Morrissey vs. the NME
27 November 2007
Morrissey vs. the NME
Many of you in London will have seen today's NME with Morrissey on the cover while others around the UK, the rest of the world and online will discover it during the course of the week.
We had agreed to do a cover story with the NME in October around the New York shows to announce details for 2008.
We were alerted to the fact that the NME were potentially doing a hatchet job on Morrissey on the 16th of November by an anonymous post on morrissey-solo.com.
We immediately contacted the magazine's editor Conor McNicholas who refuted the suggestion that the NME would be anything less than supportive and personally posted on the site categorically denying the "rumours and untruths."
As you will all see from this week's cover story, this was not the case and appears to simply have been a strategic action to ensure we did not take legal steps to stop the interview being published.
We believed his assurances that all was well until we received the following email from Tim Jonze who did the interview:
"Hi Merck,
Hope you're well. I should mention that for reasons I'll probably never understand, NME have rewritten the Moz piece. I had a read and virtually none of it is my words or beliefs so I've asked for my name to be taken off it. Just so you know when you read it.
Best,
Tim"
When we received this we immediately called Conor McNicholas who after a three day delay responded in the form of the email that follows: