Magazines of my time Part 5: The 1990s and beyond ... M8, Select, and Mojo

This is the fifth and final instalment in the series of blogposts on magazines. I’ve looked at the 1970s (here), the 1980s (here and here), and tried to provide some personal context around those days. In this part I’ll take a look at the 1990s and beyond, fast-forwarding to a virtually magazine-free present day …

The early 1990s was a period of huge transition and upheaval for me. Between 1990 and the (NZ) summer of 1992/1993, when I left New Zealand to move to Scotland, I lived in a total of seven different flats or houses, some shared, and some solo – moving from Hataitai at the start of 1990, to Aro Valley, to Seatoun, back to Aro Valley, to Mt Victoria (two separate abodes - Majoribanks St and Duke St), and finally to an inner city Dixon St locale for a few months before making what would ultimately turn out to be the life-changing move overseas. During that same period, I changed job at least three times, had some um, serious “interaction” with local law enforcement, and lost quite a lot of money on a failed nightclub-related venture. It’s fair to say I was very unsettled, and the move to Scotland – on a one way ticket – couldn’t happen soon enough. I can still recall Mum’s words on the eve of my departure … “you can’t run away from yourself” …

Part of the process of getting the airfare together, plus the tiny amount of cash I had pocketed for my arrival (from memory, about $400 NZD), involved selling a lot of the personal items I’d been collecting in prior years – most of my music collection (*wipes tear*) and a relatively large collection of magazines. I got very little cash for that stuff, but I had nowhere to store it all, and every dollar mattered at that stage. I kept some of the more precious items, but most of it went to a second-hand shop on Wellington’s Cuba Street.

I had family in Scotland, in Coatbridge (“Little Ireland”), and had little choice but to allow them to “adopt” me when I first arrived, while I settled and found a job – which I did with relative ease; I was soon back working all-nighters at a large accommodation hotel in the centre of Glasgow. Within a couple of months I’d found my own bedsit accommodation right in the heart of the city – in Sauchiehall Street, which was more or less party central, and it fitted perfectly with the lifestyle I’d become accustomed to, which was essentially that of a nocturnal insomniac-come-nightclub dweller, depending on what night of the week it was. Mum was right, I hadn’t changed a thing, I’d simply relocated, and I’d spend the best part of the next two years following that dark – and rather unhealthy – path.

I think during the five years or so before the internet arrived in earnest, let’s say 1990 through to 1995, the magazine market must have hit some kind of peak, and in the UK there were publications for practically anything and everything. I can recall being super impressed that most of the music magazines on offer came with freebies – usually a cassette tape or a CD, but occasionally a book – and the sheer variety available was mind-boggling. I was like the proverbial kid in a candy store, and with few friends (at that point), I had all the time in the world to read as much as I wanted.

 

That said, aside from the Celtic View, the compulsory must-have weekly magazine covering all things Celtic FC, there wasn’t one single publication I felt more inclined to collect over any of the others. I was a regular reader of The List, which was Scotland’s equivalent of Time Out, the NME, Q, Select, Vox, and M8 magazine. The latter specialised in covering nightlife in Scotland – dance music, reviews, club events, and an especially vibrant “rave” scene. It was one of my favourites, along with Select, which was a mainstream music glossy that frequently came with high quality cassette tapes.

M8 became an essential tool in helping me plan my weekends. It was named after the stretch of motorway that runs between Glasgow and Edinburgh, but focused on nightlife happenings right across Scotland (and beyond). Having been established in 1988 by David Faulds, who was also active as a dance music promoter, the magazine was in its prime by the early-to-mid 1990s, a period surely now regarded as something of a golden era for the dance music/rave scene in Scotland. It seemed as though every weekend there was something relatively huge happening, even outside of the main centres, at venues like the Fubar in Stirling, the Metro in Saltcoats, or the ill-fated and controversial Hanger 13 in Ayr, which was forced to close in 1995 after several drug-related deaths.

Massive dance parties in small towns frequented by multiple bus-loads of bug-eyed out-of-towners. It helped that Scotland had its very own live rave act of the era, The Time Frequency (or TTF), who often headlined such events. In these (current) times of a much more highly regulated dance music scene, it’s almost impossible to imagine now just how loose things once were.

My own ability (and willingness) to travel beyond Glasgow was often compromised however, mainly by a lack of funds, and I tended to stick to inner city clubs within staggering distance of my abode – clubs like the Tunnel, the Arches, or the retro-flavoured Fury Murrys, which was as unhip and underground as these places get, and very much a guilty secret … and yes, ‘80s retro/new wave nights were already a thing as early as 1994.

In its infancy, M8 magazine had a fanzine-like quality, but it eventually became a journalistic stepping stone, with the likes of early-period editor Mickey McGonagle becoming established at the Daily Record (is that a step forward?), and late-90s editor Lesley Wright going on to land the top gig at the renowned DJ magazine. In later years it became far more global in scope and reach, very active in event promotions, and these days operates online as Tillate.

 

Select was a far less niche publication, and it had a widescreen, if a little UK-centric, approach to pop culture. For me it was the most viable alternative to the likes of Rolling Stone or Q, each of which lacked any real appeal for reasons many, varied, and too long-winded to go into here. Select had all I really needed beyond the realm of dance music coverage – the occasional compelling feature, gig and album reviews, and most importantly for someone seeking to rebuild a music collection on a limited budget – sampler cassette tapes (and later, CDs) ... at least nine tapes between 1990 and 1996, and at least six CD releases thereafter, through to the magazine’s demise in early 2001.

Select became most famous, perhaps, for its detailed and almost obsessive coverage of the rise and fall of Britpop. It seems no coincidence that the magazine’s own popularity mirrored the career trajectories enjoyed by the likes of Oasis and Blur (among others), and it’s notable that one of its mid-period editors, John Harris, went on to become a leading Britpop authority, and author of ‘The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock’ (2003). Other leading or high-profile contributors to the magazine during its decade-long existence include award-winning Guardian writer Alexis Petridis (the mag’s final editor), and Blur biographer, Stuart Maconie.  

I still have several of those Select tapes, and maybe even a CD or two, but I stopped buying Select with any regularity around 1996-ish, not long after returning to New Zealand, because its content fell away rather badly, quite quickly. Perhaps it was just me, perhaps I just grew out of it, because one day I decided the (then) latest issue was all a bit too tabloid-esque and it no longer offered enough serious commentary. I’d more or less moved on.

In fact, the whole world was moving on. Within a year of moving back to New Zealand – newly married with a whole new set of adult responsibilities (see the “life-changing” reference above), which is a long story in itself, and one for another time/post – this crazy phenomenon called the Worldwide Web – aka the internet – was starting to take hold, and the slow steady demise of the print medium was already well underway.

It certainly changed my own reading habits, and magazines held significantly less appeal once I became suitably equipped with my own ever-faster connection with the outside world. I still covet the format, the physical “thing”, the feel, shape, form, and smell, of a printed magazine. Not to mention the excitement of a “free CD” … however obsolete that format itself has become. Because sometimes convenience can feel a little overrated, and logging into a website is not quite the same thing as picking up a magazine and flicking through its pages at leisure. Long live GP waiting rooms and hairdressing salons … 1985 issues of The Face? … I will hunt you down and find you.

Which brings me to what is more or less my current – and only remaining – poison of choice when it comes to printed matter of the periodical variety; the distinctly retro Mojo magazine, which has been in circulation since 1993.

 

I’m not a regular consumer of Mojo by any stretch but it’s something my children often buy for me on those pesky occasions when I’m forced to celebrate a birthday and it’s the only remotely affordable thing on my wish-list. I do enjoy the magazine for the historical angle it adopts, the quality of the writing, and the seemingly endless vast back catalogue of quality photos. And um, the themed CD – again, usually retro – it offers.

The fact that it has survived as long as it has – coming up for a quarter of a century – in a rapidly changing market, against all odds, says all there is to say about Mojo. 

I’ll leave it here. I’ve rambled on long enough, and I’ve dealt all of the publications that meant something to me over the course of my lifetime. Except perhaps a couple of fly-by-night gems. Which is what I set out to do, five long-winded blogposts ago.

I was a little taken aback a few weeks ago when a daughter told me she’d learned a lot about me just by reading this series of posts. Up until that point, I hadn’t realised she was even reading the blog. But it’s also fair to say I was touched by the fact that she was checking in, and that these blogposts were of some interest to her. It led to a conversation about these specific posts (on magazines) and why I felt compelled to share my thoughts on what might otherwise be considered a rather niche or frivolous thing. I explained that as much as they are a personal indulgence, they also sought to highlight, or at least document, how different life used to be.

I wanted her to fully grasp that for her generation, facts, information, and everything-you-ever-need-to-know-about-everything-and-more, is only ever a few keywords, clicks, or swipes away. Yet for my own generation, there was much less in the way of options when it came to sourcing information – we had television, radio, books, newspapers, and magazines.

That was more or less it, beyond the stuff that got handed down by default via our parents and teachers, naturally. And of course, the generation of my parents had even less choice. I think my point was that because we had to work hard at becoming informed, it somehow made that information all the more valuable. I coveted magazines because of what they offered and the amount of effort it took to collect them. I hope that makes some sense.
 

Magazines of my time Part 4: The 1980s … Trouser Press, Blues & Soul, and The Face

So far I’ve looked at a childhood obsession with football magazines, including a comic, a brief flirtation with a commercial pop music glossy, and an early love of newsprint-based music papers. But I’ve only got as far as the early to mid-1980s, and my desire to actually collect magazines, rather than to simply buy them for reading purposes only, is really just starting to take hold ...

And so to my discovery of The Face, Blues & Soul, and to a lesser extent, Trouser Press.

I’ll deal with the New York-based monthly, Trouser Press, first, because it was the most short-lived, and given that less than 100 issues were ever published (between 1974 and 1984), surely the most collectable in the sense that copies would now be relatively rare, and I presume, highly sought after. Regrettably, I have no idea where my own small Trouser Press collection may have ended up.

It’ll certainly be far more collectable than the monolith it was up against in its home market, Rolling Stone (yawn), which, despite being hugely popular, was never able to adequately represent the more alternative or post-punk genres I was most keen on. Which is something that Trouser Press specialised in – all of that left-of-centre stuff that existed outside the realm of FM radio and the Billboard charts. Not by any stretch was it exclusively American, but it was definitely far more sympathetic to home-based “alt-rock” and all things “new wave”, than any other US-based publication I ever came across.

In later years, across the last couple of dozen issues (roughly), Trouser Press offered a “free” flexi-disc to supplement issues of the magazine. Acts like Altered Images, Berlin, Buggles, Japan, Joan Jett, OMD, REM, and XTC, all had flexi-discs released via the magazine. And after it wound up its magazine format, the Trouser Press brand continued as a series of “record guide” books, five in total – three under the title of the ‘New Trouser Press Record Guide’ (1985, 1989, 1991), one as ‘The Trouser Press Guide to New Wave Records’ (1983), with its final publication being ‘The Trouser Press Guide to '90s Rock’ (1997).

In early 1986, I decided it was time to move to Wellington. I’d been feeling trapped in Palmerston North for far too long … I was unhappy in my job, and I’d been on the painful end of two relationship break-ups. The capital city offered a number of new challenges and attractions, not the least of which was a comparatively vibrant nightlife. The fact is, nightclubbing had become, if not an obsession, then pretty much my main hobby in life. In so far as it was something I spent almost as much time doing as my fulltime job – which was soon to become, conveniently enough (from a “body clock” perspective), a night duty manager at a large Wellington hotel.

Naturally, with that kind of lifestyle choice, I was being exposed to (and loving) a whole raft of new and exciting music – electro, hi energy, rare groove, hip hop, and before too long, new genres like house and techno. And as anyone who knows anything at all about that scene at that time will tell you, there were two “bibles” for the discerning nightclub patron (or DJ) of the era – Blues & Soul magazine, and The Face. I started to collect both.

(As an aside, although Mixmag was established in 1983, it remained underground for much of the decade before emerging, and um, peaking, during the acid house years. The other more high profile dance music publication of recent times, DJ magazine, didn’t emerge until 1991).

Blues & Soul is basically an institution, established as far back as 1966, and still active today, 1000-plus issues later. A few years back it had a brief spell as an online-only publication before reverting back to its original print format.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Blues & Soul was compulsory reading – what key contributors John Abbey (founder), David Nathan, and Roger St. Pierre, didn’t know about disco, funk, and soul, really wasn’t worth knowing. The magazine’s list of features and interviews through the latter decade in particular reads like a Who’s Who of every genre ever heard inside a club.

Prominent contributors during 1980s included the likes of Pete Tong, Paul Oakenfold, and Tim Westwood, before each man would eventually go on to establish a successful career as a DJ in his own right. Tong wrote an industry gossip column under the guise of ‘The Mouth’ – a “fortnightly foray into fads, fax, fallacy, and fun”. Oakenfold contributed a regular column called ‘Wotupski’, and Westwood is credited with establishing the first ever hip hop-specific column at the magazine.

The nature of club music is that it can be very fickle, very scene-centric, and at that time there seemed to be an unwritten “freshest is best” rule. To that end, I can recall religiously trawling the magazine’s various charts on a regular basis, obsessing over what I’d heard and what I hadn’t, what I “owned”, what I could potentially get my hands on, and what I’d clearly have to wait a long time for. For better or for worse, these things seemed important for a few years in the late 1980s. In fact, Blues & Soul had a chart for just about everything – singles and albums, for the UK and the US, the magazine’s own ‘City Slickers Hip List’, ‘Groove Control’ and other assorted club charts, and later in the decade, an RPM (raps per minute) chart.

The Face magazine was a slightly different beast in that it wasn’t really a music magazine. It was all about style – fashion, film, art, design, trends, identity, and politics. Naturally, a lot of music content aligned itself with that. From memory, its main rivals in that (relatively broad) market during the era were i-D, Blitz, and Arena magazines, but I think The Face was the quintessential 1980s style guide. Or at least it was for a certain demographic, one that I skirted around the periphery of due to my interest in clubbing, and the small fact that my partner between 1987 and 1990 was a committed fashionista studying textile design at Wellington Polytech.

Nick Logan, a former editor at the NME, who was also prominent in the establishment of Smash Hits, was the driving force behind setting up The Face in 1980. Logan was able to tap into the pool of outstanding journalists he’d worked alongside previously – most notably Tony Parsons, Julie Burchill (see part three), and the guru of them all, Jon Savage, who had worked for Sounds, Melody Maker, and the NME. Savage would later go on write ‘England’s Dreaming’ (1991), the seminal tome about the Sex Pistols and the punk era.

It wasn’t just about words though. As a glossy, published monthly, The Face was also renowned for its great photography and experimental/cutting edge design. Neville Brody was the magazine’s art director through the first half of the 1980s – he later moved to Arena – and much of the mag’s reputation was forged on the back of his ability to bring together all of the separate elements (fashion, film, music etc) into one cohesive whole. Brody is also noted for his album cover designs, and his CV includes work for Throbbing Gristle, Level 42, and Depeche Mode. In the case of the latter, the single sleeve for ‘I Just Can’t Get Enough’.

I think my own interest in The Face had started to fade by the start of the 1990s, but not until I had amassed a fairly decent collection (again, currently awol). I broke up with the aforementioned partner, who would go on to establish her own label and set up shop in Wellington’s bohemian Cuba Street before disappearing from my life completely.

Things were about to take another turn for me, and while music, nightlife, and er, magazines, remained right at the core of my being, I was about to indulge in that most Kiwi of 20-something pursuits, “the big OE”, and head back to the UK indefinitely. I didn’t really have any specific plans, but my passport was British, my ticket was one way, and my intent was to travel light …

Magazines of my time Part 3: The 1980s … NME, Smash Hits, & Rip It Up

By 1979, my life as a high school student was all but over. I was sitting School Certificate and putting in just enough effort to scrape a “pass” in all five of my subjects except History, which I passed with some aplomb, simply because I loved that subject way more than any of the others. The plan was that I’d do 6^th form, my University Entrance year, in 1980, but there were a couple of stumbling blocks in my path that I’d eventually fail to overcome.

The first was that, at 15, all of the things that had shaped my world up until that point, suddenly started to seem less important. I’d more or less lost interest in playing football, and while I was still involved with the school team, I was no longer being looked at for representative team selection. I was off the radar, and in truth, I lacked the physicality to play at any higher level. Shoot! magazine (see Part 2) had started to lose its appeal, and things like Paul McCartney’s Wings, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, and this crazy thing called punk rock – an unfathomable mix, I’ll grant you – became far more important distractions to fill my head with.

It was probably around 1979 when I first bought my first music and pop culture magazine. I’m fairly certain it was an Australian publication called Popscore, which enjoyed a brief foray into the New Zealand market around that time. It was a glossy, and I can recall cutting out pictures – one of McCartney stands out – and plastering them all over my school books. I’m still doing something similar on Facebook, and on this blog, today.

I’d started doing after school jobs, and started buying music with my hard earned dosh. I had also started saving money for what would prove to be the second major stumbling block in a forlorn attempt to complete my education (by passing University Entrance) – a family trip to the UK and the USA for several months smack bang in the middle of 1980. The plan had changed, and I was supposed to study from a distance, but it never quite happened.

What that trip did however, was cement my burgeoning relationship with popular culture. Lifestyles, tribes, music, and fashion in London, Brighton, and Glasgow – the places we stayed or visited most while in the UK – were a huge eye-opener for the recently turned 16-year-old me. Punks, Mods, Skinheads, Rude Boys, tartan bondage pants, DMs, the music of The Specials, The Clash, The Jam, and The Police, blaring out from shop doorways and pub jukeboxes … this was all very different to the world I’d known in Palmerston North. And it was at this time I discovered a music newspaper called the New Musical Express, which I started buying as often as I could.

 

 The late '70s, through the 1980s, was a special time for the NME, which found itself at the vanguard of music criticism during the rise of punk and post-punk. Exceptional writers like Paul Morley, Tony Parsons, and Julie Burchill, were all plying their trade at the paper during this period, and the NME was streets ahead of Melody Maker and Sounds, which were its two main rivals in the market – at least in terms of non-glossy UK-based weekly newsprint publications. In the second half of the decade key writers included the equally entertaining likes of Adrian Thrills, Stuart Cosgrove, and Paolo Hewitt.

The quality of the writing – insightful analysis of ever-changing and quickly evolving scenes, and all of the context around that, plus witty album and gig reviews, etc – from staffers was one thing, but the letters-to-the-editor page (or ‘The Big Bad Read’) was something else entirely, and probably where I spent most of my time. It was clear NME readers also held firm opinions and weren't afraid to share them. Often at the cost of a scathing reply from said editor. I also loved browsing the classifieds, and the charts page, with a special shout out to the history-nut-centric ‘Lest We Forget’ charts of years/decades past. And of course there was always Fred Dollar’s ‘Fred Fact’, a tiny morsel of weekly musical eccentricity to ponder and/or marvel at.

For whatever reason, or reasons, the NME has fallen away badly over the past couple of decades and it no longer commands the same level of reach or influence. If anything, for readers of my generation say, the (now) magazine is something of a joke and a sad pale shadow of what it once represented.

While the NME was the champion of all things indie, political, and cutting edge, fans of straight up unadulterated pop music could get their fix from Smash Hits, a magazine that catered for the pop charts. And that meant for much of the first half of the 1980s, it was very much a synthpop-centric type of publication, which is where I came in.

 

Published fortnightly, Smash Hits was a colourful glossy crammed full of posters, lyric sheets, and digestible tidbits. It was almost tabloid-esque at times. Something to be consumed and tossed away, rather than studiously pored over and/or collected. It had its own little niche corner of the market. For a while it did have a specialist indie page, and one dedicated to disco, but mostly it was a rock snob’s nightmare and it concerned itself only with whatever was happening on top 40 radio at any given time. To its credit, the magazine survived for nearly three decades before market forces and falling advertising revenues saw it close in 2006.

My relationship with Smash Hits was only ever intermittent, that whole early 80s synthpop thing being its main draw, but I was still buying it as late as 1983, because I recall having a Tears For Fears poster/lyric page for ‘Pale Shelter’ (removed from the mag) pinned to a bedroom wall in one of my first flats. I can laugh about it now, but at the time it all seemed so deadly serious.

Trivia Fact: Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant was once an assistant editor at Smash Hits. Then he released ‘West End Girls’ and the rest is history …

By the time I’d left school, found a job, left home, and established a set of like-minded gig-going companions (let’s say by 1983, for argument’s sake), I had become aware of Rip It Up, a local music paper, a monthly, that was free to pick up at “record shops” (quaint term) across the country.

Rip It Up started life in 1977, the brainchild of local music identity Murray Cammick, and while it wasn’t New Zealand’s first rock/pop culture periodical, it was the first of any real significance for my generation. It wasn’t exclusively about local music – interviews, album reviews, gig reviews – but it was the only place, beyond token coverage in mainstream newspapers, we could read about local bands, local gigs, and everything else to do with “us”. That said, it had a balanced mix of the local and the international, and was fairly widescreen in scope and genre.

 

Initially, it was quite rudimentary in its design and layout – it was advert-dependent and free, after all – with one-word section headers – “records” (reviews), “live” (gig reviews), “briefs” (short news snippets), and “letters” (self-explanatory, and only occasionally NME-standard for hilarity). It had a genuine fanzine quality about it.

I’d usually start at the “rumours” section, which took the reader on a tour around the country, covering odds and ends, news and gossip, with focus placed on each of the four main centres. It offered a summary of what had been happening in each location, and what we could expect in the way of releases, tours, and events during the month ahead.

From 1977, through the decade that followed, Rip It Up was a newsprint publication, mostly black and white, with a splash of colour reserved for the front cover and the occasional advert. But in 1991, the title underwent a facelift and a change in format, morphing into a glossy magazine, with a sale price attached. And while that’s all fair enough, and perfectly logical, something that ensured its longer term survival, it’s fair to say my own interest in the paper/magazine had fallen away by this time. Not because there was a cost associated with it, but because it had become less concerned with the grassroots, and far more mainstream in its approach.

You can find a fascinating archive of classic early Rip It Up content online here.  

So far, all of the titles I’ve covered off in this series – with the exception of Rip It Up – have been UK-based publications, but in the next post I’ll expand those horizons just a little. Still looking at the 1980s, but taking a short detour into rather more exotic climes …

Read Part 1 here

Read Part 2 here

 

Magazines of my time Part 2: The 1970s … Shoot! and Tiger

I must have been about nine years old when I signed up for my first magazine subscription. It was 1973, or perhaps 1974, a standing order for Shoot! magazine, a British football weekly. Once a week, I’d race down to collect the magazine from the local newsagent at the Awapuni shopping centre, which was a five minute bike ride from my home in the sprawling metropolis of Palmerston North … four minutes, if traffic was kind.

It was all very exciting. I came to love the smell of newsprint, there was a cardboard folder behind the counter with my actual name on it, and I think the cost of the magazine was around 35 cents local currency, which was about half my usual weekly “pocket money” (or allowance). Although the ship freighted magazines arrived some three months after publication in the UK, I’d pore over each new issue as though it contained all the hidden secrets of the universe.

It might as well have. Football was more or less my whole world at that age. My Lanarkshire-born immigrant father played it at a high local level, representing Hawkes Bay, Manawatu, and the NZ Combined Services team (he was in the police) at various times throughout the 1960s and 1970s. I trained most evenings myself, and my weekends were consumed by round ball activity – Saturday mornings for the school or (later) club teams, Saturday afternoons watching Dad's games, which often involved travelling to different North Island towns, and by 1976, my Sundays were taken over by my own representative/Manawatu age group team commitments.

 

If I was really lucky I'd manage to catch the LWT-produced Big Match on television once a week. The main drawback being that this hour-long highlights package of games from the English top flight of a week earlier, had an often inconvenient Sunday lunch broadcast slot. This was, of course, in the days prior to the VCR, or the scarcely imaginable option of saving a TV programme to something called a hard drive.

As for local newspapers covering British football ... forget it. The Wellington-based broadsheet, the Evening Post, offered weekly league tables, printed on a Monday, but any coverage in Palmy's Evening Standard was a rarity, and very much a bonus if it happened at all. So in this tiny isolated rugby-obsessed corner of the globe, Shoot! magazine was a godsend, my weekly bible, and my only way of keeping up with all the news on the global game. It was an escape into another, hugely exciting, world.

Once a year, in late July or early August, at the start of every new football season, Shoot! had a removable cardboard league ladder feature, where each division in England and Scotland had its own set of slots, and each team had its own tab which could then be inserted, removed, and reinserted on a weekly basis as the teams jockeyed for position, up and down the various tables as the season progressed. Not having regular access to the Evening Post, I’d try to keep my own tables up to date by listening to the early Sunday morning reading of the British football results on national radio (from games played overnight), calculating the weekend tables accordingly. But it was usually a forlorn task, as those pesky midweek games often went unreported, and in truth, I probably wasn’t as good at maths as I thought I was.

 

Shoot! also had a "star-studded" line-up of feature writers (or at least, ghost writers representing them) – the likes of Alan Ball, Gerry Francis, and Kevin Keegan being the most memorable from that mid-1970s period in terms of the English game. But as a fan of Glasgow Celtic, I had a special relationship with the game north of the border, and I was always drawn to what the “tartan talk” columnists had to say – the likes of Danny McGrain and Kenny Dalglish were, as Celtic players of the era, particular favourites at the time.

Other features in Shoot! included ‘Football Funnies’, which included a short comic strip called Nobby, ‘Ask The Expert’, which offered £1 for every letter published, and ‘You Are The Ref’, where the reader is presented with a rule book conundrum to resolve, and a chance to play the role of the “bastard in the black”.

I especially enjoyed the ‘Club Spotlight’ sections, usually two per issue, which included a team photo of the featured club(s) and short player bios. And the ‘Focus On’ section was always good read, where one top player was asked a series of questions from the professional to the personal, but in a very digestible/snapshot format.

I was supposed to be saving up for a “racing bike” (to get me to the shops faster, right?), but usually, if I had any spare money leftover, I’d more than likely spend it on a comic called Tiger. Tiger was also a football-centric UK-based comic, the original home for the famous Roy of the Rovers strip, prior to Roy Race and his Melchester Rovers club becoming popular enough to demand an entire comic of their very own.

 

Alongside Roy of the Rovers, Tiger had strips like Billy’s Boots and Hot Shot Hamish, along with a Motor Racing/Formula One strip called Skid Solo, and a wrestling one featuring a giant American Indian dude called Johnny Cougar. Tiger merged with a rival comic called Scorcher, before disappearing completely in the wake of Roy Race’s rebranding.

I occasionally flirted with a more highbrow monthly, the illustrious World Soccer (magazine), which I sourced from second-hand bookshops. Or I found myself the lucky recipient of used copies that Dad had somehow found for me. It’s funny, because although Dad often frowned upon me spending so much time reading about football when I “should be outside practicing”, he did tend to support and feed my obsession.

World Soccer was a much more challenging read however, with a lot more emphasis placed on the international game, and Shoot! was my main poison of choice throughout the mid-to-late Seventies.

It was all rather fascinating stuff for a pre-teen come pre-pubescent teenager living on the other side of the world to where all the action was (clearly!) taking place, but things were about to change, and by 1978 or 1979, I started to develop a healthy (or unhealthy) interest in music and pop culture, one that stays with me to this very day.

The origins of this newly discovered horizon, or soon-to-be obsession, can perhaps be traced back to an older sister, who also had a couple of magazine subscriptions of the same era – I’m fairly certain her sub was for a girl’s mag called Diana, or it may have been Jackie magazine. Each of those publications had pull-out posters, of (then) teen idols like David Cassidy and Donny Osmond, through to more serious artists like David Bowie and um, Gary Glitter … but I’ll cover some of this off in the next post as we journey into a far less innocent time and place …

Magazines of my time Part 1: Introduction

My name’s Michael, and I’m a recovering collect-aholic. For much of my life, I’ve been obsessed with collecting music, books, and magazines.

In recent years, while music and books still remain very much at the forefront of this personal form of OCD, I’ve been relieved of the need to collect magazines. But for a while, peaking perhaps in the late 1980s, magazines were the most important thing of all. Mostly magazines of the music and pop culture variety, but also magazines relating to sport – football, cricket, boxing (specifically The Ring) … even the odd bloodstock glossy relating to the thoroughbred industry (Blood Horse rules ok!).

The recent demise of NZ Musician magazine – in its printed/magazine format – was at least understandable, but also a little disturbing for someone with my affliction, and it got me thinking about all of the great magazines that have come and gone throughout my lifetime. There’s been a few.

 

So I’ve decided to dedicate a series of blogposts to the genre, a handful of posts about the magazines, incorporating music “papers” and the odd comic, that have been important to me across the past four decades or so. Little bursts of nostalgia, with some context and detail around why each publication meant something to me.

Thanks to the way we now consume news, information, and infotainment, magazines will never again have the influence, or carry the gravitas they once bore. These days, there is less need – or desire – for tangible copy. Everything is available in an instant, on a hand-held device, no less. All the news and information we’ll ever need can now be accessed within a few seconds, and be discarded just as quickly. And that’s fine too.

When I was growing up, during the 1970s and 1980s, it was inconceivable that such an option could ever exist, that technology could open up so many possibilities, and I’m certainly not about to dismiss that level of accessibility in any “oooh, it were way better in my day, lad” kind of way.

 

But I do feel a little sad for my children, in that they’ll never experience the thrill of a weekly magazine subscription. Not for them, the rush of excitement as they walk into the newsagent and spot the new issue of something they’ve been looking forward to, sitting up there on the rack, in pristine condition, in all of its colourful glory. It’s quite probable they’ll never really understand the catharsis that can come with sitting down to casually flick through the latest issue of a magazine they’ve been forced to wait a few weeks for.

One of the goals behind everythingsgonegreen is document some of this stuff from the past, purely for posterity, or else it’ll be allowed to fall between the cracks. When my children can post online, for all of the world to see, from now until eternity, what they’re about to eat for dinner, then surely it’s up to my generation to record some of the pre-internet tidbits relevant to our own otherwise undocumented grassroots existence … and clearly, my former OCD-level need to collect, has now been surpassed by my self-indulgent need to document the trivial. If it’s not recorded, or written about, it surely didn’t happen, right?

I’ll break the series up into several parts … part 2 covering the 1970s, part 3 will look at the first half of the 1980s, part 4 will tick off the second half of that glorious decade, part 5 will look at the 1990s and beyond, leading into the slow steady demise of the printed glossy in the ever less functional world of everythingsgonegreen …