A Music Bible...Every Month!

Often lauded as the music magazine for the thirty something in its formative years I have to digress that nine times out of ten when I see a fresh copy of Q on the magazine racks I invariably pick it up.

There are many good reasons why I buy Q, for my money it has always been one of the more consistently well written publications on the market. Many accused the magazine of taking itself too seriously, perhaps that is because there is a distinct “Englishness” to its flavour. Q is always informative and often humorous in its approach. That sense of humour is often dry and cutting, this is a magazine that doesn’t think twice about cutting the big guns of the music industry down to size if they start getting a little tetchy, I like that.

As a rule the magazine weighs in at just under 200 pages, while there are adverts on some of the pages it’s not an advertising bible, content wins out over the whims of the advertisers.

One of the things that makes Q such a compelling read are some of the regular features. In depth interviews with the big names are a given feature of any issue, the magazine doesn’t scrimp on going into detail either. A recent issue had twenty pages of Radiohead stuff, some might say overkill but the interview was quality and the photography was as always first rate. When features come together like this you can forgive the seeming indulgence of the page count.

There are some good examples of reader/magazine interactions as well, the regular “Cash For Questions” puts the famous types to the best questions of the readers, and believe me it’s often funnier when the readers start to pry into the lives of the rich and famous, always goaded along by Q’s dry humoured banter.

Q often takes a look back at famous events and bands of yesteryear, giving the readers a detailed look at some of music’s key events and musicians. What I like is the fact that Q has no particular allegiance to any specific genre of music. Everybody gets a fair crack of the whip from boy/teen bands to metal through to dance and back again.

It’s the reviews section where Q regularly flexes it’s muscles though, every month the magazine wades through an astounding number of albums and artists from even the most “obscure” genres. There is even a section for albums that are being reissued and Q often re-evaluates an older selection in terms of its relevance to releases of today.

Essentially what you have here is a glossy magazine that makes good reading not only for a determined session but also when you want to kill five minutes flicking through the shorter articles. There is usually enough to keep you going until the next issue comes out and the back issues often make handy reference material.

So while the other glossies out there come and go with some redeeming features if its a reliable read you want on a month to month basis then I would thoroughly recommend Q as my weapon of choice.