Here we go again, back to the NME's glory days. Back to a mythology of office fist fights (true), typewriters thrown from tower blocks (untrue), drug ODs (a couple), hip young gunslingers (more than a few) and counter-cultural cool (we tried).
In the past few years, we've had Nick Hornby confessing that NME hack was the dream job he never had, Jonathan Coe featuring the paper in The Rotters' Club, obligatory mentions in every profile of those reluctant NME twins Tony (Parsons) and Julie (Burchill). Now comes an hour-long BBC documentary ostensibly covering the paper's entire 50-year history but focused on the Seventies and early Eighties, years which contain NME's so-called Golden Age when, to quote Ovid, 'men of their own accord, without laws, did what was right... a season of everlasting spring'.
Naturally, my personal nomination for NME's Golden Age was the era of my editorship (1978-85), less for its circulation increase (which peaked in 1980) than for the way it treated music as part of a wider oppositional culture in which politics, books, movies, illustration and photography all had a major role.
Even now, NME gives the lie to the lazy characterisation of the early Eighties as the era of stripe-shirted yuppies chanting the 'Greed is Good' mantra, Duran Duran hanging off their yacht and Margaret Thatcher storming across the tundra in an army tank, khaki scarf to the wind.
The contours of a rather different Eighties are now emerging. For new bands such as Frank Ferdinand it's Eighties art rockers like the Gang of Four who are their inspiration. The invention and intelligence of pop's post-punk era have been refocused by Simon Reynolds's recent tome, Rip It Up and Start Again. Helped along by The Full Monty and Billy Elliot, the miners' strike and unemployment now define the era, not the braying triumphalism of the Iron Lady. TV documentaries about the Rock Against Racism campaign and the Brixton riots are in the pipeline.
It's a landscape I know well from my time as NME editor, when music and politics became inextricably entwined. As ever, there was plenty of escapism - it's one of pop's jobs to provide Durans and Hayzee Fantayzees - but there was also idealism, anger, and artistic adventure. There was, for sure, a surfeit of earnest young men with George Orwell haircuts posing disconsolately in the shells of dead factories, one response to the 'No Future' we had been warned of by the Pistols.
But serious battles for the soul of British youth were also being fought. Gangs of National Front skinheads targeted the likes of the Specials and Madness for gig-destroying rucks. After Brixton, the second of the major Eighties riots happened in Southall, when a gaggle of NF 'Oi' bands who had been bussed in to cause trouble found themselves chased out of town by local Asian kids, their pub venue left in cinders. NME's cover was 'The Gig That Sparked A Race Riot'.
To this combustible atmosphere was added Ronald Reagan's fireside chats about 'a limited nuclear war' in Europe and his bloody interventions in Central America (as part of its opposition, the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign ran particularly good Latin discos). When Thatcher started banging on about 'the enemy within', we took it personally and had 'NME Within' badges cast.
Political battles started outside the doors of our Carnaby Street office, where writers took stallholders to task for selling pro-fascist T-shirts alongside the cheesecloths. The office, a jealously guarded outpost of IPC's corporate HQ in Waterloo, was regularly invaded by spray-painting wannabe bands, jabbering Trotskyists, third-rate agit-theatre troupes and, just occasionally, bona fide stars - John Lydon looking for a free beer, Bob Geldof blagging a gossip column for his spouse, Paula Yates. Neil Young's dad, an eminent sports journalist, even came by to research a book on his son.
Enthusiasms for assorted art movements - Derrida, Dadaism, Brecht, Industrialism, Anarchism, Structuralism - raged through the office like super-bugs, often contracted from bands such as Scritti Politti or earnest German electro-outfits. The resultant verbose posing got out of hand at times, but, contrary to received wisdom, was only ever one strand among a swath of writing. The paper's musical and cultural diversity was a source of personal pride. Alongside the Clash or Adam Ant you'd find Sun Ra, James Brown or Leonard Cohen. Alongside New Order or U2 would be portraits of London's dying docklands, the Right to Work march, interviews with William Burroughs or David Lynch.
NME's politics - anti-Tory, anti-nuke, pro-green - seem mainstream now, but were defiantly oppositional when even the chi-chi Face was cheering 'God Bless Mrs Thatcher'. Our oppositional stance didn't please everyone. The cocktail-quaffers on the staff found my championship of the CND-supporting Glastonbury festival an embarrassment.
The company's tolerance snapped when the editor gave Neil Kinnock a cover at the 1987 election. It was the era of the 'moral majority' and US-led censorship campaigns to clean up pop. Eventually a new editor was installed, the paper carted back to IPC's grim tower and neutered, its politics confined to musing on precisely why Morrissey so loved the Union Jack. The cover awarded to Tony Blair in 1998 with the derisive headline 'Ever felt like you been cheated?' (John Lydon's farewell line to the pistols' audience) was a rare return to action.
What NME mythology loves is anecdotes involving the holy trinity of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. But what I recall most clearly is the sheer hard work involved; synapse-busting sessions at the printers, inventing cover stories after writers had flaked out on deadlines (never trust a junkie), avoidable strikes that destroyed morale and readership. All blood under the bridge, now. All things come to an end, even golden ages.
· Inky Fingers, the NME Story is on BBC4 tomorrow at 9pm. What does the NME mean to you? Has the music press become too tame? Email us at: review@observer.co.uk.