Thank Q Very Much

20 years young, Q magazine celebrates its birthday this month with - can you guess how many? - plenty of different covers. My subscription lapsed many birthdays back but I'm still a fairly frequent visitor to its pages and had to pay my respects and say many happy returns. Naturally, the issue is full of best of's (album: Definitely Maybe, single: Smells Like Teen Spirit, film: Goodfellas, TV: The Simpsons) and interviews with all the cover stars which makes it worth purchasing.

The first issue I purchased was way back in 1991 and was number 60 (which, I guess, made it 5 years old at that point). The headline screamed WHO'S CRACKED IT IN 1991? and featured Seal, Mariah Carey and Bonnie Raitt (among others) on the front so, frankly, I can't believe I "went there", as we used to say. By the way, this isn't some sort of memory retention thing I have going on but all the issues are featured in this month's copy, which is making this far easier to write. I remember little about that particular issue (no doubt Simply Red got a 4 star review...they always seemed to) but the powers that be must have detested the multi artist cover as much as I did because they reverted back to a singular star for the next 31 issues until the unfortunately titled "hips. lips. tits. power" cover with PJ Harvey, Bjork and Tori Amos reared its literally ugly head.

I don't mean to sound snooty because Q has been a pretty solid and reliable member of the music journalism world. It was pretty much launched to coincide with CD's and was possibly the first mag to cover mount them whilst yer NME's and Melody Maker's persisted with cassettes. Its glory days were, naturally, pre-internet when the industry needed Q about as much as Q needed them. And thus we would be treated to 12 page in depth articles on their A list stars - U2, R.E.M, Paul McCartney, Morrissey - whilst their reviews could be read without having heard half of the record on myspace. Soon enough though, Q started to suffer from an over reliance on only putting people on the cover who could shift a few copies - for every experiment with, say, Suede, Pulp or The White Stripes, there would be far more Kate Bush, Coldplay, John Lennon and Kurt Cobain as being dead didn't prove a problem in Q's world. Nowadays, the chances are that you already know that Brandon Flowers thinks 'Sam's Town' is the best record of the past 20 years (doesn't that time frame tie in neatly to this post?!?) many weeks before Q (and the rest of 'em) went to press. The main features aren't half what they used to be either and that's a two fold problem: the magazine's best writers all jumped ship long ago (whereas Rolling Stone still has the likes of Rob Sheffield and David Fricke) and the musicians can connect with their fan base via the internet these days. When Oasis rapidly rose up in the mid 90s, it would have been unthinkable for them not to "do" Q whenever they had an album out; their modern day equivalents Arctic Monkeys have actually made a strategy in not giving interviews, letting their music - or myspace page - do their bidding for them. And the last time we looked, that decision hasn't hurt them.

So the question - or should we rather say Q? - remains: will they be around to celebrate 40 years? The answer - ahem, A - is probably not in print form as I suspect they'll continue to make a fist out of their online proposition and podcasts etc. etc. Speaking of which, it's laughable and sadly says much for the interviewees that only The Edge, Madonna, Dave Grohl, that bloke out of Razorlight, Dave Townsend and David Bowie have ever downloaded music. But I'll always retain a warm place in my - yes! - H for its honesty, sense of humour and Tom Hibbert's 'Who The Hell...' feature where pop stars' egos were brought down a peg or two. I even managed to work on the 1998 Q Awards for The OZone where I had the honour of Debbie Harry chatting to me in the queue (the irony!) for food, being bollocked by Natalie Imbruglia and her manager for asking if we could interview her (the shame of it...bet you wouldn't knock telly back now) and Michael Stipe looking straight through me as he picked at his salad. Here's to Q.