing, we understood how The Beatles changed everything, but we didn’t much care. We were interested in what was going on right now (or right then as it was). We were interested in records we could buy the day they were released and bands we could go and see stood in front of us.

It felt like we were privy to something not widely available. It’s how we came to see the three-piece Jesus & Mary Chain on the notorious riot tour. Read about it all in NME, stood watching days later. They played for 15 minutes, someone threw a beer can on stage, band walked off house lights came on. No riot, it was Norwich and well past midnight, but heck it was exciting.

So what’s changed? You can’t imagine the Maccabees having a room bristling in the same way early doors JAMC could, so maybe it’s the bands. Corporate machines the lot of ‘em? Maybe. Perhaps focus groups have shown ‘icon’ covers do well. Maybe I’m just too old and too idealistic.

I was lucky to have worked as one of the last generation of inkie music hacks. When I started as Albums Editor as Melody Maker we didn’t have email or internet. There wasn’t an option to skim online for 15 minutes before an interview, there were press packs if you were lucky, lots of asking about if you weren’t. Writing a first piece of press for a band was a huge kick. There was literally nothing about them, anywhere, until you wrote your piece.

I was no great shake, but I understood the game. I had a hefty phone book stuffed with contacts, full of PRs, managers, A&Rs, label bosses, promoters, agents, bands, tabloid hacks. Most days the phone on my desk didn’t stop ringing. Everyone was always talking to everyone else about what was hot and what was not. The pre-internet days must have been what it was like being a real journalist. It certainly felt like the best job in the world, even if you did have to keep your head down in case anyone rumbled you didn’t really know what you were doing.

I wrote a live review a couple of months ago. By the time I sat down to write the morning after the show I found the setlist online. Amazing. More amazing I watched the band performing various highlights of their set from earlier in the tour on YouTube. I literally didn’t talk to a soul throughout the entire job. I was commissioned by email, I made contact with the PR via email, the PR failed to send me the band’s album, so I listened to it on Spotify. The PR did manage to put me on the guestlist, which surprised me I have to say. I spoke to the girl on the door at the venue to tell her my name. I watched the band on my own, went home, got up, wrote the review and filed by email.

With circulations dropping like stones, there surely can’t be any other reason for NME’s ‘icon’ covers. In June, NME was heading towards the sort of numbers that saw Melody Maker closed down with an average of 23,924 and a 17.6% year-on-year drop.

It’s a shame, I love NME and I’ve heard good things about the new team at the top table. I hope they turn it around, I for one would love to be able to pick it up and feel like I was reading a vital publication once again.