Todd Rundgren, Joey Ramone, Patti Smith, Jesus of Nazareth, quite annoying Cold Feet and Friends star Helen Baxendale... Who is it that you think Liam Gallagher most resembles on the front of November's Mojo? Either way, it's hard to imagine how the article inside could possibly be as anything like as entertaining as Kevin Westenberg's inspiringly ludicrous cover portrait. But it is. No wonder the Oasis singer has just been named one of the 10 wittiest Britons in history.
Imagine Sylvia Patterson's interview was one of the married couples in BBC2's culinary Apprentice rip-off The Restaurant, and the increasingly despotic Michel Roux had forced them to advertise their wares by parading through the streets of some stuffy home-counties burgh with a plate of hors d'oeuvres on a silver tray.... now give this little delicacy a try. It's Liam, responding to the question 'Is it true that growing your hair long really annoys him [him of course being big brother Noel]?' '[Enormous grin] Who told you that? Does it? 'Cos he asked me mam. He said, "How fucking long's he growing it?" Is that true, that? [Delighted] If that's the case, I'm growing down there man! [Indicates the floor] I'm gonna have fucking loads of page boys just fucking carrying me locks out the door! It'll take me about an hour to get onstage! [Leaps out of seat to demonstrate page boy carrying hair like a bride's train] [Oasis intro anthem] "Fuckin' In The Bushes" is on. "You'll have to play that again, only half his head's on-stage!"' If you don't want the full eight courses after that, too much fast-food has ruined your appetite. And when it comes to Liam's surprise reinvention as a kind of new age guru ('Everyone's vulnerable aren't they... just fucking be') no-one can say we weren't warned. Flicking idly through an old edition of OK! (March 9th 2004 to be precise), a lovely montage of Liam and Nicole's Caribbean holiday snaps presents itself. 'From Cigarettes and Alcohol to Sun and Sandcastles' was the title. The stand-first was 'The mellowed Oasis frontman and his saintly girlfriend [remember, this is Nicole Appleton they're talking about] bask on a Barbados beach with son Gene'. And Liam's t-shirt bore the improbable legend 'Sit next to a stranger and watch things together'. With a Gallagher on the front of Mojo and Richard Ashcroft on the cover of the NME, readers might feel themselves in the pernicious grip of a 1997 revival. And while the first of those talismanic frontmen can reasonably be said to have mellowed with age, Ashcroft has somehow remained just as much of a fat-head as he always was. 'This is hip-hop, man,' he explains, of his decision to stop making utterly pointless solo albums and rediscover common cause with the guitarist he said he'd never speak to again. 'This is rock 'n'roll, but it's hip-hop as well,' he babbles. 'It's hip-hop philosophy. It's like "We're making a record, man. We're the fucking Verve".' There was a time - quite a long time in fact - when the NME could have been relied upon to greet such addled meanderings with at the very least a sarcastic raised eyebrow. But such irreverence can no longer be tolerated. The paper's desperation to maintain its tenuous hold on an increasingly elusive demographic requires rigorous adherence to a centrally-dictated party-line. And you can almost hear the gears of Blairite control-freakery clanking as it strives to accord a blatant non-event like The Verve reunion the status of an epoch-making historical landmark ('We've waited eight years,' gushes current editor Conor McNicholas, beneath his wind tunnel-assisted photo bye-line, 'but here it is, this is music'). McNicholas' tenure has been a mixture of the occasional quite good idea - like giving away special edition White Stripes and Babyshambles vinyl singles - and lots of really terrible ones (I'm thinking particularly about the toe-curling embarrassment of the recent get-the-Sex-Pistols-to-number-one-by-buying-downloads-of-'God-Save-The-Queen'-for-your-friends campaign. Thank goodness Johnny Rotten did not live to see that one). But occasional green shoots of possibility can be seen sprouting from the ruins of this once proud journalistic empire. (And that doesn't just mean the letter in the 6 October issue in which reader Sophie Thomsett issues the following incendiary wake-up call to the youth of today. 'So MySpace generation, listen up - it's time to stick up for yourselves and do it quick. I've started a music blog. What are you going to do?') Having learned a painful lesson from alienating The Darkness early on in their career, the NME's desperation to buddy up with any potentially upsurgent musical phenomenon (historical note: this description did once apply to The Darkness) is now intense enough to leave it open to making some interesting mistakes. For instance, the paper's transparently bogus attempts to convince the youth of Britain that Razorlight were somehow a band worthy of a place in the NME pantheon came to an aptly gruesome conclusion with last year's Reader's Poll, in which the public delivered a humiliating smack on the wrist to the IPC politbureau by making its feelings on the vexatious issue of Johnny Borrell painfully clear (the cricket-loving Ric Ocasek-wannabe won an unprecedented grand slam of 'Twat of the Year / worst-dressed / worst hair'). There has been something rather unedifying about the paper's subsequent attempts to backtrack on its earlier pro-Borrell editorial line - bravely floating the possibility that this consistently puffed-up mountebank might be 'in danger of becoming' a little arrogant; captioning a cover shot of Razorlight's headlining slot at Reading with a contemptuous 'What was that?' [Exactly the kind of embarrassingly vapid and narcissistic performance you've been praising to the rooftops for the past three years, you backsliding hypocrites]. However, there's something quite appealing about the idea of a publication whose readership has a clearer idea of what it ought to stand for than its editors do (I always used to like it when incredibly sarcastic letters in The Face would call writers to account for tiny errors of detail in the life and death matter of casual fashion, though on reflection comparisons with that late-lamented title are not much sought after by profit-conscious publishers). And the faint but nonetheless happy possibility exists that this awareness of what the NME ought to be might somehow be passed from readers, to artists, to staff, by a kind of magical osmosis. When the paper decided to put its full weight behind Kate Nash, disaster seemed to loom on a number of different fronts. A subliminal note of despair could be discerned in staff-writers' through-gritted-teeth assertions that Harrow's answer to Suzanne Vega was 'the sort of person readers might want to go for a drink with'. But Nash seems to be growing into perky big-sister role the NME has created for her. First she picked the Minutemen's classic of hardcore unorthodoxy 'Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want The Truth?' (a rhetorical question to which Conor McNicholas' answer would almost certainly be 'New wave please, so long as Jo Whiley agrees with me') as No 1 in her '5 Songs You Must Hear'. Then her 13 October issue summit-meeting with heroine Regina Spektor beat a bold path through the dense jungle of Myspace Cronyism to a clearing of actual human contact. All that needs to happen now is for Jack Penate to take a vow of silence, and all really will be rosy in the garden.
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