MOSHERMAGS - Rachel Branson
Where Were You When Street Rags Ruled?
Written by: Tom Wilson - Sense Music Media | Tuesday 2 November 2021
Considering most of you are reading this on your smartphones, it’s hard to believe that just a few years ago, print magazines ruled the roost. One of the most ubiquitous publications in the realm of heavy music, Kerrang! was first launched as a weekly magazine back in 1981, as the genres we love were still young. Think of all the bands, trends and genres you love that have come and gone in the lifespan of this publication. With fifty-two editions being punched out every year for four decades, there is, to put it bluntly, a metric shit-tonne of content. Combing through it all would be a mammoth undertaking. Who would be better suited to this task than a librarian raised on SUM 41? MosherMags creator Rachel Branson spoke to SENSE from Newcastle, U.K.
The Interview
What was your musical upbringing like? What were the first couple of bands you remember getting into?
I was really lucky, in that my mum … she was a really big fan of 70s hard rock. Her favourite band was AC/DC. She went to see them when she was a teenager. She always loved music … She has the first fifteen issues of Kerrang! magazine. She started getting it in 1981, so she bequeathed her musical knowledge onto me. But then obviously, growing up in Britain in the mid-90s, I can’t lie, I wasn’t exactly just a fan of rock music when I was a child. I liked HANSON, S CLUB 7 and SPICE GIRLS. Nothing wrong with that! We all start somewhere. I do remember that I grew up listening to rock music, and when I was around ten or eleven, that was around the time when nü metal had hit the mainstream – we’re talking LIMP BIZKIT at number one in the U.K. charts and things like that … We’ve only got one chart really, and that’s it, so when something gets to number one, it’s the song that everyone hears. Everyone hears that one song. The charts were full of weird nü metal, so LIMP BIZKIT got to number one. Heaven is a Halfpipe by OPM … KORN were really popular … I used to get the music mags that were for pop music, and because these bands were in the charts, they were in those magazines as well. It was easy to transition into, like, “I like this now, because this is pop music too!” [Laughs] BLINK 182 were massive as well. They were really big in the pop music magazines as well, and then I discovered SUM 41 – that was my gateway band to everything, really, back when I was eleven. They released All Killer, No Filler and it was my favourite album.
[I think] there was a Hard Times article – “Music journalist decides that the best era of music was coincidentally when he was 16.” For me, that was 2001. I look back on it, and I know I’m biased, but holy shit. LIMP BIZKIT, MUDVAYNE, SYSTEM OF A DOWN’s Toxicity, SLIPKNOT’s Iowa, AT THE DRIVE-IN …
Mind-blowing. Those bands were on Top of the Pops and Jools Holland, where it’s the mainstream media in the UK. SLIPKNOT were on a Channel 4 Friday night show, and absolutely blew everyone’s mind. Obviously, I was a little bit too young to understand the nuances of it all, but all I knew was that it sounded absolutely mint! [Laughs]
Who have been some of the surprising fans of your page? I noticed DJ Lethal is one of your followers.
When I was growing up, LIMP BIZKIT were one of the bands I loved the most. I loved them so much, and I used to name my Pokémon on my Pokémon game after Limp Bizkit. My Pickachu was always DJ Lethal, and Pidgeotto was always John Otto, obviously. So, when [DJ Lethal] started following, I was like, “Oh, I’m famous!” [Laughs] I got very sort of emotional. It’s so weird, still, being able to have this contact with people who you only really saw … If someone like Robb Flynn would comment on something … Burton C. Bell commented on something a few weeks ago, and I was like, “Oh my god – Burton C. Bell!” It’s weird, because you know that they’re vanity searching, or because you’ve tagged them. I think DJ Lethal is the biggest one who follows me, but being in contact with writers from Kerrang!, and photographers who took the photos from back in the day. People like Scarlet Page, who’s Jimmy Page’s daughter. She took pretty much all the photos in Kerrang! that you’ve ever seen from that era, in the 90s and early 2000s. She’s always happy to give me the story behind photos and things like that.
These magazines are amazing snapshots of a period of history. You pick up a magazine from 2002, and as far as the magazine is concerned, it is 2002. It’s not apologising for the past or anything. It’s great to see a review of an album that would, in years to come, be regarded as a classic, but it’s being seen with fresh eyes. What are some examples of this that you’ve found?
St. Anger. That got a very good review, because it was the first new METALLICA album in years … Because of the hype, and the fact that it was METALLICA, it was always going to get a relatively good review from a metal magazine. They’re not going to shit on their flagship band. One of the big ones for me was the METHODS OF MAYHEM album. That got three out of five! Everybody knows that that is not a very good album. It’s bad. And I was like, “three out of five? Who was paid?” You do have to take it with a pinch of salt, because obviously labels do pay magazines, especially back then. There was a lot more pay-to-play, and being paid to feature things more prominently, and you can’t really trust stuff. But yeah, there’s stuff where, looking back on it, the albums of the year of 2001 … they all hold up. Things like Jane Doe by CONVERGE, Iowa by SLIPKNOT, Toxicity by SYSTEM OF A DOWN …
Hindsight can be brutal. What are some of the more jarring things that you’ve seen that have been given new meaning for what happened afterwards? You know the name I’m going to mention …
Yeah, unfortunately I do have to avoid him quite a lot, the old Watkins. [We’re referring to Ian Watkins, lead singer of LOSTPROPHETS, who was arrested in 2012 and charged with a litany of child sex offenses. The following year he was sentenced to 26 years prison.] They were big in the U.K. from 2000 onwards … How many times they were on the cover [of Kerrang!] was baffling. They were like the biggest U.K. band at this point. Truly everywhere. I did make a point when I started MosherMags that I wasn’t ever going to post them … I don’t want to upset people.