Let’s set the scene. You live in Oxford, or you’re visiting Oxford, or you’ve just moved to Oxford. You’re interested in music, or you’re a music-maker. How are you going to find out what’s going on in this town, what other musicians are out there, what gigs you should be going to, who’s who? Pretty quickly, you’ll come across Nightshift. For twenty years the magazine has been the go-to publication for all things Oxford music, and built up a formidable reputation as a constant source of support and inspiration for Oxford musicians.

Ronan Munro is the man at the helm of the good ship Nightshift, and has been ardently keeping it afloat through good times and bad. He kindly answered a few questions for MusicInOxford.co.uk about how he does it, why he does it, and more…

MIO: When did Nightshift start up, and why?
RM: Nightshift started up out of the ashes of Curfew, which was basically the same sort of thing but with even more basic production values. Curfew started in March 1991 and ran until December 2004. It stopped because all of the main venues in Oxford closed down in quick succession – the Venue (now the Academy), the Jericho Tavern and the Hollybush. There was no advertising, and nothing to write about. Realising there were a lot of people in town working towards the same goal, but without any support system, Ride’s manager Dave Newton got a few people together and got us a cheap office in George Street. He persuaded me to restart the magazine under a new name (‘Nightshift’ was an old Siouxsie & the Banshees song) and we later started Shifty Disco Records together. As to why I started it all in the first place: I’d failed miserably as a musician, so I thought I’d try and help others fail miserably too.

MIO: What’s your background – both Nightshift/music-related and not?
RM: I’m half Scottish, half Yorkshire by birth, so a born miser. I grew up in High Wycombe though, and moved to Oxford in 1984 to come to the Polytechnic (now Oxford Brookes). At the time it felt like I was the only person there who’d been to state school, and everyone seemed to be talking about where they’d being skiing at Christmas or whatever, so I started going off to gigs on my own and met people from town. I used to DJ up at the Poly and then went to work at Our Price for three years. I worked with Steve from Ride and when Ride took off I went off on tour with them selling t-shirts. When that finished I started doing Curfew as something to pass the time until I got a proper job. Twenty years on I’m still passing time and waiting to do a proper job. I think I’m officially unemployable now, though.

MIO: Who’s involved with Nightshift?
RM: For the most part it’s just me doing the day-to-day stuff – everything from compiling the gig guide, to writing most of the reviews, to sorting out the finances, to delivering the mag each month. But there’s also a good little team of writers and photographers who contribute regularly or occasionally. Some of my writers have been contributing almost as long as I’ve been doing this – Paul Carrera and Art Lagun, for example. Not everyone who contributes knows everyone else, but once a year we all get together for a curry or a pizza and argue about which is the best Fall album, or make fun of Paul’s punctuation. Then they all kindly put me on a bus back to Kidlington and go back to the pub to bitch about what a sad old bastard I am.

MIO: What’s the best thing you’ve ever published?
RM: For purely personal kudos, I guess the first On A Friday reviews and interview. It was obvious to me the first time I saw them play that there was something special going on. I’d only gone along to see them because Colin, who I knew from Our Price, had asked me, and I thought it would be like any other mate’s band. When I interviewed them in 1991 for Curfew it was the first time I’d properly met Thom, and he was quite different to most local musicians I’d interviewed – incredibly focussed and determined. On the other side of the coin, I guess the review of Toploader I did for NME is something I remember fondly, mainly because singer Joseph Washbourn later put me in his list of villains, alongside Hitler and Satan. He said I’d called him a “curly-haired cunt” in the review, which I hadn’t, but it was a moniker I was more than happy for him to adopt.

Who have you correctly predicted for big things?
RM: I think I’ve been lucky enough to get pretty much every success story out of Oxford right from the off. Radiohead and Supergrass were both big favourites when I was doing Curfew, and as Nightshift we’ve supported Foals, Stornoway, The Young Knives, A Silent Film, Youthmovies, Little Fish and others right from the very start, so it’s always really exciting to see those bands go on and do well. Ed O’Brien says in Anyone Can Play Guitar that Radiohead wouldn’t be where they are if not for myself, Mac and Nick Moorbath, which is really sweet. It’s utter bollocks of course, they would have been huge whatever, but it’s nice to be remembered for the help you gave a band at the start. Of course, it’s lucky that people tend to forget the rave reviews you gave to bands who amounted to nothing years ago, but then success is subjective; if a band releases one single that I love, that’s a success for me. It’s worth remembering too that when we were doing Shifty Disco, me and Mac turned down the chance to release Muse’s debut single because we thought they were a bad Radiohead tribute band. We put out a Spunkle single instead. I’ve got no regrets on that front.

What are your future plans for Nightshift – and anything else that we don’t know about yet?
RM: To be perfectly honest, in all the twenty years I’ve been doing this I’ve rarely thought much beyond the next three or four months. Finances are always so precarious it’s impossible to think too far ahead. Next year will be the 200th issue of Nightshift so it might be tempting to a do a big glossy full-colour issue with loads of highlights of the previous years, but the plain fact is that Nightshift might not even be here in a year’s time and if it is, I couldn’t afford to splash out on anything too extravagant. You only need to look at how the Punt couldn’t happen this year or how the Folk Festival has been cancelled due to various factors, to see how unpredictable things are. I guess I’ll just continue to drift along until I finally hit the rocks, like the last few years.

Has the internet affected Nightshift‘s standing as a place for Oxford music news and reviews?
RM: It’s affected everyone to some extent. Obviously the internet means everything is instant – look at the new Radiohead album: announced with two days’ notice and the first reviews were up online within hours. News travels so much faster now, so being a monthly magazine it’s easy to be left behind in that respect. But then Nightshift is a very niche publication so it still has its place. There’s nowhere else you could get a comprehensive gig guide for the whole of Oxfordshire or have the contact numbers for so many studios, venues or whatever all together in one magazine, so it isn’t in too much danger of being rendered obsolete. I have absolutely no technical expertise so the simple PDF copy of the mag is the best we can manage online for now, but it’s very apparent how many people now read it online before the printed copy is out. Something like MusicinOxford.co.uk is something that works well in tandem with Nightshift as it can put news items out straight away. And then there’s the Nightshift forum too, for immediate news broadcast.

How can people contribute to Nightshift?
RM: If people want to write reviews or take photos they can just e-mail me or call me; it’s that simple. I do have high standards though: anyone can string a few words together but good reviewers are rare, and I’m lucky to have had some exceptional writers over the years, including the current crop of reviewers. Very few writers are the finished article when they first contribute, but it’s a learning curve and you can generally tell when someone has the basis of writing talent, just the same as with bands, really. People can contribute financially too, of course; I think a lot of people think that Nightshift runs on buttons and fresh air and will just always be there. It’s always gratifying when a band we’ve championed gets signed and gets their record company to take out an ad or two for their album. It all makes a difference. Radiohead and Supergrass were always particularly good at that, but then that was in the days when record companies actually had money to spend on promotion.

What’s the worst thing you’ve ever been sent for review?
RM: God, I can never remember specific abominations, never mind pick a single worst one. Some of the demos I’ve reviewed over the years have beggared belief: not so much the raggedy half-baked ones, more the awful, soulless tripe that some people somehow thought was going to be their big career break, because they were either technically gifted but imagination-free dronebots, or because they were so cynical they saw music as a career path rather than a fire in their soul. There was an album I reviewed a few months ago in Nightshift by a guy called Michael Lee, that sticks out; it sounded like the musical equivalent of flat-pack furniture, utterly bereft of craftsmanship or passion, just a trained musician going through the motions. Give me incompetent passion over dead-eyed virtuosity any day.

Who, or what, do you like in the Oxford music scene – both now and in the past?
RM: I genuinely love the sense of community we’ve built here. There are people who have been working on the local scene for years and still carry that passion with them, and anyone new who has a good attitude and is prepared to work hard has always been made welcome, like the Truck people. Maybe there are some people who see it as an establishment that they’re not invited to be part of, or just want to rail against, but nothing could be further from the truth. It’s a really welcoming scene and one we should be immensely proud of. People forget Oxford is a very small city, far smaller than Reading or Northampton for example, but we’ve produced so many great bands and have such fantastic venues and people working in all sorts of ways to help musicians, from promoters to writers to youth project workers. As for people I like: too many to mention. Most people I’ve met and worked with have been great. There are very few real arseholes out there and you’d meet people like that in any walk of life; you just learn to ignore them. So many of my best friends I’ve met through doing Curfew and Nightshift, and it’s a genuine pleasure to work with bands like Radiohead or Stornoway or Little Fish, who are just really nice people. I love bands who are talented and determined but are grounded in the real world and appreciate the world doesn’t owe them a living and know they have to work bloody hard to succeed. Someone like Jack from Fixers, who’ll take the time to e-mail and say thanks for a review or something; that’s the kind of attitude that makes it worth carrying on trying to help bands.

Download the current issue and lots of back issues of Nightshift here, and observe local music people carrying on banal arguments (with the odd spark of genius) here.