THE NME has traditionally heaped praise on bands that were trendy rather than actually good. Here are some you slavishly pretended to like in the hope of being cool.
Lush
It feels mean to criticise Lush, with their adorable singer Miki and harmless, dreamy shoegazing tunes. But it’s also unlikely you’re rushing to listen to tracks like Sweetness and Light again. The NME loved them in the 90s; with hindsight it’s like taking a mild anaesthetic.
Birdland
Birdland seemed to be NME darlings purely because their image apparently reminded you of Andy Warhol and CBGB. Sleep With Me is actually alright, but even now the chorus, ‘Sleep with me – just, uh, all night long’, is faintly annoying. Do you normally sleep with someone for, say, three hours and 20 minutes? No you don’t, Birdland.
Silverfish
The NME gave these screaming Camden noise merchants an undeserved amount of positive coverage. Really they were just slightly hard work to listen to, and fell firmly into the popular indie subgenre ‘Endured in an attempt to get off with a student girl in flowery DMs’.
The Seahorses
Obviously anything to do with The Stone Roses was incredibly important, and that included John Squire’s new band. Who are best described as ‘competently tuneful’ and whose only standout track, Love is the Law, is marred by some ill-judged ‘saucy’ lyrics. Pre-internet you may well have paid actual money to listen to them in some form, so thanks yet again, NME.
The Family Cat
The NME wanted to marry The Family Cat and have their babies, really hyping this middling band. They’re largely forgotten now, perhaps having passed on to some Elephants’ Graveyard for merely okay guitar bands. Their skeletons are probably near the bones of Kingmaker and Diesel Park West.
Manic Street Preachers
Back in 1992 the Manics were a questionable punk-metal version of The Clash with horrifically earnest lyrics. ‘Economic forecasts soothe our dereliction/ Words of euthanasia, apathy of sick routine’ went a typically cheerful ditty from Generation Terrorists. Richey Edwards famously carved ‘4REAL’ into his arm in front of an NME journalist to prove the band’s authenticity. Really it just proved it’s a bad idea to mix mental health issues with silly rock’n’roll posturing.
Northside
The distinctly middle-class NME was infatuated with proletarian ‘baggy’ bands, which was good news for sub-Mondays acts like Northside and Flowered Up. Northside’s shonky output includes Shall We Take A Trip, with the on-the-nose chorus ‘Say LSD. Say LSD. Aha. Aha. Aha’. You’ve got to grudgingly respect a band who can make Clapton’s Cocaine seem full of incredibly oblique drug references.
Spacemen 3
The NME used to eagerly report on Spacemen 3’s hallucinogenic adventures and they sounded quite exciting. So it was a bit of a shock to discover their actual music was extremely boring. Yes, it’s drugs music, but weed makes anything kind-of interesting, so you could just skip Spacemen 3 entirely and blow your mind by eating a bowl of Rice Krispies while mashed.
