1990 was twenty years ago. Ten years ago.
This cover date was the day I turned 4 years old. The paper has had another makeover, dropping the Popswop association and merging with Disc. The last issue of Disc was August 30th, 1975. (The last Record Mirror & Popswop branded issue was May 17th, 1975). (Scans courtesy of World Radio History again.)
And now I am almost three years old. Another relaunch, the (& Radio) Subtitle? Midtitle? was dropped in August and the paper left the Billboard organisation in early July moving to Spotlight Publications. Can’t imagine that went down too well with Editorial as they were housed in Carnaby Street before moving to Benwell Street into a building that seems now to be the Jamie Oliver Cookery School. Magazines as before courtesy of World Radio History.
Continue reading “September 21st 1974, Record (& Popswop) Mirror”I had just turned 2 by the coverdate of this issue. I was going to use the previous week’s magazine, but this one was a soft relaunch of the paper so looks a bit more interesting.
This is the music that would have been contemporary when I was approaching 1 year old.
Longtime readers of the site would, well, no, there are no long term readers any more are there? I’ve bee sporadically active and the landscape has changed. RSS is out of favour, content is pushed to one site and replicated to the other five or six. Maybe you’ll see me dancing my way through this on tikety-tok in future.
So now I’m going to back to amusing myself, as if I didn’t do this in the first place. I’ve found a motherlode of old music press and charts at World Radio History, so let’s have a look at the charts in Record Mirror dated for the week of September 25th, 1971. I was born that week, have always been kind of curious about the music that was around at the time as no amount of film stock and bands on the roof would really adequately describe what was out.
Loveless was released 30 years ago, not 30 years and 1 week ago.
Continuing in the tradition of me scanning a bunch of pages from an old magazine and whacking some tunes together in the pursuit of content. You’ll be pleased to know I’ve been fully Moderna-ed and might actually post more than 4 articles this year.
From August 1991, Kraftwerk are the cover stars, not that it might be entirely obvious as the text is all over the place and someone’s been overdoing the Deluxe Paint IV on their copy of The Robots / Robotnik from 1991.
MOREA conversation elsewhere reminded me of Heartbreak Hotel, a short-lived “Comics Lifestyle Magazine” which attracted talents such as Trina Robbins, Steven Appleby, Dave Gibbons & Alan Moore to name a few. There wasn’t any mention of the mag on Wikipedia until about 15 minutes ago when I added it as a future rod for my back but more about that another day though. In skimming one of the issues I spotted a house ad for Titan Books, the usual fare and well, something I don’t remember.
I though I had struck gold with the Halo Jones ad, there’s a version in my head that I swear describes the whole thing as a 9 book saga with a Pirate Queen Halo that I’ve never found again, but I haven’t found it today. I had both of those Love & Rockets volumes as my first introduction to Hopey & Maggie and I was of the age where Hopey was a real crush. And my first Watchmen copy would have been the Titan edition due to it being slightly easier to come by (and these were probably featured in LM), but in the middle, there’s the real monster. And it’s not wearing the memories of Alec Holland.
I had more ambition in 2020, I had hoped to post at least few times. Look how that turned out.
Anyway, less said about the past few months the better, this year’s (primary? only?) post is about the 1991 Comic Relief Comic, Wikipedia says this about it.
Various items of merchandise have been sold to promote and raise money for Comic Relief. In 1991, The Totally Stonking, Surprisingly Educational And Utterly Mindboggling Comic Relief Comic was published by Fleetway. Conceived, plotted and edited by Neil Gaiman, Richard Curtis, Grant Morrison and Peter K. Hogan, it featured contributions from a vast array of British comics talent, including Jamie Delano, Garth Ennis, Dave Gibbons, Mark Millar, Simon Bisley, Mark Buckingham, Steve Dillon, D’Israeli, Jamie Hewlett and Bryan Talbot. (Alan Moore, arguably Britain’s most famous comics writer, was not credited as working on the book having sworn never to work for Fleetway again, but was said[19] to have worked with partner Melinda Gebbie on her pages.) The comic was unique in that it featured appearances by characters from across the spectrum of comics publishers, including Marvel and DC superheroes, Beano, Dandy, Eagle and Viz characters, Doctor Who, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, in addition to a cavalcade of British comedy figures (both real and fictional). These were all linked by the twin framing narratives of the Comic Relief night itself, and the tale of “Britain’s meanest man” Sir Edmund Blackadder being persuaded to donate money to the event. The comic “sold out in minutes”, raising over £40,000[citation needed] for the charity, and is now a highly prized collectors’ item.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_Relief#Merchandise
Highly prized collectors’ item isn’t really a term I would use to describe something you can get on ebay for a fiver but I digress. Please find below a few pics taken from the comic, as it’s not something likely to be reprinted.
