The NME Bows Out of Print. We’ll Miss the Inky Fingers.<br />The NME’s editor, Danny Kelly, understood my belief in the band,<br />and when two cover stories with Sonic Youth and The Cure fell through, he called me and said: “You have 48 hours to find Nirvana, get the interview and deliver 3,000 words to me.<br />You probably barely recognize the name, but by the time this page is ink on your fingertips, Nirvana will have sold 1,000,000 copies of their new LP.”<br />That’s how I opened the most significant cover story I wrote for the NME, on Nov. 23, 1991.<br />Bands in California would rush to buy the few copies of the NME<br />that were stocked at Book Soup on Sunset Boulevard, craving insight into what was happening in the British scene and a deeper understanding of how American artists’ music was going down in Britain.<br />I arrived at the NME in 1986, age 22, after a year spent living in a wooden shed in Hollywood, writing about artists such as Jane’s Addiction<br />and Metallica for another British music newspaper, Sounds.<br />Later, making a second immersive reading of the music papers, from cover to cover, with a flashlight, in bed.
