I distinctly remember the first music mag I ever bought. It was a copy of Kerrang! in 1988 with David Coverdale on the front and the results of the readers poll inside (and a risque poster of Doro Pesch, which went straight up on the wall despite me never having heard a note of her music; it came down as soon as my Mam saw it though). I had just started developing a music taste of my own and It kick started many years of buying that, the inkies and the monthlies. It was exciting to read about your favourite acts, and it fired your imagination about ones that you had never heard. They were the pimps, and I was the John hopelessly in love.
Then life happened along the way. I was still buying the mags, but only skimming them instead of devouring each and every page. The cd’s with them remained unplayed, the subscriptions were allowed to lapse. It got to the point when the only time I bought a magazine was if I was taking a train journey.
About a month ago I was up in my mothers attic, and found a box of some old mags I had kept. They excited me again despite some of the attitudes contained within, and some of the terrible music they championed.
So my question is, do you remember your first time? What was on the cover that caused you to buy it? And are any of the mags these days actually worth getting excited over, even at our age.
You mean apart from The Word? That’s why most of us are here, after all. For those who may have wandered in in the last couple of years we started life as a community blog on the webpage for much-missed monthly mag The Word. Technically it was of course more than a music mag, as though that was always the centre it included a bit of film, telly, books and digital stuff too.
I was never really a big Word reader (controversial)! I bought it on occasion, but my attachment to the Word community was more through the podcast and the discussion blog. I think there are probably many others in the same boat, which was probably what contributed to the magazine folding in the end! Sorry. It was us freeloaders wot done it.
I may have bought a Pop chart lyric mag in 1974 with Sweet on the cover and a Chicory Tip flexi disc attached. A year or two later I bought my first proper mag; Melody Maker with Dylan at Blackbushe or IOW festival. I started a long subscription with MM.
Blimey….. probably pouring over copies of a chum’s Disc (& Musical Echo) or Record Mirror. This would have been belonging to one other of the Baylis brothers and I would have been 9 or 10. Progressed into MM and then NME, buying both until my mid 20s. Never like the other inkies. Q when it started, until I renounced rockiest fare for the bywaters of Folk Roots, maybe for a decade. Since the it has been Mojo and Uncut, Word while it existed and occasional forays into Rock’n’reel, increasingly unavailable even in WHSmith. Long journeys will see a Songlines or even Maverik. I love my comics, me.
My problem with Songlines is the smell when it comes out of the wrapper. I have to leave it a few days before reading for the smell to dissipate.
As a student in the early 90s, I didn’t really buy monthly music magazines because I was skint. But most weeks I would but either the NME or Melody Maker every Wednesday and skive off lectures to read them avidly from cover to cover. Oddly enough I didn’t like a lot of contemporary music at that time (!) which sounds strange, but I liked the enthusiasm in the articles, I liked music in general (more old music) and it made me feel I was in touch with the zeitgeist a bit.
Once I started working and had a bit more spare cash, I would buy a monthly music mag or two just about every month. For a good decade anyway, up to the early noughties.
Mojo was definitely my favourite – it felt like home. It was suitably geeky and didn’t snub old music (in fact it reveled in it). I also thought it was consistently well designed and laid out. In fact I can tell you my favourite issue: the one in 1995 when the Beatles Anthology came out. They had three alternative covers, lots of Beatle features, and in particular a big article by Ian Macdonald reviewing a load of unreleased Beatles tracks in the same style as his book Revolution In The Head (and in fact a lot of that content was worked into subsequent revisions of the book).
I also loved Uncut – which I think came along in the late 90s? It was full to the brim with content and great writing, but maybe felt a bit more amateurish next to Mojo. It didn’t have the same professional sheen.
Q was an occasional purchase. It was always a bit too safe for me, a bit too in thrall to the rock canon. But it always felt grown up, like a “proper” magazine.
I don’t know exactly when I started falling away from buying monthly mags. They seemed to get thinner and thinner, didn’t they? And (definitely in the case of Mojo) started repeating themselves.
Uncut seemed to me to be the House of Lords to the inkies Commons. They sent the writers there when they kids didn’t want them anymore. Unfortunately they also seemed to take the snide sneering attitude that blighted the inkies with them.
Mojo was always far more enjoyable, but as you said the repeats came thick and fast.
Word was my favourite. It used to be NME in the 80s, joined by Q for a bit, until it went rubbish, and then in the late 90s Uncut took over. Mojo is okay, but a bit dull and it recycles it’s covers and cover stories. Uncut’s got like that too. There’s only so many times you need to read the same articles about the Stones, Beatles, Dylan, Kinks, etc.
My favourite now is Classic Pop. It’s reviews section is a bit rubbish, with reviews about reissues/boxed sets just discussing the album and not the reissue itself (sound quality, extra tracks, etc), but it’s clearly made with a lot of affection for the music and you get lengthy articles about artists that don’t normally get much space in other music mags (because they’re not Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, Bowie, etc). It’s a bit like a Smash Hits for grown ups.
Yay! I’m a subscriber to CP (for the second time). To be honest, I’m surprised it’s still going, and twice as frequently as when it first emerged; I felt that the fairly narrow scope of the mag had ‘built-in obsolescence’ literally written in. But it has essentially followed the same route as the other ‘rock’ monthlies, by focusing on a similar number of core artists from the target era, and tying in with some spurious ‘anniversary’ or other. I feel that it’s a good place to go for those who are unashamedly lovers of pop.
It’s the only magazine where Stephen Duffy can get a 6 page article. And there are very few artists they cover that I don’t have at least a passing interest in. I’m still waiting for an article on Frazier Chorus, The Beloved, The Dream Academy or Danny Wilson though!
Might give that a go. I currently skim read uncut, but there’s rarely much to get my teeth into.
Completly agree that the reviews of reissues should major on sound quality, curation, package and content
It does my head in. The albums that tend to get released in superduperdeluxe versions are the better known albums that are likely to be the bigger sellers, so why these reviewers seem to think we need another lesson on how good Pet Sounds/Purple Rain/Automatic For The People is I have no idea. The problem is, the magazines want to get the review out as soon as possible, so they haven’t actually listened to the reissued album or the bonus tracks before going to print. On many occasions I’ve seen 5 star review for sets that are subsequently found to have serious problems, e.g. the Soft Cell boxed set.
Or the record company insist on an early appearance of a review, to justify the expense, time and trouble(!) of sending a poor quality stream out to reviewers……….
Every one of these sorts of review should have an A-B review against the previous version – does spending ££ for the blah blah special analogue remaster blah make any aural sense
NME was our Bible before the Titanic sank. Melody Maker was firmly aimed at spotty fifth-formers destined to be Geography teachers. Rolling Stone started out as just the grooviest mag ever but within five years had gone all corporate mainstream (funnily enough today it is the best of a very bad bunch). God, the awfulness of Q, Mojo, Uncut et al! Then came The Word and The Word was Good (at least for two or three years).
Today the only music mag you really need is this here blog.
Rolling Stone the best? I was a subscriber a few years ago when I lived in the US. The subscription was dirt cheap, about $20 a year but it wasn’t worth it. There was so much advertising that there was only about 20 pages of real content in there. The reviews were ridiculously biased. The only decent stuff I found were some of the political articles, however they have been lambasted for lack of accuracy in some of those too.
Monthlies, I started with Q then went on to Mojo then Uncut then The Word.
Q has not been for me for a long time. Last time I tried Mojo I found it incredibly irritating, bought Uncut for first time in years last month (for Wilco covers CD) and it was actually pretty good. So Uncut for me.
Vox was the fist monthly for me. My sister bought me a copy while I was in hospital, with Harriet Wheeler from the Sundays on the cover (the internet tells me it was January 1991 so I was 13) as well as the Happy Mondays and the Charlatans and a bunch of other stuff I wasn’t interested in (Guns ‘n’ Roses! Donovan! Gary Glitter!) I stuck with that for a while. Then there was Select, which is probably my favourite, and of course the Word. Q/Mojo/Uncut came and went but never grabbed me like those others, although I stuck with Uncut when everything else was gone. There was also a short-lived, late-nineties film magazine called Neon that I loved. Seems it’s bad luck to have me as a subscriber!
Vox – I forgot about that one. I bought that on occasion as well.
And Neon! Yes I remember that one. I thought that was pretty good.
Oh yeah I bought Vox too. Mainly because it was the only one available where I was living (Zurich) for some reason.
I gave that chappie with the magazine archive a full run of Vox from issue 1 to the last one.
When I was younger I bought the NME.
Now I only buy ‘Record Collector’.
And me.
NME from late 70s through to mid-late 80s. That period gets slagged a lot these days for being pretentious but I absolutely loved it – the writers open my ears and eyes to so many records, books and high-falutin ideas that helped make me the man I am today.
I never graduated onto magazines, though in recent years I have picked up the occasional copy of Record Collector.
Yes, that was the best era for the NME. Loved all those writers- CSM, Kent, Quantick and Johnny Cigarettes (not his real name. His real name was Bill Cigarettes of course). NME back then had great swagger and attitude.
Curiously I enjoy RC these days because it has neither of those things. But I like the curatorial element because a curator is what I’ve become. I really can’t be arsed with any new music these days and, even though RC pays it lip-service, I know that it would much rather be talking about Free in 1969.
I bought the NME for a long long time, it wasn’t a monthly though.
I used to read my brother’s Sounds in the heyday of punk/post-punk, progressing to buy NME and usually MM from the early 80s onwards (I also bought SHits and No 1 fairly regularly…always the pop tart!). Bought Q from issue 1, and it was pretty great for years. Tried Vox and Select, but in a more discerning way dependant on who featured. I also really liked a magazine that came out in the late 80s, 20/20 – anyone remember it? It was more cross-cultural than just about music, and had some great writing, as I recall. Ditto Ikon from the mid-90s. Have read Uncut and Mojo regularly over the years and subscribed to the latter for a while, but find their limited roster increasingly boring (unless it’s Bowie or Prince, of course!) Have also bought many of the Special Editions/Ultimate Guides that have been brought out over recent years. And of course I was a proud regular, and later subscriber, to (The) Word.
I’ve got a very large pile of the Uncut Ultimate Guides waiting to be read. I sometimes wonder how on Earth they determine their star ratings for the individual tracks, cos there are an awful lot of stars dished out for albums that are a load of old rubbish, and then they go and give 3 stars to a bona fide classic. I’ve enjoyed the ones I’ve read so far though, the Stones one being the pick, so far.
My 17yo sel;f would have loved the fact though that every track is rated…
My 50 year old self loves it that you can rate the tracks yourself in iTunes!
My journey went somthing like this…
1963 – Disc…then it became Disc and Music Echo
Probably 1964, Fab, which became Fab 208 I think as it hooked up with Radio Luxemburg (?). I don’t remember that lasting too long.
I can’t remember when, but moved to Melody Maker sometime later in the 60s from Disc and Music Echo as it seemed a bit more serious, then to New Musical Express in the 70s. Around this time I would also buy ZigZag (which I remember being very good), Creem and the odd Rolling Stone. Sounds was bought occasionally when it came out.
I really can’t remember when NME got the boot, but probably early 80s. I bought Q from issue 8 and loved it – at last there were long articles about stuff I was interested in. I actually stuck with it for some unknown reason until early this year! I found I just wasn’t reading it. Mojo from issue 1, and still subscribe – yes, the quality has been uneven, but the production values have always been good., and I think it is really quite a good read again at the moment. Tried Select also for a while, but not for long. Uncut has come and gone long ago, mainly as it was getting ridiculous buying 4 mags a month with the above mentioned and Word as well. I occasionally pick it up at a friend’s house, and usually find one article of interest, so I’m not sorry.
I liked NME and Select but the mag which best reflected my listening was Jockey Slut. Its tagline was ‘disco pogo for punks in pumps’, which was pretty much me at the time.
I never got into the print version of Word as much as I wanted to. I loved the website and the podcasts but the mag itself lacked authority and consistency. It never quite found its feet.
Here’s a question you might laugh at…. did anyone buy Heat when it first came out??
It now seems to be a really tacky celeb paper, but I distinctly remember I bought it quite regularly for the first year or so. In the early days it seemed to have a bit of substance to it (as well as a bit of celeb culture stuff admittedly) – good for music, TV and movie news. And all at a very reasonable price. Am I alone in this? When did it come out – 1999, 2000?
Q gave away the pilot issue with its own mag and it was nothing like what it became, as you say.
Incidentally, I’m typing this on my phone, so I’m quite used to having to watch out for spell checker messing with my prose, as well as being thankful for it because of my clumsy fingers, but it’s just tried to spell check Q and changed it to A!
I think I bought the first issue and it was concerned with strange phenomena, a tabloid Fortean Times. Whether my memory is correct or not I wasn’t tempted to keep on reading it.
I might still have that pilot issue in a box somewhere. I know I saw it when I did the most recent ‘sort out’, but I might have consigned it to the blue bin.
Yep! It was actually very good when it came out – more of an arts/pop culture magazine. I actually subscribed for a while (I know…) and then it slowly went into the RealityCeleb hellmouth.
Good to know it wasn’t just me! I recently mentioned this as an aside at work, and got heftily laughed at – the very notion of me reading a celeb/reality mag. I don’t know my Kardashians from my elbow.
I distinctly remember Heat before it went, well…shit. I bought it until the relaunch, which came about because no one was buying it, and when it was still a decent read.
Actually, it reminded me of a mag that lasted a princely total of four issues back in the late 80s: LM, which was published but he same company that did the Crash! and ZZap64 commuter mags, Newsfield, who were based in Ludlow. LM was almost exactly the same in tone as the original Heat, and it obviously predated Loaded too, though I was never a Loaded fan.
I still have the 4 issues of Lloyd Mangram’s Leisure Monthly, along with the dummy issue 0 that was stuck in an issue of Crash! There was soooooo much to read in there and I was really cheesed off that it had to fold.
It was a product before its time really. Later, it may have succeeded, especially if they hadn’t been stretched financially so much on launch.
Yes, it was really good for a while, selling about 50,000 copies a week. Unfortunately at that time this was considered a failure, so a very smart man called Mark Frith took over the editorship, boosted the circulation to 600,000, but trashed the original concept of the mag.
@illuminatus: I bought Heat pretty much every week in 1999/2000. It struck me as an attempt to splice the broad pop culture of the imperious Entertainment Weekly*, with a little of the snark of Smash Hits and the better tabloid showbiz reporters. Great book, film and TV reviews but it simply couldn’t satisfy advertisers who wanted to appeal to a much broader readership. Hence, wot KDT said! My personal favourite – though it was more of a quarterly – was The Modern Review: LRB-level erudition on bonkbuster-level culture staffed by Toby Young and a soon-to-separate Julie Burchill and Cosmo Landesmann. What could possibly go wrong?
*The pre-dot.com crash website contained pretty much ALL the EW printed content.
I was working at EMAP in the late Nineties when Heat was in development, and it was spoken of in house as being a British take on Entertainment Weekly, which at that time, was quite a lofty ambition. As I recall, sales were somewhat high underwhelming and it was repositioned as a celeb gossip mag and ended up selling by the truckload.
The very first one was Schlager, the ironically named Swedish pop mag that came with a free cassette of new music and dubious sound quality. I think I bought it simply because it was the first music magazine I’d ever seen in my life – never new such things existed and was thrilled with my discovery. It certainly wasn’t thanks to the (even back then) very un-PC cartoon cover of a cannibal with a bone through his nose… This was at the dawn of the 80s, and soon after I found Smash Hits, which became my bible. Still have all of them in a box somewhere in storage.
When the kind of music that SH wrote about became bad in the late 80s (-87 was probably the cut-off point) and the magazine went bad with the music, I went without for a few years, until the early 90s when the Swedish music magazine Pop launched. I couldn’t afford to buy much music in the 90s, but I spent money on an annual subscription to Pop, because reading what they had to say about music was almost better than listening to it. That kept me going through the decade, until it popped its clogs. Almost the same people then launched the odd but entertaining fashion + pop culture magazine Bibel, serving as an OK substitute for the year or two that it existed.
Then a few barren years until I was recommended The Word, which then led to the online community; always better than the actual magazine so when that folded I only grieved until it was clear that the online community would go on elsewhere.
I replaced the reading with Mojo, Uncut and Swedish Sonic – a magazine desperately trying to be Pop resurrected, but failing to copy anything but the bad parts, and no longer published since last year (two years ago?)
The two I still miss are Smash Hits and Pop, both glorious reads in their heydays, both the kinds of magazines that I’d put aside everything else for, and read from beginning to end without fail, and without ever wanting to skip anything. Which I can’t say about Mojo and Uncut, which I find more and more difficult to get all the way through with each month.
In their era:
NME
Q
Nothing for a bit
Mojo
Uncut
Word
Nothing regular. If I buy anything now it’ll be Mojo or Uncut depending on what they cover. Prog or Classic Rock sometimes have specials I like the look of.
Wot? No Zigzag readers here?
By far the best read back in the day, eventually sent astray by the punk Stalinists, but great while at the top of its game.
Still have a sub to Mojo, but have adopted a strictly austere Methodist approach to back issues. I bin them.
Pick up Ucnut too if I ever pop into the supermarket for a top up of the spirits cupboard – a rare occurrence – but I’m usually unimpressed with its charm these days.
I would have loved it but never laid eyes on a copy.
I used to get mine from the Virgin Records shop in Plymouth, back when it was crowded if there were more than 5 people in there at the same time, when you’d trip over the beanbags as you stumbled towards the counter to ask the longhairs to put on some Henry Cow.
Happy days!
Another Zigzagger here – terrific mag. I have the first 20 or so issues until not so long ago, and then they went in one of the clearouts – sold them on eBay IIRC. A rather rambling tribute to the mag and Pete Frame here:
http://www.terrascope.co.uk/Features/ZigZagFeature.htm
Would have been NME first for me, I reckon (unless you count the bangin’ rock ‘n’ roll reviews in the Children’s Newspaper). Then the others, pari passu. Q and the rest later, but I think Word was my favourite. These days I get Mojo and Uncut with my Readly sub, which suits me fine. No cover discs, but most of them can be assembled on Spotify if I feel the need.
First one I remember properly buying (rather than reading someone elses copy) was the 1983 Readers Poll issue of Smash Hits – Howard Jones was on the cover (he was “Best New Act” (I think?))
Pre-music was:
Roy Of The Rovers / Tiger / Shoot / Scoop – basically anything Football related.
Smash Hits was the start of music periodical obsession.
Smash Hits was interspersed with issues of Number One (a sort of ITV version)
followed by
One, two, three, or all of: NME / Sounds / Melody Maker / Kerrang * / Raw / Metal Hammer
(* including the Doro Pesch issue above)
followed by (in order (I think):
Q
Select
Vox
Mojo
Uncut
Word
Q
Mojo
Pick up the odd copy of Vive Le Rock – keep meaning to get a subscription, but “Procrastination” is my middle name
My son has started getting into Roy of the Rovers. I have a few compendiums that were released a few years ago, but I’ve managed to get hold of some DVDRoms off a bloke on eBay that has pretty much the entire run from the 70s to the 90s on them. I was impressed that I could still remember pretty much all the team from the late 70s, but I was also surprised to learn that Billy’s Boots was in Tiger, rather than Roy of the Rovers, as I had misremembered it. I used to read both, so I think I’d muddled it up with Tommy’s Troubles. It didn’t move to Roy of the Rovers till 1986, a good few years after I’d stopped reading it.
They relaunched the Roy of the Rovers story a few years ago, alternating between young reader novels and comic books, starting off with him being scouted as teenager. My lad’s working his way through those and then he’s going to go back and read the 70s/80s run. I’m aching to tell him about the shooting! It was the major topic of conversation in the school playground for a week or two. I had Vic Guthrie as the culprit!
The shooting was a big deal of course , but the terrorist attack in Basran that wiped out half the Melchester squad was a much darker day in Rovers’ history. And for God’s sake, don’t tell your lad about the helicopter crash yet!
I am no longer embarrassed to say that Penny Race was my first crush.
Anybody remember the spoof ROTR strip in the first Spitting Image book? The match carried on in the usual fashion, oblivious to the rioting on the stands behind them and skinheads going “FARRRKOFF!”
Them was rotten days.
“Go on – stamp on his bollocks!”
@moose-the-mooche
The hated Salford ensemble?
You must have carried on reading after I stopped, because I know nothing of terrorist attacks and helicopter crashes. It was more Mervyn Wallace thinking he’ll lose his place to Paco Diaz, and Tubby Morton having to come out of retirement to cover for Charlie ‘The Cat’ Carter when I was reading.
We respect all equally here at the Afterword, and more power to you Slug, but, am I the only one who thought the women in the ROTR strip looked like the guys with girlier haircuts..?
I have a couple of the issues from when Melchester Rovers signed Martin Kemp and Steve Norman from ver Spandau Ballet – which was of course parodied in Viz when Fulchester signed Shakin’ Stevens and mick Hucknall.
There’s a very funny tongue-in-cheek Roy of the Rovers autobiography out there somewhere. Typical quote:
“I’ve been kidnapped nine times, including seven while on club tours abroad, which remains a record in top-flight English football, and each time it’s been a new and slightly surprising experience. I suppose it’s a bit like winning the FA Cup. You certainly don’t get bored of it!”
Pre music press I first had a worthy publication courtesy my parents called “Things of science” which had break out schematics of space rockets etc. Quite good in retrospect but it was the early 60s so science was exciting. Then it was the Eagle, utterly brilliant with Dan Dare etc. Then the Beano and Dandy….gap…Commando comics (“you vil die Britisher pig” etc – I note they are now back in print!) until the NME.
TV Century 21 was my bible when at primary school. All the Gerry Anderson’s, Doctor Who & The Daleks, cutaway drawings of all the 21st Century machinery you could want. Still waiting for atomic engines to become commercially available.
Also bought Boy’s World each week from my mate Kevin’s Dad’s newsagent. Each week there was a “What would you do?” puzzler on the front cover – escaping from a shark attack, safely descending from a crumbling factory chimney, signalling to rescue helicopters from deep in the jungle and so on. All scenarios I have since managed to avoid, safe in the knowledge that, given the worst, I know how to react.
My brother used to get the Commando comic books.
I was never really taken by it – but I do remember there was a picture of a footballer of the time (I remember Peter Ward Ian Britton and Vince Hilaire) inside the back cover – why?
Arrrrrg Himmel!!
Still a Mojo subscriber but I have found it to be less and less essential over the last couple of years. The only one that I pick up regularly now is Electronic Sound which although a bit niche is generally good and always beautifully made
Electronic Sound is good and does look very stylish. They do tend to cycle around a very narrow corner of what could be a broad topic – multiple Kraftwerk, Numan, Foxx, Radiophonic Workshop articles and they go for the future retro thing a bit too hard – lots of Robots, Moog Synths and Space Age kitsch.
I’ve become rather bored with Electronic Sound lately. Once my already-paid-for issues are out, that will be it I reckon. Ditto my Songlines subscription which is about to expire anyway.
Mojo, your days might also be numbered! I often don’t get around to reading it, so why waste my money? See also Songlines.
I got into the habit of buying Uncut every month regardless, whereas I used to only buy it if it looked particularly interesting. Think I might just stop that too.
The crosswords in Mojo and Uncut are the only bits I genuinely look forward to, if I’m honest.
The Uncut crossword is easier than the Mojo one. I almost always complete the Uncut one and just about never complete the Mojo one.
A lot less clues to solve in the Uncut crossword but the questions are usually trickier. I cheat with both, in a completely shameless fashion.
I do as much as possible from my own limited knowledge – generally I can get 60-80% unaided – and then I Google any lyric clues I’m unfamiliar with and I consult Discogs.com for clues relating to bands/artists that I know nothing about. I’m pretty useless with anagrams, so I often use an online anagram solver for the hidden anagram clue that completes the Uncut puzzle.
Crossword compilers have their individual styles of presenting clues and once you get used to a person’s habits it gets easier to solve their clues. I’m used to Uncut compiler Trevor Hungerford’s style from way back in the late ’70s when I used to get the NME every week and do the crossword. I had a much higher success rate in those days.
‘The Uncut crossword is easier than the Mojo one’ – Afterword t-shirt.
Pick up a subscription to Readly and you can read all of them ( more or less ) every month.
This is a problem though, because I read so many magazines on there I never get round to reading anything else. I’ve had to start skipping things that I know pretty well in an effort to get to the pile of books that has got completely out of hand.
Started with Melody Maker back in the day interspersed with occasional NME and Sounds. All then went quiet ( for me anyway) until Q emerged in mid 80s. That felt like breath of fresh air – since then I’ve tried most of them and have kept early copies of virtually every post Q mag – God only knows why. Since Word folded I guess I buy Mojo more than any other but still flick through them all in Smiths each month mainly to check out new releases.
Record Mirror and Sounds for me early doors. Record Mirror because it had the “real” charts and I was the class nerd on that from 1980-82. I was the go to guy to settle arguments on the lower parts of the top 20!
Then Kerrang. I remember pre-ordering it at my local Newsagent and cycling to the shop to buy it in 1981 – happy days. If I recall it had a top 100 HM songs chart included which I obsessed over for a few months. It introduced me to the delights of Montrose and subsequently those early 1980s Sammy Hagar albums (Standing Hampton) before he joined Van Halen.
I bought the first ever issue of Q with Macca on the cover from the same shop in 1986.
I then progressed through all of the 1990s Mags mentioned before.
My Mojo subscription expired last month and so I am now at the cusp of “do I bother”.
I think Mojo is going through a purple patch despite the nonsense spouted by @Lodestone-of-Wrongness – been a subscriber since it’s 2nd issue. couple of great cd’s this year too.
Also subscriber to Uncut and I buy Record Collector most months.
Can’t imagine life without them but am sure that day will come in the future.
There’s usually a deal on offer for Mojo subs – I renewed last month for 2 years for £58, so only about £2.40 per issue.
My Uncut subscription ran out in the summer but I received no renewal reminder – on contacting them I was told ‘oh we’ve only just taken over so haven’t sent any out’ (the mag was sold earlier in the year). Their best deal was £48 for a year (or oddly £21 for 6 months!) so I didn’t bother in the end – maybe just buy the odd issue if it appeals.
I enjoyed The Face. Smash Hits for grown-ups?
The early Face was great, before it got overtaken by Robert Elms-type fashion nonsense.
Smash Hits was great fun if you were (ahem) the right age, as was its forgotten Beezer-type rival, No. 1.
This is a tangent, but did anyone else used to read Acorn User back in the day??
There’s a tiny computer shop near me, with faded, obsolete accessories in the window. They have a niche business repairing old Acorn machines that still run elderly CNC machines in engineering workshops.
My mum I believe still has an old BBC Micro in the loft from years ago. Maybe I should try to fire it up and get some Elite on the go! (And Repton, Castle Quest, Citadel, Stryker’s Run, Exile….)
Somwhere I have an iso of an early version of the David Braben follow up that was called “Elite 2” when I, er, acquired my image copy…. I think it morphed into his game called “Frontier” eventually. Hmmmm. Must have a root around on my archive discs.
*wanders off into reverie about BBC B adventures in long forgotten decades*
Chuckie Egg?
Daley Thompson’s Decathlon?
Overdrive?
Football Manager?
Still got mine in the loft – this could be an interesting (proustian) weekend
My first copy of Q was bought from a newsstand at Circular Quay, Sydney. The issue where OK Computer topped the 100 Best Albums Ever Made despite (or because of) being released that same year. From that point I was pretty hooked, even though an imported copy was about 20 Australian dollars. There was simply nothing with that cultural depth being made locally. I’d read the free street press in my late teens and 20s (good for a thriving 90s Sydney music scene), and there were Australian versions of Rolling Stone and Smash Hits as I was growing up in the Duran years, but this was an entirely new world for me. The depth of writing, the cultural scope, I’d read them cover to cover. Only having one or two friends with similar interests musically, I found – and still find – that within its pages (and soon after, Mojo, The Word) was a parallel cultural life. I had to remind myself that my general circle of friends and colleagues had no idea who the Manics were, or that Revolver was the Fabs’ *real* masterpiece. From then, The Word which I devoured whose back issues I still flick through. Similar to some previous comments, this here blog is what serves at least part of that role in my life now that wider culture is now so much more fragmented and, well, shit.
When in foreign parts I like to pick up some local and practice my language skills. Rock et Folk is always worth a go in France. I used to pick up a Rolling Stone in the US but music seems such a minority part of their canon I no longer bother.
Now Dig This for Rock ‘n’ Roll.
I still like Mojo. OK, it’s never going to be as good as it was in the first 40/50 issues but …
Nevertheless, I’m not sure I’m going to keep subscribing.
Uncut if there’s a Dylan/Hendrix cover.
Shindig … though it does blow hot and cold. This month, which I didn’t get, they announced grandly that they weren’t going to run with an Abbey Road feature as everyone else was doing that, so ran with Bowie instead. Doh!
RC was a saviour in the dire 1980s (that, Beatles Monthly and Elvis Monthly) but I can’t it stand it now. It’s just a shopping list and wears its preferences far too thinly. Not everything is worthy of comment or promotion. I also dislike its shameless jumping on the vinly bandwagon as it was the magazine in the dire 1980s that championed CD the most.
I love the Uncut/Mojo Specials but, like RC, they are spreading their subjects so thinly. Who is going to buy a CSNY or REM Special? Judging by my local WH Smith, no one … 6/6 unsold of the former, 4/4 unsold of the latter. The Hendrix one sold out.
The problem with the REM special is that it’s one of those tawdry cash-grab ‘deluxe’ updates, which they try to justify when an artist has ‘new’ product out. In REM’s case, this hasn’t happened (edit: I just remembered about the Monster reissue, but hey-ho); my ‘old’ version covers all their career including ‘Collapse Into Now’, so for any committed fan, I would assume there’s no reason to buy again.
Maybe, but the Hendrix one was also a deluxe update and it sold out.
On that subject, my Dylan Uncut Special came out in about 2015/2016 and I think his catalogue has been enhanced by about 150 songs, or about 700 (seriously – remember that 1966 World Tour box) if you include the larger versions, in that time. So, a new Dylan please.
Ditto Zappa. Since the Mojo Special in 2010 about 30-40 new titles have been added to his back catalogue.
I think we’ve already had 3 Dylan’s. certainly had 2.
I’d like them to get around to a Joy Division/New Order one. I’m quite astonished that they’ve never done one. Pet Shop Boys, Beastie Boys, Kraftwerk and The Fall would also all be on my wants list too, although I guess the first two aren’t very Uncut.
Classic Pop have done a PSB ‘Special Edition’, although theirs tend to have less of an exhaustive coverage of the albums.
Yes, got that, but like you say it’s done in a different style. Neil Tennant is always good in an interview, so there should be lots of stuff that they could reprint along with the album reviews. Can’t see that one happening though.
Wow, as if by magic the joy Division/New Order one has just been announced! Whilst I’m getting what I want I should strike whilst the iron is hot and make some more demands. Okay, I really wish Jurgen Klopp would leave Liverpool and take over at Barnsley. And how about the British public coming to their senses and seeing Johnson and Farage for what they really are…
While we’re at it, can you ask for The Dawn Chorus to reform? I’ve been playing their albums all week and I miss ’em.
Zappa’s entire pre-death back catalogue has been reissued since then in the proper un-tinkered-with-in-the-’80s versions, let alone the many additional albums and extended versions that the family trust have released.
Well overdue for a revised version, but probably not that big a seller sadly.
I would have started with issues of Disco 45 in the 70s, but I grew up reading Record Mirror from about 1978, which I loved because it had the charts, and also for James Hamilton’s Disco pages and Sunie’s single reviews. In the 80s I started getting the NME, which was a good education for the young impressionable me, with occasional issues of Sounds (which I always found a bit impenetrable) and Melody Maker (which I now regret not purchasing more often given my love for the Chart Music podcast).
Started with Q (and Empire) from edition one, Vox, Select, Uncut, Mojo (and Neon while it lasted, and Total Film for a while). Now subscribe to Q, Mojo, Empire and Sight & Sound. But, if you’re asking for the best, it was The Word (somewhat predictably) for me – it remains the only magazine I read from cover-to-cover, and felt in tune with what interested me in the culture.
Incidentally, apart from a sell-off of Record Mirrors and NMEs in the late 80s (which I bitterly regret), I’ve archived all these into proper storage boxes and kept them all – whether I’ll ever get time to re-visit them though is anyone’s guess…
Disco 45 as I recall had the lyrics to the hits of the time
as evidenced by this.
Disco 45, and its wannabe Mickey Message, often got lyrics wrong, which is hardly surprising as the record companies didn’t provide them with the words. I still think that Starman goes ‘Don’t tell your poppa or he’ll get us locked up in gaol’
That’s the one!
I think the getting lyrics wrong extended into Smash Hits – I recall a Prince lyric transcribed as “Can you my darling, can you fix your lips”…
The duff lyrics in Smash Hits may have been done on purpose so a 14 year old from Tamworth could send in a letter correcting it, Smash Hits would print, and then he could brag to his mates in the playground that he is now a published author.
Yes. Happy memories of them printing a “translation” of La Bamba (“To dance the goat”).
My pal Richard Lowe (RIP, gone far too soon) edited Ver Hits in the late 80s, and his favourite Hits-ism was ‘click brrrrr’, used when phones were hung up by popstrels who were riled by the journalists’ questions. Marti Pellow was renowned for doing this, particularly when asked whether he had any pets.
I won the Wallace back in 62…anyone remember that one?
That may well have been a Prince lyric, to be fair.
In Japan, Mojo and Uncut are the only regular English music magazines to be widely available ( I don’t count Rolling Stone) and while I enjoy both, they are certainly struggling with the diminishing returns of rock nostalgia and the over-used anecdote. I will defend Wire for its originality, and will buy it whenever I can find it. But the one pop culture monthly I most enjoy these days is Sight and Sound, not because I am a great film buff but rather as it’s so consistently interesting on things I don’t know enough about.
I subscribe to the Wire magazine.
It’s pretty good if you want the very latest about artists who stand at a synthesizer and make a very rowdy noise like a rhinoceros trapped in a wardrobe.
Arf!
Their strapline: “Music for people who don’t like people”
I was also in the Q / Mojo / Uncut / Word camp.
These days, I use Readly and so rarely read a whole magazine from cover to cover – just dip into articles that catch my eye from the above lot, plus Classic Pop, Classic Rock, Prog etc….
I bought the first issue of Q (and the next 10 years). I was quite proud of this first issue but my then GF, now Mrs Tunes, though it funny to write, in black marker, next to the big cover page letter Q. ‘Who is a Ponce?’ and then ‘A.Timmy.’
Hilarious
Wives and large collections of old magazines don’t mix, I’ve found.
Reader’s wives?
Now you’re talking… hurrrr
Any old rubbish
Then Krazy Comic
Then Spider-Man Comics Weekly
Then 2000 A.D. (and, while it lasted, Star Lord)
Then NME
Then Vox
Then Uncut (and, occasionally Private Eye)
Then Word
Then The Word
Then… no more trips to the newsagents
(Nowadays I do dip into Readly in the winter months for the end of year stuff)
2000 AD! I have fond memories of it (I bought it every week from about ’85 to ’91) but in hindsight it was patchy with inconsistent quality control. Some of my favourite artists – Kevin O’Neill, Mike McMahon, Dave Gibbons, Bryan Talbot…. – are 2000 AD alumni though.
@sewer-robot
Have you ever looked at https://www.albumoftheyear.org/
More lists than you can shake a stick at, including lots of more specialist ones, where you find the good stuff.
My first music related magazine purchase would probably have been Disco45 in the early 70s. I bought that and Shoot! every week (they were weekly, weren’t they?). I loved the start of the new season when they included the cardboard First division league table and team tabs so you could update the league table every Saturday afternoon. But I digress…
I bought the NME every week starting in the mid 70s, then bought Sounds as well.
As for proper, shiny magazines, I bought the first few issues of the Face – not quite my cup of Earl Grey. I started buying Q every month after reading a friend’s old issues. I bought Mojo for a while when it first started, as well as every copy of (the) Word, too.
Loved those League ladders. Kept doing them into my early 30s.
Yes, in those league ladders, the tab for every team was in the colours of that team’s (home) kit. West Ham in claret and blue. Marvellous.
Bought things like Music Star and Popswop first. No proper radio in seventies Ireland, no big brother to steer me right. Bought the NME from 1976/7 to early 90’s. Bought Sounds quite a lot as well. Never warmed to the Melody Maker. Bought Q from it’s first issue, but eventually they were surpassed by Mojo and Uncut. Don’t buy any now. Have a subscription to Readly where I can dip in to most mainstream music mags at my leisure.
Used to love Popswop in the glam era…made scrapbooks of the posters. I so wish I’d held on to them.
I think I’ve bought, or subscribed, to most of them in my time
Nowadays I read them all on Readly (to which I was alerted by someone on this very site) – it’s a awful lot cheaper and you don’t have all the current paper littering the house.
Me too – in fact it might have been me, I was an early adopter as they say. With the exception of Private Eye, still pursuing its fogeyish print-only path, I haven’t bought a paper magazine for years.
Hey look! ANOTHER hamper.
* puts hat at jaunty angle *
* wanders off whistling Marguerita Time *
There’s still a market out there for a high quality intelligent music magazine
Sadly most of them had it for a bit and then either folded or meandered on
Mojo was great and is probably best of a mediocre bunch
Uncut was the best when it was really thick and half was devoted to film. When they dropped that it declined fast to the point now where it’s dull as dishwater
Select was my favourite in the 90’s but around the end of the decade they developed inexplicable obsessions with Kid Rock and Limp Bizkit. No one cared!
If only The Word returned… as it was before the stupid cover drawings started…
Ooh! Whatever about being the BMM, Uncut has again this year demonstrated it is the one least likely to make it to Chrissie Morning without accidentally “tearing” its present so, hey, might as well open it now, by being first out of the traps with its Top 75 albums of the year..
I lived at 2 Bank Road, a couple of older kids lived at 2 Bank Close. Occasionally we’d get mail for the other address including, memorably, an issue of Disc weekly sometime in the mid 70s.
Before taking it round I had a quick skim and was immediately hooked – not by the features, reviews or photos, but by the cartoon page by the late great J Edward Oliver. It was of its time – frequent gags about Bowie’s sexuality and lusty, busty actresses, but it was beautifully drawn, crammed with detail and whimsical humour. I’ve only recently discovered/realised JEO drew a number of strips for Odhams/Fleetway/IPC comics like Buster, Krazy, Whoopee etc.
A swag of J Edward’s work is viewable here…
http://www.jedwardoliver.uk
Judy Dyble has just posted this on her facebook page.
Could be worth a look.
How do you pronounce “Dyble”?
I’ve always said die-ble to rhyme with “Bible”, but I’m probably wrong.
I’ve never pronounced it “Dibble”, because that would make the former Fairport Convention singer sound too much like Officer Dibble out of Top Cat.
I think Judy is/was a site member? @judyd
@Colin-h will know, otherwise!
Yes, as in Bible…
I smoked her out…
PS. Wait… a film about the Melody Maker being premiered in the US, where no-one has read or heard of it? Yeah, that makes sense….
Next: a thrilling account of the genesis of the Broons. Premiering, naturally, in Tierra Del Fuego.
Genesis of the Broons sounds like a lost Dr Who series, possibly with Patrick Troughton as The Doctor.
Yes, but David Tennant or Sylvester McCoy would have been more obvious Time Lairds.
“The But an’ Ben’s bigger on the inside, Granpaw”
Die ble is correct.
I believe she has been referred to as Dibble, but that is a nono according to her.
hello! Judy here, I rhyme with ‘libel’ not ‘scribble’ 🙂 and the documentary is a wonderful watch (I only witter in it for a few seconds) but it is delightful 🙂
I’m surprised no one has mentioned Beat Monthly/Beat Instrumental, Music Maker (1960s), Music Scene, Let It Rock or International Musician and Recording World. New Music News started when NME disappeared for six weeks due to a printers strike in May 1980. If I remember correctly, Mark Ellen was involved with that one. Also, no mention of Vive Le Rock…?