Melody Maker: Last News

The summer of 1994, a time when festival pints cost just 89p and smartphones were yet to be invented.

Dave Grohl's romantic escapades have taken another surprising turn, leaving fans astounded this week as he revealed he's become a father once more this time with a woman who is not his wife.

John Robb has spoken to NME about his spoken word tour, being the first person to interview Nirvana, the infamous Oasis vs Cable fight, and his ongoing belief in new music.Robb is an author, journalist and member of punk legends Goldblade and The Membranes. Starting out in zines, he went on to write for the likes of ZigZag, Melody Maker, Sounds and The Guardian among others.

Last summer, concert-goers turned out in their droves wearing flamboyant cowboy hats and funky feather boas draped around their necks.They made their way to stadiums in cities across the UK, including London, Edinburgh and Manchester, to see the one and only Harry Styles as the Watermelon Sugar singer finally brought his Love on Tour shows to the British Isles after much delay caused by the coronavirus pandemic. But it was surely worth the wait. Reflecting on the summer gigs, Matt Owen, programming manager at Wembley, hails Love On Tour as “a remarkable moment” in the stadium’s history.

who died at 65 early Thursday — the story behind his band’s Christmas-in-the-drunk-tank classic “Fairytale of New York” began with Elvis Costello.The “Alison” singer was the Pogues’ producer at the time, and he bet the band that they couldn’t write a hit holiday single.But MacGowan and Pogues banjo player Jem Finer would prove Costello wrong after writing “Fairytale of New York” — the most-played Christmas song of the 21st century in the UK — in 1985.Finer came up with the melody and original concept for the song, which was initially about a homesick sailor on Ireland’s West Coast. But Finer’s wife suggested changing up the lyrics to be a conversation between a couple at Christmas.Then the notoriously hard-drinking MacGowan took it from there and transformed it into the Broadway-style tinsel tune we know today.“I sat down, opened the sherry, got the peanuts out and pretended it was Christmas,” he told Melody Maker in 1985.“It’s quite sloppy ….

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor Veteran music writer Scott Schinder, who wrote for virtually every major music publication over the course of a three-decade-plus-long career, has died after a long illness, his friend Randy Haecker confirms to Variety. Schinder’s work can be read in Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, Billboard, Time Out New York, the Austin Chronicle, Please Kill Me, Creem, Musician, Newsday, Stereophile, Musician, Tower Pulse, New Musical Express, Melody Maker, Texas Music, SXSWorld and probably many others. No cause of death has been announced; he was 61. A native of Long Island and a longtime New York resident, Schinder was a ubiquitous presence on the city’s music scene, where, beginning in the 1980s, he could be found most nights of the week at CBGB, Irving Plaza, Maxwells, Under Acme, Brownies and multiple other venues of the era. Indeed, the photo on his author page at Please Kill Me could have been taken at one of dozens of different venues in the city on any of a couple thousand evenings (it was actually taken at CBGB circa early 1990s).

A caustic, typewritten letter from John Lennon to Paul McCartney is expected to garner up to $40,000 via an ongoing auction.

A letter written by John Lennon in response to an interview Paul McCartney did with Melody Maker back in 1971 is going up for auction. The letter sent to – and published by – the music magazine is addressed directly to McCartney and goes into detail about the Beatles’ post-break up business arrangements, among other things.Opening with “Dear Paul, Linda, et al the wee McCartneys”, the letter is topped with a handwritten annotation requesting that Melody Maker editor Richard Williams publish the document to give Lennon “equal time” so he can respond to comments made my McCartney in his interview.That interview came eighteen months after The Beatles split, and followed protracted legal wranglings over the band’s finances – launched by McCartney.

John Lennon once wrote to his estranged Beatles bandmate, Paul McCartney, has been sent to auction.The letter came as a response to McCartney’s interview in the November 20, 1971 issue of Melody Maker, which among other topics, saw him wax lyrical on the relationship between Lennon and his widow, Yoko Ono, and the dissolution of The Beatles’ business partnership. Typewritten and inscribed with notes scrawled in pen, the letter runs for three pages and is addressed to “Paul, Linda, et all the wee McCartneys”.In it, Lennon riffed on the minutiae of The Beatles’ royalty-sharing arrangement, implying that he disagreed with the way McCartney was compensated directly from royalties that should have belonged to their self-run label, Apple Records. Lennon also took aim at McCartney’s understanding of his songs, snapping back at McCartney’s opinion that 1971’s ‘Imagine’ wasn’t intended to be political: “It’s ‘working class here’ with sugar on it for conservatives like yourself,” he wrote.

An angry letter that John Lennon wrote to Paul McCartney in the wake of the breakup of The Beatles is going up for auction.

Gotta Have Rock and Roll, currently stands at $22,000. At the time he sent the typewritten letter, Lennon — then age 31 — was furious with McCartney over an interview he did weeks earlier with music magazine Melody Maker.

A scathing letter from John Lennon to Sir Paul McCartney is going up for auction. The late Beatles legend - who was shot dead in 1980 - wrote to his former bandmate days after the 'Live and Let Die' hitmaker gave an interview critical of him and the Beatles to now-defunct music magazine Melody Maker in November 1971, and it is now expected to fetch at least $30,000 when Gotta Have Rock and Roll auction it off, TMZ reports. The typewritten letter - a copy of which was sent to Melody Maker editor Richard Williams, who complied with John's request to publish it - sees John tell Paul he is ungrateful for the money he receives from The Beatles and even accused his the musician of threatening their former bandmate Ringo Starr and his wife Maureen.