Well.....it's OK, anyway. I think that when I did the same thing with Bis a couple of years later, I came up with a much, much better article, but that's not bad for a beginner (that was only the fourth feature I'd ever written for anyone). Kind of horrible reading it back, though, because I can see exactly where the editing has happened, and to me it sticks out a mile. All the awkward, journalese phrases I'd never use, pasted in, in place of a longer, better- written way of saying the same thing. That's what it's like at a national paper, though, with some justification I suppose.
Also, the kind of articles we had to write at MM don't archive too well, because they *were* disposable, and they were written with that in mind. Our primary objective had to be taking on the concerns of our readers, which were often minute concerns indeed. The bigger issues everyone remembers us talking about (most of which stemmed from an acknowledgement that pop is, for all its immaturity and its many sins, bigger and better than us, and to train a healthy pop response - that is, to meet pop on its own terms - it's first necessary to make our minds a little less lazy and squalid than they usually are) were only raised as either a counter-argument to whatever bilge the indie world was pumping out at the time (to shame and chill these people in the shadow), or as backup and context when plugging some new wonder. We weren't allowed to write stand-alone thinkpieces, and our word-counts were kept low-ish (2,500-3,000 words for a cover story). We had it easy compared to the trussed seals of latter-day music magazines, with their feature templates and wasteful sidebars, but we had nothing like the freedom - in terms of content as well as length - enjoyed by writers for, say, Creem or NME in the 1970s, or Melody Maker itself in the late 80s. I liked this discipline in a way, because writing for a weekly and being forced to follow trends, albeit with a take-the-piss option, makes one feel quite alive, quite useful, as though one lived in Japan or something, and as I said earlier, I was 22 or something at the time. A good age to be in charge of a weekly feed of very-contemporary, constantly- shifting opinions, perhaps a bad age to be allowed to write 6,000 unedited words that are supposed to go down in history.
A few months after that S*M*A*S*H interview was published, I ran into one of them in a bar in London. I anticipated a row, but instead he complimented me on the article, and said, oddly, that "we sat down and talked about it and we decided you'd raised some good points. It had quite an influence on us". A month later I heard their new single, a dancey, poppy remix of one of the album tracks, with a video that looked a little like the video to "Groove Is In The Heart". About three weeks after that, they split up.
Some nice songs though.