It was through a band ad in Sounds that I met my friend Liz. We pooled our musical knowledge (four chords) and we learned to love the NME.

I shuffled into London around 1984 from England's premier miserable rock province, Manchester, where I had been a contributor to local music magazines. In a moment of festive boldness, at the 1983 NME Christmas party, I asked the editor if I could write the gossip news page. I spent most Mondays for the next two years walking to my typewriter at the Carnaby Street office feeling somewhat surprised by this new posting.

The United States lacks an equivalent to Britain's irrepressible, obsessive newsprint weeklies, probably because of its geophysical sprawl and unbridgeable interstate and inter-ethnic cultural divides. And for all rock 'n' roll's cultural impact here, the music has only intermittently been a matter of social urgency for teens. The Anglocentric British weeklies thrived on a narrow geographic focus, love-it-hate-it London and its relationship to the upstart provinces, and an all-consuming need to precisely define a band's relevancy in any given publication cycle. The United Kingdom, back then, still had a higher-education program, which meant that many students did not have to work through school, thereby giving them plenty of time to read and care about those voluminous weeklies.

And let's not forget a legal system that discourages spontaneous litigation by requiring the loser to pay the winner's legal fees. This process makes libel prosecutions a gamble and in practice allows a writer to be a little more creative with fact. As a writer in the United States in the years since, I have always been startled when the fact-checker actually gives me a call.

When I left London, 11 years ago, Margaret Thatcher was still the prime minister and the media brass at NME, Melody Maker and Sounds were yet to face the trek across the treacherous tundra of the Internet. God knows what's going on over there today. Ken Livingstone, formerly the leader of the Greater London Council and leftist bane of conservatives everywhere, is now, disconcertingly, Lord Mayor of London. Livingstone's recent repositioning is not a bad thing, just surprising, rather like finding out that Lou Reed now has a theater in Branson, Mo.

However, it is sad news indeed to hear that Melody Maker, an institution since 1926, will be no more. Its owner, IPC Media, announced last week that the paper would close. Melody Maker's last stand-alone edition has just been published, but its name and "musicians wanted" section will live on, ironically, in the pages of the NME.

Melody Maker and NME enjoyed a certain rivalry despite their both being owned by that same IPC Media. Looking back through the mists of history, the tone of this rivalry was pitched somewhere between mods vs. rockers and a schoolboy feud: a mixture of superficial stylistic, social and occasional sartorial differences invisible to outsiders but deeply diverting for those involved. It was quite silly, really. During my stay at the NME, Melody Maker sent us two editors and countless other staff members and nobody thought twice about it.

By then, Nick Kent and Chrissie Hynde, the last of the rock 'n' roll glamorhacks of the period and both NME stars, had moved on, as had the famously vicious teenage double-act of Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons, whose scathing classic meditation on punk rock, "The Boy Looked at Johnny," is still marvelous reading. The truest test of notoriety was the number of annoyed readers denouncing one on the letters page.

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