Last week the mighty chamber indie collective Magnetic Fields announced that their new album, ‘Quickies’, will consist of 28 songs; the longest of which clocks in at 2.35 and the shortest runs to just 17 seconds. It’s a new paradigm I’d love to see alternative music embrace again" - Mark, My Words argues in favor of short songs in rock.

"It looks as if the days of the pop fan death cult are about to come to an end" - Mark, My Words writes in his column after attending a private Circa Waves gig for super-streamers. What happened? - "The gig, it turned out, was put on for those couple of hundred fans who had streamed the bands’ songs most on Deezer. But it could also finally mark the end of the hardship of the superfan. If this becomes common practice, all of your superfanning can be done from the comfort of your own Styles-den... Now you can gain priority access to your favourite band’s gigs by sitting up all night in your home-made altar to Lewis Capaldi and streaming your way to the front".

Funny and clever as always, NME's Mark Beaumont delves into questions of fashion and identity in his latest Mark, My Words post: "Metallers' image has been assimilated deep into the mainstream. They’ve undergone painful surgeries at the hands of their drunkest mates in order to declare their extreme tastes and lifestyle to the world, yet if you wander into a record shop (remember them?) in 2020 with piercings through your pancreas and Cannibal Corpse lyrics tattooed across your eyelids, you’re more likely to be recommended a Post Malone, Billie Eilish or Lil’ Jaily record than anything that might even slightly melt your face. The ultimate signs of personal non-conformism have become the New Normal. Luckily, there is an answer – if the mainstream has stolen your identity, why not steal theirs?".

A report in 2015 revealed that the UK had lost 35 per cent of its live music venues in the previous eight years because, on its own, the venue is but a solitary minnow squaring up against a school of sharks... But when their isolated individual voices combined with the help of the Music Venues Trust, they were saved - NME's columnist Mark Beaumont writes, defeatistically, about UK's exit from the EU, and how UK's clubs were saved on the very principle of unity.

“'I’m not physically or musically capable, but thanks for the offer', said Dave Grohl when it was suggested he replace Neil Peart in Rush after the legendary drummer retired from the group in 2015... Peart was nick-named The Professor thanks to his meticulous, intricate, firebrand drum work in all manner of exotic time signatures, which was key in making Rush one of the most renowned bands of classic rock and inspired countless drummers to take to the sticks in awe of his skills".

NME's Mark Beaumont doesn't agree one bit with Coldplay who decided to stop touring until they find an environment-friendly way to do so. Not touring would make more harm than good: "If musicians are dedicated to working towards carbon neutrality, it’s vital that that message gets shouted from the biggest, most amplified and most eye-catching […]

"No real fan waits patiently in the pissing rain outside a stage door for some hog-wild aftershow to finish in order to make their soggy tour programme worth twenty quid more than they paid for it. To a real fan, an autograph’s monetary value is irrelevant; it’s priceless to them because it represents a small […]

"When it comes to making records promiscuity has become a talent-killer. That’s why Kanye was right to ban anyone working on his album from having pre-marital sex during the recording period of ‘Jesus Is King’ – not for ridiculously pious religious reasons but to stop the music being smug, bland and self-satisfied" - Mark, My […]

NME's Mark Beaumont's new blog entry is about fake social media accounts of pop stars, the latest victim being pop-reggae star Shaggy - "Why not grab at the chance to become a virtual superstar? Initially the internet offered these unsung heroes – with their slightly misspelt surnames and their many, many handle numbers – a […]

"For someone who claims to be a rock star, he’s missing a major point of the job. Rock’n’roll was about subverting traditional engrained ideas, of not doing and believing what you’re told, of questioning the world and everything in it. Every radical musician from Lennon to Frank Turner has questioned religion in song and to […]

"It’s been around ten years since a new underground scene really broke through... So, with the South London scene already dubbed gristle rock, let’s continue with crank wave – Fontaines, Squid, Idles, Do Nothing, Life, Famous, insert your own band here; smart, modern guitar bands with a singer who sounds like someone having a psychotic episode […]

Lucien Greaves, co-founder of The Satanic Temple, recently listed his favourite devilish songs for NME - Rolling Stones, Johnny Cash, Iron Maiden... - and of course Mark Beaumont had to react: "The devil’s music is far more insidious... It’s the pleasing four-note trumpet fanfare you hear when paying ten quid for an ‘exclusive’ in-game plough, […]

"The rap, grime and future R&B (Nao, slowthai, Little Simz, Dave) represented the most incisive rising British talent, the guitar rock (Idles, Fontaines D.C., Black Midi) was suitably disjointed, angular and innovative, the poised and/or melodramatic art-pop (Anna Calvi, Cate le Bon) bore not the faintest trace of Paloma or Florence, the bigger names (The […]

Mark Beaumont in his latest NME column writes about how he thinks Snow Patrol's 'Chasing Cars' (the most played song on UK radio this century) is shallow and empty, but there's no need to read about what he dislikes, especially when there's a text about what he does like. The latter being the latest Flaming […]

Funny and to the point, NME's Mark Beaumont in his latest column wants the 1980s revival to end: "The ‘80s revival has lasted far longer than the original decade itself. And that wasn’t even worth the ten years it hung about... It’s a source of unending frustration to those of us that lived through the […]

"You sample a song, you get it cleared. The music industry has always been a wild west of rip-off artists, snake oil salesmen and manipulative profiteers but the plagiarism lawyers have beaten some sort of gentlemanly practices into it over the decades. Talent borrows, genius steals, previous genius sends legal letter outlining their cut. There’s […]

"Breakthrough acts like Idles or Fontaines D.C. are the result of actual human DJs, writers and tastemakers coming to a rare consensus around a particular band, but their impact is limited now, their chances of cracking the increasingly irrelevant singles chart virtually nil. All thanks to The Algorithm... The result is a musical culture practically […]

"Don’t you care about the bands that will struggle to tour Europe?” - that's the question journalists should have asked The Who's Roger Daltrey who said "as if we didn’t tour Europe before the fucking EU!”, after being asked about Brexit. "Because clearly Roger hasn’t given a second thought to the bands, roadies, tour managers […]

"This is the new face of scenes in 2019. Tiny enclaves of like-minded locals sharing a mutual, hermetically sealed party vibe all their own, caught forever at the initial spark stage of a national explosion that never comes... The mystique and magic of bubbling under, undiscovered, can last forever in a place like this, unspoilt […]

"With well over five million tracks released in the past 60-odd years of rock ‘n’ roll – and with rap and Britpop making ‘sampling’ from the past a legitimate artistic endeavour – it’s almost impossible to come up with something that has no similarity whatsoever to anything that’s gone before" - Mark Beaumont asks in […]