I’ve recently acquired a few issues of Creem circa 1971-75 that between their glossy covers are deteriorating as fast as any 50 year-old British inky. I never read the magazine back in the day, I doubt it could have been readily found in Hemel Hempstead’s newsagents, but since those faraway days it has taken on something of a mythic status, hosting, as it did, Lester Bangs, Dave Marsh, Ben Edmonds, Greg Shaw and on occasion Nick Tosches and Greil Marcus. It also, I was surprised to discover, gave fairly regular space for pieces by British writers, mostly from the NME, like Nick Kent and Charles Shaar Murray. There was a regular column, ‘Letter from Britain’ from the always entertaining Simon Frith, whose singles reviews in Let It Rock easily rivalled his American equivalent, Juke Box Jury, that Greg Shaw put together for Creem and for his own magazine, Bomp.
To some extent the magazine lives up to its reputation, it has a terrific sense of community, between the writers most obviously, but also between them and their readers, which was something NME tried to emulate. But what the British weeklies did much better than their monthly American cousin was to create a sense of an unfolding narrative. NME and Melody Maker pulled their readers into the heat of the action, you can see this clearly in the reporting on and around Bowie throughout 1972, each new move he made was eagerly anticipated, reported on and responded to. The music papers produced a remarkable feeling of immediacy (and intimacy). By contrast Creem is all reaction, everything has already happened. It features last month’s story, NME and MM were about tomorrow.
