[Landline] He's become nostalgic

^^^ This Landline logo by Will Sweeney ^^^

I’ve been compensating for recent news by methodically paging through scans of full issues of long-ago music periodicals1.

As always in this kind of exercise, you find nuggets, you find unbelievable trash, you find weird juxtapositions of things you didn’t realize were occurring at the same time.

Generally speaking, you get a deeper understanding about what a specific moment in time actually felt like — journalism is (was?) the first draft of history, and, inevitably, necessarily, later drafts of history leave stuff out. Reading that journalism as it was originally presented, next to advertisements and other features and so on — in its native habitat, so to speak — widens the lens.

As an example, for the paying subscribers of Landline — because their support is crucial to the Landline project and I gotta give them something extra more often — here are scans of a solid gold Gang of Four thinkpiece/profile by Mary Harron as it appeared in the pages of the May 26, 1979 issue of Melody Maker.

(Yes, this is the Mary Harron who would go on to direct I Shot Andy Warhol and American Psycho, as well as executive producing Sam Green and Bill Siegel’s 2002 The Weather Underground documentary.)

It’s not paper, but it’s close.