Readers respond to the closing of Britain’s most iconic music weekly
In this age of instant access to information, it is difficult to appreciate how important the NME in its heyday was in introducing “generations of suburban teenagers” to the cultural hinterland around the music that it covered (Editorial, 9 March). For me, a teenager in west London in the late 1970s, it provided a pathway to JG Ballard, who lived in& a street similar to mine but showed that life there didn’t have to be all it seemed.
John Attridge
London
• Much has been made of the NME’s charting of popular music of the late 20th century. But, in my mid-70s, my appreciation of it resides in the days of the late 1950s/early 1960s when American music dominated the UK charts, an age when US hits like Walk Don’t Run by the Ventures, and The Wanderer by Dion slowly gave way to the emerging British talent of the Beatles, Stones, and the Manfreds, all adoringly chronicled at the time by the likes of NME writers such as Derek Johnson and Keith Fordyce.
Mike Abbott
London
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