Productive Barry

These days, Barry McIlheney is a major player in the world of London-based consumer magazines. He's been a guiding hand behind FHM, Q and Mojo, and has just launched a weekly entertainment magazine, Heat. But in 1982, it was a different story. There he was, working in a Belfast library, when he got a call from Hot Press. They reminded him that he'd written a bit during his college days, so did he fancy doing a review of Status Quo at the Antrim Forum? There was no looking back.

"You can blame everything that's happened since on Hot Press," he laughs. Like many of his peers, Barry was energised during the punk years, fronting a band called Shock Treatment. Weirdly, the act's most famous track, released by Good Vibrations, was a discourse on the local press, called "Belfast Telegraph". In the early '80s, he covered the music scene in Northern Ireland, before heading to London and taking a course in journalism.

He resurfaced at Melody Maker, where he ran the reviews section in 1985, writing about the likes of The Pogues and Ruefrex and landing himself in a famous scuffle with Kevin Rowland. The former singer with Dexys Midnight Runners took exception to a McIlheney feature (they had previously met and bickered over the tone of the Don't Stand Me Down LP and the singer's views on Ireland), and fists were raised in anger.

Back then, Bazza was fiercely ambitious—he looked like a young Orson Welles, which can't have harmed his chances. He also cultivated an ebullient, Ulster manner. At one point, he wrote an abrupt missive to the NME's letters page, complaining about a previous comment by an NME writer, who decried the "pinched Protestant faces" and their influence in the north. Barry assured all and sundry that his face was by no means pinched, nor were his politics.

His defection to the editor's post at Smash Hits surprised many people at the time, but it was all part of the long-term bid for power and influence. He had arrived at the EMAP publishing house when that group was poised to shake up the magazine world. First there was Q, which catered for the emerging yuppies and baby boomers, who'd started to buy their old albums again on CD, prompting a market for retro features and kind profiles of the Live Aid generation of acts.

EMAP tidied up the younger end of the market with Select, and eventually added the mature-minded Mojo to the top of their portfolio, creating what is known in the trade as "cluster publishing". Your musical tastes were catered for, from cradle to grave. And when the rival house, IPC, came up with Loaded, EMAP adapted FHM and trounced the competition at their own laddish game.

Some people, of course, are unhappy with this aggressive, pre-formulated style. In the old days, when NME was perceived as the all-inclusive "rock Bible", there was space to ramble, to be creative and to encourage broad-mindedness. Sure, that ethos also allowed some self-indulgent twaddle, but some of us mourn the lack of a wide rock 'n' roll constituency, all sharing the same fears and thrills. Ironically, McIlheney now thinks that niche marketing—the line that he's been pushing for 14 years—may be on the wane.

"In the past, the fact that you knew a lot about music was seen as a badge of honour," he supposes. "But now, there's the danger that you'll be seen as a bit of an anorak."

So what's the essence of Heat magazine, then?

"We just think that it's the right time for a general entertainments magazine. People like the band Pulp, and they also like Pulp Fiction. They buy the Titanic video and also want to know about Radiohead. From our existing experience with magazines, we've discovered that people are fascinated with the idea of an entertainment weekly. Hopefully it will settle down at about 100,000 sales a week. We've got a major, six-week media campaign, with TV, press, PR, the whole shooting gallery."

Also on board are some of EMAP's big executives, like Dave Hepworth and Mark Ellen from Q, plus Sky's Mark Frith and Paul Du Noyer, another Q veteran, and NME's old news editor, Matt Smith. Outsiders are divided as to the logic of launching into a depressed market, when the likes of NME and Melody Maker are experiencing difficulties, but you can be sure that Mr. McIlheney is squaring up for another lively battle. Like he says, blame Hot Press.

AN AFFIRMATIVE ULSTER
Back to a local dimension, and it's time to appreciate the awesome noise of Lowend, hardcore boys from Doagh. On stage, they behave like uncaged beasts, leaping over tables, blamming joyously. There's singer Jamie, guitarist Jeremy, two bassists (Tim and Gareth) and a drum machine.

"If you don't draw in your audience and entertain them, it's not very good, is it?" Jeremy reckons. "You wanna make people notice you. There's no point doing it in any other way, is there? There's a lot of passion. We're all just gagging to get out and play. Even when we're practicing, we're severely rocking as well."

Like many of their peers, they hail The Jesus Lizard and Fugazi as big influences. But we also detect a bit of Girls Against Boys, maybe even Rocket From The Crypt.

In short, Lowend is just the smile-inducing job to rescue the province from derivative Britpop bands. Last Halloween, they attended a fancy dress party dressed as Mike D in the Beastie Boys' "Intergalactic" video. Except Jamie, who was "one of the voodoo people". Jeremy spent all night doing the dance and couldn't walk for two days afterwards. And on New Year's Eve, Jamie fell down the stairs at a party and broke his nose. Crazy scenes altogether.

"There's not much in Doagh, apart from six-toed farmers running about," Jeremy says. "But it is a town of rock. There must be about four Marshall cabinets in the space of ten metres on this road."

With all this in mind, we've asked Lowend to feature on the bill of the Oh Yeah Awards, taking off on February 10th at the Empire in Belfast. The Oh Yeah website (www.ohyeah.net) is edited by myself and aims to celebrate the music of the north. So we've been holding online polls and getting some of the feisty new blades out there to show their goods.

Lowend will be joined on the night by Snow Patrol, Roo, Hedrock Valley Beats and DJ Stan Ferguson. The awards night is a joke that became a scam and then a real possibility. Maybe it will finish up as a joke again, but what the hell? If you want a forward-looking, affirmative Ulster, then everybody should run the risk of looking silly now and again. So far, it hasn't harmed Lowend one little bit.