Writing letters to the NME Part 2. A world we have lost
Anyone who is still following this will recall that the question was posed on social media about what the subject matter of letters I wrote to the NME in the 1980s and 1990s was.
My memory doesn’t stretch that far and anyway I’m disinclined to rely on memory as a way of remembering things.
Fortunately there is a fairly easy to find out.
As a research historian Ive had a readers ticket at the British Library since the mid-1980s and I still stop by at least once a week.
The Humanities 2 reading room has bound hard copies of the NME on open access (for most books etc you have to order in advance). That means you can pull out a volume or two at will.
How long the bound volumes will last is another matter. It is to be hoped digitisation will occur so that the NME can be viewed on-line and electronically searched.
It would certainly make it easy to search for letters from Keith Flett, London N17 or similar.
Fortunately it is not that difficult. Certainly for the volumes for 1991 I looked at-January to August (two months per volume)the letters page- Angst- was on the inside back page.
It is difficult to think such a letters page would exist now.
For a start a lot of letters were printed- far more than you’d find now on still existing letters pages in most cases.
Secondly they were letters. A snail mail address-25th Floor Kings Reach Tower- is given. This was before e-mail and while I think fax machines were used at the time, no number is given.
Hence each letter had to be word processed, placed in an envelope, stamped and despatched via a post-box (a round red thing you’ll find occasionally on street corners). Admittedly in general it was easier to do that now that it is now when getting hold of stamps and finding a post-box requires dedication.
I think I was very much in a minority in using my actual name when writing to the NME. Most letters were pseudonymous, sometimes amusingly so. On occasion (frequently in my case) a letter was accompanied by an acerbic comment from an NME staffer in bold underneath.
Looking at the volumes for 1991 there were quite a few fletters. It tended to go in waves. Several would be printed, then I’d get ‘banned’, and would re-appear a few issues later.
It’s a reminder of a lively letter writing world that has been lost
Pt 1
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