The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

The Stool Pigeon is a free, fully independent and award-winning music newspaper based in London. It’s edited by Phil Hebblethwaite, designed by Mickey Gibbons, printed five times a year and available all over the UK and Berlin.

It is also a website.

We won the Record of The Day ‘Best Free Music Magazine’ award in both 2007 and 2009 and were voted runner-up in the ‘Magazine of The Year’ category in 2008. Strictly speaking, we’re a newspaper, but you get the idea.

Our fifth anniversary, 25th issue came out in February 2010, prompting Michael Hann at The Guardian to write some nice things about us. See here.

This is what The Fader magazine in New York had to say way back in 2006: “Everyone hates on the NME, but good people, that thing comes out 52 times a year. I can’t even imagine putting out a weekly music magazine – that means you have to cover everyone who ever got an abstract haircut and a keytar. Which is why I was psyched/relieved /intrigued when intrepid photographer Michael Schmelling altered me to the existence of an excellent five-times-a-year, London-based newsprint music rag known as The Stool Pigeon. The Pigeon brilliantly asks all the wrong questions of everyone from Beck to Aaron Lacrate to Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, getting completely sonned in interviews and sharing every painful minute of it, making our favorite rock icons seem like, well, the ‘regular dudes’ they are. So while there’s no sense in hating the NME, I wouldn’t actually recommend that anyone read it either, especially now that the mighty Pigeon has landed, its entertaining and overbearing self-consciousness fully intact.”

Mark E. Smith, The Fall: “I like it, I think it’s really good.”