Friend of Prince, Catherine “Cat” Glover on the cover there, although I thought it may have been the Black Box fronting, non English speaking model from Guadeloupe instead at first. (She is mentioned later on, which is the only reason I know her name.)
Bat
Paul Oakenfold complaining about Batman here, more specifically about there being two different soundtracks, one Elfman and one Prince, and worrying one might be considered a social outcast for not seeing the movie.
Oak
Well.
Chris Mellor’s Euro Dance Chart follows a little later, some tracks from that later. Nice to see the Sueno album mentioned, I remember getting that in 23rd Precinct. Loletta Holloway having a bit of an understandable moan about Black Box here, and Alan Jones calling out Chris about the Lambada after Chris slagged it off a bit in the previous month.
RideChart
No chart inspired mix here, just this one based on the Eurochart above but by his time in 1989 most of these tracks would be blaring out of radios or cars. Maybe not so likely with the Euro tracks, by this point in time Europe has gone full blown Piano crazy. Also, very loud unconvincing orgasms.
Main chart above, specialist charts this time are a bit, well, dull, other than maybe the House Chart from Black Market. Bit of a typo at the number one spot with Latin Cream though.
Adamski on the cover there, an indication of the slightly different direction the magazine was taking post transfer of ownership from Spotlight to Punch (Tony Blackburn column jettisoned, Tim Jeffrey as editor, Normski, Norman Cook, Paul Oakenfold & Chris Mellor as contributors). It’s now moving away from the disco into the club, so as such the content is a bit more interesting. Less about CDs of DJ jokes and quips and into smoke machines and lighting. And of course, RAVING.
Rave
Neat feature on Sheffield here, showing Parrot & Winston who would go on to further success and a great quote from Parrot that bears repeating : “Forgemasters is the first inch in a very, very deep well.”
North
Similar feature about “The North”, following up on Manchester & Leeds as well. Early mentions of Nightmares on Wax & Warp Records.
Charts
And some slightly more specialist charts than previously, doing away with the regionals (which really didn’t vary too much across the UK) in favour of charts from Black Market Records and Zoom instead. Today I’ve gone through these four charts and picked out a few tracks, some of which weren’t so easy to find due to misspellings and attribution errors.
Chart
Main chart is above, Ride On Time, Numero Uno, Pump Up The Jam, Sueno Latino, French Kiss, Grand Piano, Strings of Life, 3AM Eternal, Meltdown, Mantra for a State of Mind. Some of these tracks are more easily available on things like the previously covered Warehouse Raves but before this they weren’t really collected as the audience didn’t exist yet, and 12″ white labels were coveted by those lucky enough to know what they were.
Whenever I hear this year mentioned it is immediately repeated on the Walkman that lives in my head in the style of Chuck D. (The following year has a similar curse, but with a bit more saxophone.)
Below you can find the club chart from Jocks Magazine, April 1989. Jocks was a trade magazine aimed towards professional mobile DJ types, the sort that were booked for your school disco or wedding. It uncomfortably carried a club chart in the centre pages, presumably to be posted in the sort of music emporium that catered to said mobile DJ, and this was based on their monthly returns and compiled by James Hamilton & Alan Jones. Jocks eventually morphed into DJ Magazine, but more about that here. Perhaps at some point in the future I’ll go into the contents of a couple of these magazines, not today although the best thing about them is probably the Tony Blackburn columns.
The cover dates it as April, the returns involved here are probably from January-February 1989 given lead copy times and print deadlines. The content of the chart is a bit of an odd mix of Rap / Hip-House / Soul / House / New Jack Swing with early innovators of these sounds (Joe Smooth, Fast Eddie, A Guy Called Gerald, Tyree, Farley “Jackmaster” Funk, Clivilles & Cole) and favourites from the previous incarnation of this blog (Smith & Mighty, Gail “Sky” King, Dave Dorrell & CJ Mackintosh) fairly well represented as well as a little bit of more unusual sounds in the lower reaches such as Westbam & A Split Second. I guess the sorts that were dutifully sending their chart returns covered a broad church of portable discos and not quite serious nightclubs, and this was long before the DJ as rockstar was a phenomenon so the kind of person that voluntarily opted to pursue this career wasn’t really in it for the money.
Top 100 Dance Chart, Jocks Magazine April 1989.
I’ve taken some of the tracks from this chart and bunged them together into an almost 3 hour haphazardly mixed set, which you can find here. Featuring tracks from A Split Second, Tyree, Joe Smooth, Baby Ford, Farley “Jackmaster” Funk, Longsy D’s House Sound, Soul II Soul, KC Flightt and more.
FWIW, there were a couple of items I couldn’t find in a decent bitrate, namely Bali – Love To Love You (Future mix), which is a bit surprising as it’s an early Oakenfold mix, Candi McKenzie – Wanna Be Good Tonight (specifically the Top Cat remix. Cooltempo stuff seems quite hard to come by these days, which is unfortunate as there’s a lot of Jolley / Harris / Jolley there), Freshski Dames – Kickin’ It (Fairly interesting rap that sounds super-dated due to the oft-used backing tracks here) and Prince Lover Dalu – Let Me Make Love To You (no idea, the Internet barely remembers this guy). I mean, I could rip the audio from youtube but that’s really a last resort kind of action and the tracks don’t really warrant it. It’s kind of like looking at Oakenfold’s early sketchbook. Would you buy drugs commission a remix from this man?
New Releases, 1989, Feb-Mar.
Bonus scan of the “new” dance releases in Feb/Mar 1989, Edward II & the Mad Professor, Bizarre Inc., Soul II Soul & The Reynolds Girls among never to be heard of again acts.
Apologies for the low quality of the scans, my flatbed scanner is unreliable and the CZUR standing scanner thing doesn’t seem to do very well with slightly glossy paper. Anyway, this is the preview issue of LM given away with Crash, Zzap & whatever the Amstrad one was called. Tone is a bit different from the proper issues, but it’s kind of a gateway issue.
This was the belly band wrapper which stuck the mag to it’s computer sibling at Christmas 1986.
The first issues had a neat double cover, simple block colour on the outside, actual cover inside, Superman bursting through the page quite visually striking but this idea was gone by the time issue 4 arrived.
Anyway, link above. Somehow the PDF is 12Mb so I do suggest you take a look at a snapshot of 1986 featuring 3D out of Massive Attack, Nigel Mansell, some big coats, an assortment of joysticks that wouldn’t look out of place in Ann Summers, Ian Rush, a very youthful looking Mark E. Smith and Superman IV among other stuff.
From the publisher of Crash & Zzap 64, LM magazine was an attempt to create something that might be later thought of as a (men’s) lifestyle magazine, but in 1987 there wasn’t an audience (of advertisers) to sustain it. LM quickly folded after 4 (well, 4.5) issues.
But that’s how it ended, how did it begin? A risky move for Newsfield, opening an office in that there London compared to the joys of Ludlow but someone had a vision, and there was an audience of readers engaged even if they were jumping in from their sister titles. There were almost 270,000 copies of the trial issue 0 printed (which is a surprising number considering how infrequently they would show up on ebay, but I guess loads ended up in the rubbish) and most if not all were bundled with it’s label mates at Christmas which was a smart move for a February launch. I’ll get round to issue 0 at some point in time as it’s not to hand just so instead some waffle about the first issue follows.
LM 01
Why was it called LM? Maybe backronymed as Leisure Monthly, it probably wasn’t a coincidence that the various editors in this stable of magazines made liberal use of one “Lloyd Mangram” as a pseudonym. So maybe they just couldn’t think of anything better, although the first issue is bylined as the Lively Magazine so who knows for sure?
BCNU
Content-wise, it’s a fairly eclectic mix of well, stuff; features on Paul McGann, the Icicle Works, The Prisoner (which was a revelation to me at this time), Russ Meyer, Jumble Sales & Frankie Goes To Hollywood and it approaches these things with a reasonably mature, level-headed tact. See especially the feature on lads who beat up their mothers as a fairly surprising choice of article, which seems to be thanks to one Sue Dando, ex of Oh Boy and other, more female oriented magazines.
242
The reviews are quite fun, although in a month where you’re reviewing Viz, The Dark Knight Returns and a bunch of Alan Moore works you’re probably not going to be spoiled for words. The reviews are a little anaemic compared to Crash et al. though, but it’s probably a harder sell to the audience to dedicate three pages to John Cleese in a bath.
The Cans writeup is strangely fascinating, if only to reinforce how bad the premium lager scene was as Budweiser seems to be the favourite and it’s quite frankly piss. Was more of a Red Stripe man myself.
Anyway, I suggest if you’ve made your way here you might be interested in the full thing. Fill yer boots here.
