Damon Albarn “Blur in America” cover, 9th March 1996
August 28, 2008
Damon Albarn on the cover of Melody Maker, 9th March 1996. Photo by Stephen Sweet.
Remember that ROMO scene? There’s a Bennun interview with Plastic Fantastic inside this issue I’ll scan in for a laugh. Who started ROMO? Pretty much the final nail in the coffin for me and it’s interesting that this is the last copy of MM I’ve got.
August 30, 2008 at 4:50 pm
I believe it was Simon Price who started/coined “romo”. Definitely in MM before NME.
August 30, 2008 at 10:05 pm
NME never got behind Romo. Simon Price was indeed the main man behind it, though Taylor Parkes was also involved.
As a movement, it was never going to take off at a time when 80s-bashing was an essential part of the dominant popcult movement, but I actually rather like the comment by one of PF in their interview in this issue: “I don’t understand how people could not like a whole decade” (he’s clearly alluding to one of Ocean Colour Scene telling NME that all 80s music had been rubbish because “people stopped listening to the Beatles and just went to fashion shops”, a statement which defined a moment every bit as much as “this ain’t no surf music” once had).
I understand what you mean here, though: in May, though Allan Jones remained editor for the moment, the paper would have an aesthetic popularisation / brightening-up which can only be described as “Blairising”: the idea that MM represented something that *should* be incomprehensible to the majority was dumped (the masthead made that obvious). Some of the writing was still pretty good for a while, but it’s still one of the key moments where the very idea of subculture in this country died.
September 1, 2008 at 11:41 pm
[...] thanks to the comments from Pavemental and Robin regarding ROMO from when I posted the cover featuring the infamous “Fiddling while ROMO burns” compilation t…. As promised here’s the David Bennun interview with long forgotten ROMO band Plastic [...]