I am not one of those people; back in the NME’s 1980s heyday I was a loyal reader of Sounds, which was always far more catholic in its music coverage, and didn’t sneer at rock and metal. If your music world revolved around punk and indie, the NME at the time was your bible. But if you didn’t, the NME really wasn’t for you; it was the paper than hated what you loved.

As Classic Rock’s editor Scott Rowley famously said, had one of the other “inkies” survived instead of the NME, we might have a better mainstream music scene today. But in the end it wasn’t really the the NME’s fault; much like the excessive sanctification of John Peel, it was the laziness of the rest of the media that allowed the NME to punch well above its weight as a gatekeeper, and whatever the NME didn’t like (which was a lot of things) tended to get marginalised. It was pointed out on Twitter than in the years 2005 to 2015 the NME faves the Gallagher brothers appeared on more front pages than all female artists put together. And Pete Doherty wasn’t far behind.

With a combination of the internet and a whole load of more specialist publications on the market meaning there’s no longer one powerful gatekeeper, the British music scene will probably benefit from the NME’s continued slide into irrelevance.

The wrong inkie survived. Sounds and Melody Maker were both in love, in different ways, with the rock’n’roll woah. Sounds with its piss-taking, street-wise fascination with rock’s comic book foolishness, MM in its always-progressive-and-frequently-pretentious search for the next big thing. The NME, meanwhile, looked down its nose at anything it deemed ‘uncool’. What constituted ‘uncool’ could change from one week to the next but two of the main principles seemed to be that: 1) It was uncool to like rock (spelled ‘RaWk’), and 2) It was uncool to live outside London – in what Londoners like to call ‘the provinces’ (aka the rest of the country).

The whole thing is well worth a read, and when it comes to blame it’s certainly a target-rich environment. But I’m not the only one to believe the NME has had an especially corrosive influence to the detriment of Britain’s music scene as a whole. I’ve jokingly stated that Britain will never have a decent mainstream music scene until the last Radio One daytime DJ is strangled by the last copy of the NME.

Despite declining circulation figures that ought to have heralded a slide into a well-deserved irrelevance, the NME still punches well above it’s weight in terms of cultural influence. Much of The Guardian’s music writing, for example, remains steeped in the NME world-view, despite recent and welcome attempts to broaden their coverage. And likewise Later with Jools Holland has always been overloaded with NME-style indie bands, with rock never more than a token. When it’s unthinkable to imagine bands like Nightwish, Opeth or Porcupine Tree ever appearing on the show, let alone someone like Panic Room or Touchstone, you know there’s a problem.

Yes, the closed-mindedness of many classic rock (and prog) fans is nothing to be proud of, Scott Rowley is right to point out that much of this is a defensive reaction to the way rock, despite it’s popularity, is all-too-often marginalised by large sections of the media.