nme

The Fans React To News Of Pete Doherty’s Jailing

1:57PM Clem Bastow | In news that surprised not even your nanna who thought the end of The Crying Game was “a bit of a shock”, Pete Doherty buggered up his probation conditions and is being locked up AGAIN, as we told you yesterday. Naturally, the Pete Doherty street team is up in arms about this, and have been spraying their vitriol all over the NME’s coverage of the case – to greatly amusing effect. Some are surprisingly eloquent, some are aggravated, some are anti-Pete, but our favourite out of the lot has to be this one: indierockchick4lyf Apr 9, 2008 omgggthis is soooo sad!! he will miss the solo show in london that i was goin 2 :( i was realli lookin foward 2 dat..i hope he gets out n dnt do the hole 14weeks! he doesnt deserve it!! he is sooo talented, a tru poet n songwriter!! and most of all A LEGEND!!!! That’s right, “indierockchick4lyf”, he is most certainly a “tru poet n songwriter”. In fact, we feel confident that that phrase will be introduced into academia from this day forth. “Let us all turn to Chapter Three now, as we discuss the work of Whitman, a tru poet n songwriter. 4 lyf.” More »

Beth Ditto Gets Naked For NME

3:06PM Jess McGuire | Did you know Beth Ditto is actually the frontwoman of a rock band? Did you? We had no idea. We thought she was just some girl NW Magazine began trotting out a few months back whenever they decided to do a celebrity ‘curves’ themed issue, but we were very wrong and have chastised ourselves for not keeping our finger on the pulse of the music world. Anyway, the woman Keira Knightley once admitted had a body she only wished she could have been born with has posed naked for the cover of the latest copy of British music magazine NME, according to No Rock & Roll Fun. This week’s NME features Beth Ditto as naked as Avril Lavigne on the cover. For confused but well-intentioned reasons. Those of you with long memories will recall the last time a semi-naked woman was on the front of the NME, it was Lesley Rankine and Silverfish, who were in turn parodying the Polly Jean Harvey cover from a few weeks before. PJ and Beth Ditto were both on the cover as a riposte to traditional ideas of female beauty and societal nomrs – both had hairy armpits, for example. The trouble is, it’s all a bit muddled. Because NME, for all its other faults, doesn’t usually have FHM-style covers, so the value of putting Ditto on the front, without pants, is a little lost. Kate Jackson, it’s fairly safe to say, hasn’t been lined up to slip out of her corset for the next Long Blondes piece, because that would bring a stream of letters calling them for trying to flog magazines with sexist pictures. Likewise, the Twang don’t turn up with only a well-positioned tree to preserve their modesty. So, is NME they saying it’s okay for Beth to be on the front nude, because she isn’t ‘conventionally attractive’? And if that is the case, isn’t that simply endorsing the idea of there being ‘conventionally attractive’ in the first place? Or does the paper feel that a naked Beth Ditto is, from its reader’s point of view, every bit as desirable as, say, a naked Amy Winehouse? In which case, isn’t it a little bit Felix Dennis to be selling music magazines with female flesh? Certainly food for thought. More »