Keeping on the Beat

An audience with Krissi Murison

Carried as part of a work experience placement at NME…

As the first female editor of NME, it was inevitable that Krissi Murison would make waves – and that was before she chose to put Simon Cowell on the cover of the magazine’s Christmas issue. It was her recent redesign of the legendary music paper, though, with 10 covers for readers to choose from on the relaunch issue, which has ensured that people are sitting up and taking notice.

“We had no idea how to kick the relaunch off,” she explains. “There was such a weight of responsibility on who that cover star was going to be. We also had to have a way to shout and make people know we’d done [the redesign]. That’s very hard with one cover, but with 10 covers we also didn’t have the problem of who that one artist was; we could show the breadth of what NME stands for.”

Sleek and sophisticated, with a greater focus on in-depth, authoritative features, the redesigned NME is undoubtedly easy on the eye. It has received an overwhelmingly positive reception from fans, but Murison was understandably nervous about implementing changes to a publication with such a passionate following.

“The thing is, everyone grew up with NME,” she says. “Everyone thinks they know how it should be run; everyone has an opinion. For a long time it did feel like whenever you put your head over the parapet, you got bashed round the ear by someone telling you why you should do it this way or whatever.”

Having worked full-time for NME since she left Bristol University seven years ago – bar six months spent in New York as music director for Nylon immediately prior to taking on her current position, 28-year-old Murison is perhaps more attuned to what works for the publication than others. “I’ve loved and read it for so long…I’m very, very immersed in it,” she smiles.

She admits that part of her motivation for redesigning the magazine came from “very selfishly wanting to make my mark”, but also recognises the necessity of keeping a weekly format constantly fresh and exciting. The relaunch issue may have hit the newsstands in early April, but it’s something which has been in the pipeline from the moment she touched down back in the UK last July.

“It’s something that I didn’t want to rush,” she says. “Especially being on a weekly, where you’re always working on one and 10 issues at the same time. We started getting loads of ideas together – both content and style ideas – in the period from September to Christmas. One thing I wanted to do differently was to let the photography do its job and really breathe: that’s what a lot of the work we’ve done on the covers has been about.”

So where does the future of NME lie? “I wanted it to feel a little bit more…mature is such a boring word, but I was worried that perhaps it had gone just a little too young,” asserts Murison. “It needed to be a badge of honour, to be more credible again.”