Melody Maker, New Musical Express, Disc and Music Echo, Sounds, and Street Life

We don’t have many music newspapers in our collection so were delighted when our good friend Terry popped in with several large boxes. These contained mainly Disc and Music Echo, and New Musical Express (NME) but some other titles too.

Our Disc and Music Echo newspapers extend from 1968 to 1972, and we have 99 copies now. Disc had absorbed Music Echo in 1966, with ‘Disc’ being much more prominent on the masthead. This paper is unusual for its time in having full colour on the covers. I was also surprised by the edginess of some of the comment and letters pages, but I guess with an increasing teenage consumer market from the 1960s on, popular music newspapers needed to demonstrate some kind of irreverence. Disc and Music Echo was in turn absorbed in 1975 by Record Mirror.

We already had some copies of NME from 2008–10, but now have an additional 88 copies from 1968–78. This latter period covers the arrival of punk and I can remember friends at school coming in with their copies at that time. NME first appeared in 1952 as a weekly pop music newspaper, initially popular as it latched onto new rock ‘n’ roll music, but ultimately it declined  and ceased its print edition in 2018, moving wholly online and now available every other month.

Thanks to Terry we now have twelve copies of Melody Maker from 1970–72, and a single copy of Sounds from 1971. Sounds was another title I can remember from schooldays, particularly the centre-fold ‘Rock family trees’ by Pete Frame. Funnily enough, I don’t remember anyone at school buying Melody Maker. This latter title started in the 1920s and, in terminal decline in the 1990s, vanished in 2000. Sounds had picked up early on punk, but the title had the shortest run of them all, lasting from 1970 to 1991.

The adverts are wonderful too. There are lots of adverts for singles and LPs, and the classified section in Disc (and the others) was a forum for penfriends and musicians wanted, fan clubs and the sale of tapes and pirate copies. The ‘Bargain Basement’ in Disc is a joy, a kaleidoscope of obscure sales from drum kits to G-string underwear. I also enjoyed the adverts around 1972 for loon pants, reproduced here. 

Most interesting of all though are the copies of Street Life. We have twelve copies of this fortnightly music magazine, which only ran for seventeen issues between 1975 and 1976. With its newspaper format, it was printed on better quality newsprint with colour covers. It distinguished itself by its longer articles, and reviews of records, concerts, TV and so on. Not sure why it disappeared after only seventeen issues, but maybe there just wasn’t the room for another music newspaper.