RECORD MIRROR MAGAZINE

After many decades bemoaning the throwing out of my original Record Mirror collection many a long year ago, I have finally been able to buy back copies of part of my original collection. It was a slow proccess, watching ebay and any other place I thought I may be able to find some old issues from 1973 and 1974. They just do not seem to show up in charity shops or anywhere these days.

I seemed to remember my oldest issue had Jimmy Osmond on the front. It turns out this was from February 1973.

I used to get this paper more or less weekly and can recall a listing of wavelengths for Alternative Radio stations, ie Seagull, RNI, etc appearing one week.

I was listening to RNI by this time I recon. I haven't found this issue with the wavelength listings as yet. I initially thought it could be from 23rd June 1973, which is missing from this collection. But a good sport of an ebayer looked up his own copy from that date in June and even back to May 1973, and there are no Alternative Radio pages featured until 30th June 1973!! Into the bargain, I know it featured in the issue dated 30th June, but my pdf had the page missing until May 21st 2017!!! April 1974 also had dates on the files as 1973!! Any further errors, please report them to us.

Record Mirror became RECORD AND RADIO MIRROR on 29th September 1973. It also merged with both POPSWOP and later DISC.

 

SCAN FORMAT

Of course it would be a benefitial archive to many if I scanned the complete magazine for each week. This however would be very very time consuming, but any articles required by anyone, I am sure can be scanned, so long as there is not a flood of requests. Maybe some day I have nothing to do, I can begin to scan the rest of the papers.

(Update - First request made in March 2017, so the first complete issues are now on line. Record Mirror July 7th and 14th 1973 full paper.)

So for the moment, the format of the pdf files given include 300dpi scans of front covers, chart listings (always an important part of Record Mirror), the "Alternative Radio" feature, and later two page Tune In / Waves articles, the small ads page, which often contained Free Radio ads, the letters page if carrying radio relaterd letters, and occasional pages with ads that caught my attention during scanning eg for maybe Radio Luxembourg, or Capital Radio, or even Soundhog tapes. Was it PL Tapes that used to use Soundhog Tapes??

There was a Scotch cassette tape competition in April 1974 which as a 10 year old I entered, and received a free tape!!!! I wish I had kept a copy of the crap entry!!!!

 

DISC AND MUSIC ECHO

I am also in the middle of scanning a large collection of these magazines, loaned by "Roger" in March 2017. Many thanks for the input. Same format will apply unfortunately, which I shall kick myself for in future years I'm sure. But they will have to be returned with only radio sections and covers etc scanned.

 

OTHER TABLOID SIZE PAPERS

Also available off the shelf in John Menzies etc many years ago were other tabloid / newspaper size music papers. We can think of Record Mirror, Disc, New Musical Express (NME), Sounds, and Melody Maker. Any that we discover that carried radio related articles will be scanned in the same format... Though at present only Disc and Music Echo and the odd NME seem to be available.

 

UPDATE - May 2017: Good weather in Scotland has meant much work outside being done for now. Scanning can be done in the dark, or in the rain!! But as can be seen, a load of other mags are waiting to be scanned, and the collection from mid 1973 is now complete bar for two issues. There are also a number of holes in the 1974 collection recently filled.

UPDATE 21st MAY 2017 - Major update done on the Record Mirrors in our own archives here at the dx archive. Only a few from 1974 are now required to complete the set of Record and Radio Mirrors.

UPDATE - JUNE 2017 - A couple of Record Mirrors from 1977 are uploaded with MOA articles, and a RECORD MIRROR link in the pop up menu under press now inserted.

I also have a series of Melody Makers to scan as well as the Disc and Music Echo collection. So no scarecity of work to be done. Please be patient.