The NME Bows Out of Print. We’ll Miss the Inky Fingers.

The NME Bows Out of Print. We’ll Miss the Inky Fingers.
The NME’s editor, Danny Kelly, understood my belief in the band,
and when two cover stories with Sonic Youth and The Cure fell through, he called me and said: “You have 48 hours to find Nirvana, get the interview and deliver 3,000 words to me.
You probably barely recognize the name, but by the time this page is ink on your fingertips, Nirvana will have sold 1,000,000 copies of their new LP.”
That’s how I opened the most significant cover story I wrote for the NME, on Nov. 23, 1991.
Bands in California would rush to buy the few copies of the NME
that were stocked at Book Soup on Sunset Boulevard, craving insight into what was happening in the British scene and a deeper understanding of how American artists’ music was going down in Britain.
I arrived at the NME in 1986, age 22, after a year spent living in a wooden shed in Hollywood, writing about artists such as Jane’s Addiction
and Metallica for another British music newspaper, Sounds.
Later, making a second immersive reading of the music papers, from cover to cover, with a flashlight, in bed.