Dear NME,

There isn’t an easy way to do this, but, here goes …

We went through so much together, shared so many special moments and cherished memories, through the good and the bad times you stood by me thick and thin, and then you went away with someone else, talking about other things that marginalised me, deliberately shunning me and forcing me to seek comfort in the arms of others. But, like the hussy you are, you came back. Saying you’d changed and that you’d learned from past misdemeanours.  Well …

After a major group-think, corporate rethink and another revamp you’ve returned to an overcrowded free-blurb marketplace in a reduced, abridged and ever-atrocious format. Like an unlamented soap character who returns in a different guise you have already blended seamlessly into the crapsosphere, primed to join the mountain of discarded and ‘flicked-through’ ‘zines littered across the land.

The current BBC4 indie-rock-doc ‘Misfits’ highlights once more the terrain you used to occupy, manage and at one point dominate. A land of plenty, fertility and prosperity, a culture forever challenging and driven by a future to be imagined and attained, now amid a barren, arid and a culturally bereft desert you prop up the present with infantile dross and error-strewn PR drivel.

Your much vaunted return has underwhelmed yet again, have you learned nothing from the past 15 years? (Rhetoric alert) Oh, of course you haven’t, why even attempt to educate, inform and elucidate when you can parrot, rephrase, rehash, contributing to the industry of inanity, the perpetual past-present stasis that signposts all things CONSUMPTION.

Fashioning yourself as yet another ‘style bible’ another free rag-mag designed to coerce and seduce, aspirational claptrap disguised as accoutrements of avarice. Every page geared towards the oniomaniac impulse: accept and expend and don’t think. EVER.

By plastering infant horrible and ex-member of The Roly Polys Chris Moyles and deep-dish-actor Crem-Patz all over your front pages you have thrown in the towel once and for all, mooning over the lowest common denominator and whispering sweet nothings and empty promises. Who next, Grimmy? Shoot me now.

Like MTV your relationship with ‘music’ ended way back, pre-millennium, before music became aural wallpaper to be plastered willy-nilly and the backdrop to mundanity. Awash with advertorials and ill-thought think-pieces, synergy and platforms are your raison d’etre now, a sad reminder of a once luminous past, even the ghosts of yore don’t knock at your door anymore. Well, quasi-breathing anachronism Liam Gallagher might, he’s permanently on the look-out for some kind of cathartic-comeback. Here he comes now singing ‘Alimony-money …’

Editor Mike Williams opined earlier this year ‘the evolution of 2015 is our boldest ever move’. Really, Mick? Cash your cheque and carry on bellowing smoke up and down the corporate shit-chute of conformity. The Star’s sleb-pages beckon for you.

In the words of former hero turned litigant, Morrissey, ‘I could say more, but you get the general idea’

Yours no more,

Kemper Boyd