This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Business News Industry People Media
Former NME journalist Dan Martin dies
By Chris Cooke | Published on Monday 27 July 2020
Numerous artists and executives from across the music industry and music media have paid tribute to former NME journalist Dan Martin, who has died aged 41. The cause of death has not yet been confirmed.
Having first started writing about music and entertainment while a student in Manchester, including for the city’s listing magazine City Life, Martin began freelancing for the NME before joining the music title full-time in 2003.
He spent a decade at the music weekly, entertaining readers with his eclectic genre passions and adventures in music, which – as Alex Needham noted in The Guardian yesterday – included gate-crashing the finale sing-song at the Live 8 show in 2005 and standing in for Bez when the Happy Mondays played Coachella the following year.
In 2013 he left the NME to join Buzzfeed UK as Entertainment Editor. He also subsequently wrote for The Guardian, including about another of his passions, ‘Doctor Who’.
Among those paying tribute this weekend was former NME Deputy Editor Eve Barlow, who tweeted: “I don’t know that there was a kinder, lovelier, funnier heart in music journalism. I loved hearing him effuse about Biffy Clyro and Kylie Minogue, often at the same time. I’ll remember him lifting up bands at NME and in turn being lifted by them”.
Meanwhile one of the bands who Martin covered extensively while at the NME, Manic Street Preachers, posted on Twitter: “Terrible news. Dan was so sweet, funny and talented – we spent a lot of time with him on the road in the UK and USA and at our studio in Cardiff. Always a pleasure to be with”.
