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Phew, rock'n'roll! And the telly! You know the drill. That habit you get into in those tender years. Friday, pocket money, down the newsagent, Cresta, Horror Bags, Spanish Gold and... a pop/TV crossover magazine! Here's the stuff you would be expected to shell out your hard-received 25p for... |
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BEEB
(1985)/FAST FORWARD (1989-92) |
CHART
SONGWORDS (1980-81)
CHOCK FULL of 2-Tone stuff. Basically a Smash Hits-type thing,
comprised of lyrics to selected top 30 songs, and some
interviews.
DISCO 45 (1970-80)
THE POP mag that was usurped by Smash Hits. Paper covers, lyrics to
current chart hits, a few photos and dodgy personal ads - young girls
looking for 'hairy' lads, etc. Not that brilliant.
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FLEXIPOP (early 80s)
HOUSE TITLE of the early 80s glossy video pop movement - ABC, Spandau
Ballet, Altered Images etc. Came with free exclusive flexidisc (hence
the title, amazingly) on the cover. Which the local hard kids always
nicked, leaving loads of disc-less magazines on the shelves of
Smiths. Anyone got 10p to stop this disc slipping?
LM (1985)
EARLY ATTEMPT at a 'lifestyle magazine' of the sort that are these
days launched and wound up weekly, named after the egocentric (to say
nothing of made-up) 'editor' of Spectrum-baiting Crash magazine,
Lloyd Mangram. It started off with the bold gambit of having largely
blank single colour covers with LM in the top left and possibly just
a few lines giving an idea of what was inside. And what was inside?
Thunderbirds, Frankie Goes To Hollywood and Paula Yates. It was very
bad. 'Mangram' did an advice column, and Crash artist Oliver Frey did
crappy drawings for it. And a spectacularly unfunny 'rogue's gallery'
of all the staff in the first issue. It only lasted about another
seven.
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LOOK-IN
(1972-88) |
Other regulars featured On The Ball with Brian Moore and The Look-In/New World Young Cook's Club. Advertising was of the pocket-money prising, oh go on, Dad nature - Pocketeers, Lego, PGL holidays, The Outrider etc. Flogged in spare time in commercial breaks, accompanied by still of front cover: 'Look out, for Look-In!' Best of all were the selected listings for all ITV areas (with all the logos!), cataloguing exotic fare such as Gus Honeybun and Puffins Pla(i)ce from faraway regions such as Westward and Channel, which were stupidly dropped in rubbish early 80s revamp, which majored on Adam and the Ants and BMX bikes.
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A pretty complete list of those 'In strips : Timeslip, Follyfoot, Please Sir!, Benny Hill, Les Dawson, Bless This House, On the Buses, The Tomorrow People, Man About the House, Space 1999, Black Beauty, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman (both running in colour simultaneously in 1976-ish, these would merge in the early 80s to form downmarket black and white 'regional repeat'-styled crapper), an ABBA life story, Charlie's Angels, Doctor On the Go/In the House, Gerry Anderson's 'please buy this series' plea in the shape of half-pager Starcruiser, Logan's (short-lived) Run, Mork and Mindy, Battlestar Galactica, Mind Your Language, Sapphire & Steel (drawn by Arthur Ranson and possibly the best strip Look-In ever ran), little blue bastards The Smurfs, Oliver Twist, Terrahawks, Worzel Gummidge, Smuggler, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, biographies of Elvis and The Beatles, CHiPs, Dick Turpin, Monkees-styled adventures for nutty boys Madness, Magnum PI, Monkees-styled adventures for skirt-stripping Eurostars Bucks Fizz, Dangermouse, Star Fleet, Murphy's Mob, The Fall Guy, Cannon and Ball, Monkees-styled adventures for, er, Haircut 100, Into the Labyrinth, Robin of Sherwood, Knight Rider, Street Hawk and then, ultimately, death by Australian soap which it utterly failed to capitalise upon.
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While, to its credit, it certainly drew (do you see?) on some of the best British comic strip artists, Look-In will chiefly be remembered as being wonderfully opportunist, wilfully cashing in on the sex gods of the '70s. Its history can broadly be described as Magpie-Osmonds-David Cassidy-Bionics-ABBA-Tomorrow People/Flintlock-Star Wars-Smurfs-Tiswas-Adam Ant-Madness. Only with the early 80s and its adoption of Bucks Fizz as comic strip-pin up heroes did it seem to lose its way. The early 80s also saw a revamp of the comic, when in 1981 the familiar chunky logo and cover paintings (95% of which had been provided by a certain Arnaldo Putzu) made way for a new masthead and a move towards off-the-shelf photos. The "La la la la la Look-In!" jingle changed, crushingly, to "Look out for the new-look Look-In!" A rapid succession of 'great new looks' followed, and as we all know that can only mean one thing...
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LOOK
ALIVE (1982 and no
longer....) |
NUMBER ONE (1983-91)
LIMP RIVAL to Smash Hits from the IPC stable. Issue one came with a
neat plastic interchangable pop badge. Pretty much useless otherwise.
Letters page "edited" by cartoon dog Snabber (not as good as Black
Type in ver Hits). Title was bought by the BBC in 1989. And closed by
the BBC in 1991.
POPSWOP (1972 - er, 1972)
ISSUE ONE had a free iron-on T-shirt transfer of Marc Bolan. Issue
two had a free iron-on etc of Donny Osmond. Issue three had...etc of
possibly someone like Alvin Stardust. Get the picture? Barely lasted
the year.
PUNK LIVES (1982?)
LATECOMER punk cash-in featuring interviews with the likes of Becky
Bondage of the group Vice Squad. Only around for less than six
issues.
RAGE (1989-91)
"CROWLEY 'ERE!" ...unfortunately. Rage was the wide-trousered
invention of the flame-haired sultan of indie-bollocks, set up to
capitalise on that whole acid house/Reni hat/spastic dancing 1989
vibe. Not that bad, but not that great either, limping on until 1991
for the arse-end of Madchester - The High! The Mock Turtles!,
shoegazing and erm, Oceanic. Cheers, 'Crowman.!
RECORD
MIRROR (unknown-1991)
LONG-TIME also-ran stalwart chasing the coat-tails of the Melody
Maker et al, but in late '80s became a kind of training bra NME for
disaffected Smash Hits readers. Highlights included the very
Cream-like TSP Moore column, the late dance page guru James Jammy
Hammy Hamiltons distinctive lexicon ('a real juddery jitterer from
Inner City, bpm 0-140-160-88-140-0'), Colin Morton's surreal Great
Pop Things (semi-intelligible cartoon strip obsessed with David
Bowie, Beefheart and The Fall) and loads of charts. Another victim of
the great rock press crash of '91 (see also Sounds, Rage).
SMASH HITS (1978-)
THE GENIUS brainchild of former NME editor turned style mag svengali
Nick Logan, in its pomp the 'Hits was the bible for the pop kids
marginalised by the serious fare dished up by the boring old inkies.
Smash Hits meant Pop Music with a capital Pop, craftilly fuelled by
the ploy of printing song lyrics so you could singalong with 'the
only chart that counts' - but it wasnt just teeth-rotting fare. The
magazine s policy of recruiting the sharpest of editors and writers -
from the likes of Mark Ellen and David Hepworth through Neil Tennant,
Peter Martin and Tom 'Hibs' Hibbert - meant you were just as likely
to be reading about Ian McCulloch and Pete Wylie as Tony Hadley or
Andrew Ridgeley.
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Memorable mid-'80s covers included Morrissey with a kitten inside his cardigan and Depeche Mode with Martin Gore in a PVC dress. Smash Hits was also enhanced by its own Cream-prose style vernacular - 'Dame David Bowie! Fab Macca Wackythumbsaloft! Ver Spands! The Hedge and his Shimmering Shards! Matt, Luke and Ken! The 'Yond! Corky O'Reilly! It's Kylie! Legs akimbo! (they used that a lot) Ben Volauvent -Pierrot! Frightwig! (as applied to Sigue Sigue Sputnik and Spagna)'. Black Type-helmed letters page ('win a tea towel!') was a fortnightly highlight, as correspondents mused on Martin Kemp's song-writing abilities and the antics of the Rainbow crew. Constant flow of pull-out posters featuring a pre-Abflex Madonna ('she who is sultry') in her lacy gloves phase also helped a lot. Celebrities regularly contributed to the Singles Review page: Susan 'Hill/Enders' Tully on The Jesus And Mary Chain: 'I think their name is disgusting.' Thanks, 'Chelle. Oh, and they once gave an FR David album 0 out of 10.
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SOUNDS
(1972-92) |
SPIRAL
SCRATCH (1980s)
BASICALLY a sub-Record Collector vinyl anoraks mag, shamelessly
ripping off RC's format of artist features with priced discographies
and a small ads seggy where optimistic punters would try and fetch a
couple of quid for their Bananarama shaped picture discs. It never
quite acheived the reassuring bulk of Record Collector.
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TUNE
IN (late '70s) |
TV TOPS (1981)
WOULD-BE Look-In beater. The first issue appeared on 10 October 1981
(only one month after Look-In 'went 80s' - perhaps the Look-In crew
had advance warning of this spunky new arrival) and, rather
surprisingly for Dundee Dandy'n'Beano traditionalists DC Thomson,
caught the zeitgeist of gritty, post-Grange Hill British kiddiedom.
Violence came in the shape of comic strip tales from strictly 9pm
series The Professionals and Minder, laughs from Hi-de-Hi, Metal
Mickey, The Krankies, the time-travelling adventures of Adam Ant the
Highwayman, Educating Marmalade and, believe it or else, 'Not the
Pamela Stephenson Page'. Buck Rogers also featured in strip form,
about six months after he had been dropped by Look-In.
Pop largely centred on the Ants and Duran Duran, as you would if it were 1981/82. TOPS' closure after a solid year or so is something of a mystery, truth to tell. Perhaps it was something to do with the fact that despite lots of colour you could spit peas through the paper which was as thin as, er, paper. Copies were likely to disintegrate after being passed round the hands of your gritty, post-Grange Hill classmates. Perhaps that's why so few survive today? Free with the first issue was one of those little things normally found in cereal packets whereby the image changed depending on which angle you looked at it - employing state of the art venetian-blind technology. And Sally James' (almost) legendary Pop Interviews, of course.
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Expertly removing the staples from the
free Leif Garrett poster: Derek Boland, Mike Carroll, Ben H, Geoff Johnson,
Graham Kibble-White, Graeme Payne, Chris Head, Alistair McGown, Daniel
Thornton, Carol-Anne, P3TE, Kris and Noko, Phil Drake.
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