Before the big purge of 2006, I had every issue of Q magazine to date, every single one of them. From the first issue in October 1986, running right through past the birth of Mojo in 1993 and on into the new millennium, I had them all neatly shelved in meticulous and correct order of release. Even after all the bands worth reading about had migrated to sister magazine Mojo and Q had become home to the Spice Girls, Robbie Williams, Oasis and other horrors I still kept on buying it, mainly for the Q Charts and the quality writing of Tom Hibbert.

Then one day, after realising I would probably never read that Rory Gallagher or John Martyn interview again (let alone be able to find it, even if the mood took me) I ditched the lot, freeing up acres of shelf space and feeling enormously liberated in the process

But today I found around 20 early copies of Q which had somehow escaped the expulsion. The earliest of these is issue #7 from January 1987 and what a keyhole into the (recent) past it is. This morning I read it almost from cover to cover, just so you » Continue Reading.