Record Mirror for the articles.

Didn't "graduate" to MM and the NME until I was 14 and fixated with this new band called The Smiths and their quotable bequiffed front man.

A lot of his Sounds Columns are included in The Olivetti Chronicles... including the legendary 'Dear Shit' letter from an irate ELP fan.

Personally I went from MM to Sounds to NME. I gave up on Sounds when they let Bushell loose with his Oi! manifesto. I often went back to MM though because (as is often said about The Word) there was just so much to read.

...I never bought Sounds or Record Mirror, don't know why, the covers never appealed to me and it seemed like the heavy metal bands dominated them. NME for a long time (late 70's to mid 90's), I had a brief flirt with Musicians Only when I thought I was a musician then it was The Face (when it was worth reading).

Q from the start until early noughties and any magazine with a free cassette or CD (ie Vox, Select, Mojo, occasional lads mags like FHM) in the 90's then Uncut from the start and the Word from about issue 4.

I miss the weekly inkies, Thursday on the way to college (45 minute bus journey) was always a highlight as was every break and the journey home, especially if it was a Costello or Morissey NME cover. One of the things that amazes me now is how I hung on the words of any musician and believed they spoke only absolute truths and every utterance and opinion was sacred and right. This really didn't stop totally until I read an interview with Tim Wheeler of Ash sometime in the mid 90's when he solemnly declared that he never read books, couldn't see the point of them, and no-one had ever learned anything from them. It was a revelation to stop, blink, and think "what a dick".

for the punk time, Sounds for the NWOBHM...but never MM.That was for the proggers who slept with their guitars and told us we weren't listening to "real music"

Roughly:

1975 Record Mirror
1976 Sounds
1977 - 1988 NME
1998 - 1997 Q
1997 - 2004 Mojo
2004 - present Word (of course)

Melody Maker from circa 1988-1996 was unbeatable: Chris Roberts, Simon Reynolds, Stud Brothers, Paul Lester, Taylor Parkes, Simon Price, Jim Arundel, David Stubbs, Caitlin Moran, Andrew Mueller... An incredible array of writers, to which NME couldn't hold a candle. Then Allan Jones left to start Uncut and utterly talentless Mark Sutherland took the editor's seat.

Nowadays, I subscribe to Word, Q and Uncut, and buy NME whenever I feel like it. Uncut has become so stale, that I only buy it if I have bought everything else that month.

For the C86 era and Collins and Maconie's dependably funny Thrills section. The spoof article on Nelson Mandela slamming the line up for his 70th birthday bash was picked up as a genuine story and appeared in several international papers, (I think SM tells the full story in Cider With Roadies).

From 1979 to 1995 or so.

In the early 80s the excitement I felt on picking up the latest edition every Thursday was pretty extreme. I then moved to London and could get it a day earlier. Oh joy !

No other rock periodical (sorry Word) has had me in such thrall since. I would read every word, even about bands I had no interest in and I kept every copy (for a while).

Did you get the wonderful Zigzag magazine in New Zealand? Probably not, it was difficult enough getting it in Somerset in the early-mid '70s.

Anyway it was enthusiastic, amateur-ish in the best possible way, featuring the likes of Pete Frame, John Tobler, Andy Childs, the famous Mac Garry etc.

It championed a certain sort of music, very niche market stuff & probably only survived as long as it did because of the genuine passion of the writers, who could write God knows how many pages over many issues about the Byrds, for example.

Still have the issues from '72 to '78, when it was hijacked by Kris Needs, went all punk & I gave up. Still look at them from time to time, especially on miserable Sunday afternoons when it's nice to think back to a time when so much great music was coming out.

Around 1980, then graduated to MM in 1981/2. Moved to NME probably 84/85. Q from mid 80s, til it got too hip (shit?!), then Uncut, Mojo (currently a subscriber) and The Word.

I do miss the heyday of the weekly inkies. It all seemed to matter more then in a way that it doesn't now - hence the disappearance of most of them.

Sounds always had more humour than NME or MM. From the cartoons - Savage Pencil and Curt Vile - to the lost genius of Jane Suck, to the legions of tiny adverts for hard-to-get singles at the back, it was always a good read.

Sounds for NWOBHM obviously and Record Mirror because it listed the "Official" charts and I was stats geek back then.

Currently I subscribe to Q (have bought it since 1986 Macca issue 1), Mojo and Word. Each one offers a different perspective and the FPO even reads Q occasionally as well.

Left Uncut over a year ago and haven't missed it at all.

I think Charlie Gillett was the editor, and there were a couple of annual "best of" compilations. It had the right tone to cover the range of music that was emerging then - it took the music seriously, but was written with a sense of humour. I read the NME and Melody Maker, but Let it Rock lacked the pretensions that they both had at times (although I think it may have had some of the same writers).

Kerrang was the one for me from 1980 to about 1984 when I left school. It became unreadable later on when NWOBHM meandered off into hair rock, thrash and black metal etc. But along with Sounds it was the staple reading material on the school bus for long haired, snot nosed, mainly working class, adolescents who thought the sun shone out Ritchie Blackmore's arse.

A lot of the old hacks who worked on it are now in "Classic Rock" and its little brother "Classic Prog", ideal for those of us who like our music turned up to eleven, wearing bell bottoms and dripping in Jack Daniels.

Maybe 82-86 - I was never into metal (which was their USP), nor Oi! (purely a vehicle for Mr Bushell). But it did cover interesting other music without pretension. Also, lots of humour.

But the best thing was David Henderson's Wild Planet feature, which introduced me to the delights of Nurse With Wound, Throbbing Gristle, Chris & Cosey, Test Dept, SPK, and all those other easy listening orchestras!

I stuck with it the longest, certainly, but I went through phases of buying one of the other inkies, too - for example if Sounds or MM covered over several pages a band I was interested in - "Blockheads UK tour - first report back from Dundee & Aberdeen" then I'd buy it that week. And if the paper had improved since I'd last read it, I'd stick with it until money was tighter or I got fed up with it again.

I stopped buying the NME regularly around 86. Some great writers - Charles Shaar Murray, Danny Baker.

Or sometimes Tuesday, if you were in London. I would often buy all three, but the must-have was NME because it seemed to have a broader remit than just music.

For example, I think it was Andrew Collins that managed to get Vic Reeves on the cover just before Big Night Out was first shown on Channel 4. After reading about the show in the NME, I knew I was going to love it.

Melody Maker annoyed me a bit because MM writers would refer to each other in articles and gossip columns, as if to collectively raise the profile of MM people. It seemed like they were trying to create the same aura that the NME stable of writers enjoyed. But you can't force something like that, it occurs organically with the right people.

1975-7 whizzer and chips
1978-1980 smash hits
1980 - 1984 NME (the political years, much of it I had no idea what they were going about as a 13 year old, might as well have bought the Morning Star but their singles review wouldnt have been as good).
1982 - 1984 In The City
1984 - 1985 ID
1985 - 1992 Arena
1985 - 1992 The Face
1989 - 1993 Blues and Soul
1992 - 2006 Q
2006 - present The Word

Used to love the NME though, great for long bus rides and poring over at college lunchtimes. Read sounds, RM and MM sometimes depending on cover story etc.

I loved it.

I remember the first one I bought had a brilliant review of a Hawkwind album by Carol Clerk (now sadly passed on) and I was sold on it.

There was always plenty of XTC as I seem to recall, which was good enough for me.

Did MM, Sounds and NME all operate from Kings Reach Tower? Because I've just realised I work in the building opposite it.

1970's - kept six boxes of back issues in my student cellar. Left them there when I moved back home. When I realised they could be worth something I went back ages later and they were still there! Sold most but still have one box - including THE Bowie interview that turned me on to his music. Once judged in a heat of the MM Rock/Folk Contest and had a letter printed in it.

I still have every issue of SFX (19?), the 1980's magazine on a cassette tape. Must copy them onto CD one day, especilly the muso interviews with Madness, XTC, Lou Reed & Ossie Ardilles. Wha?

My dad worked for IPC in the Seventies and would bring it home each week. But I never fully got into it because it didn't have the right charts in it. So I moved onto Record Mirror and stayed there til I was 22. Same with Smash Hits. Never got into the NME, I'm sad to say.

from 1978 to about 1981/2 when I graduated to Irish Rock bible Hot Press (which I suspect was a mix of all the UK inkies) and had Fr Ted's Graham Linehan on reviews and Arthur Matthews contributing cartoons. I ocassionaly picked up NME when I had spare cash but was by no means a regular.

After I stopped getting HP regularly in the mid-80s I drifted.

I felt homeless; Q was for the CD generation/audiophile yuppies (I was still a cassette kid), Mojo was for nostalgia freaks. I sort of liked Select and Vox but they didn't last.

So when Word came along it chimed with me and it was kind of back to beginning again with Messers Hepworth & Ellen. I loved the way it turned me on to new music (eg British Sea Power) and if I have a gripe its that I feel I notice a creeping Mojoish drift into Nostalgia. Maybe that's just me - still its a great mag and the recent revamp has freshened it up for me and addressed many of my concerns (ie more books, films, more to read)

Back in late '75/early '76 I would go into WH Smiths on the Promenade in Cheltenham every Wednesday morning on the way to work and buy Sounds and NME. Back then both publications cost a bit less than 50p for the two of them. So I'd tuck the copy of Sounds inside the NME and give the check out girl a 50p piece, nonchalantly looking away as she gave me my change. My thinking was that if I was accused of stealing I could claim that I gave the girl enough for both papers - it was her fault for giving me too much change.

I got away with it for years. Sorry WH Smiths.

No contest. Melody Maker later on, as well as NME (but NME is now a pale and uninteresting shadow of its former self).

Q used to be good (went downhill a while ago). Mojo sometimes hits the mark. Classic Rock (and it's prog offspring) is excellent. The Word is also excellent and has more in-depth pieces to savour (I like the new format with even more reading). AND it has the best blog!

...but only for the band ads/musicians wanted page at the back. I'd arrived in Britpop London and was convinced I get could get a successful beat combo together.(this didn't quite pan out)

The only other good thing in it was a column called Mr Angry - a hilariously obscene vitriolic attack on bands of the day ("CHRIST ON A F**KING BIKE!!!ALL ROCK STARS ARE F**KING TOSSERS!!!" etc )

I don't remember liking much else about the paper - it had some ridicuously pretentious hacks writing for it, and I stopped buying it when that fat clown Simon Price tried to big up a ludicrous New Romantic revival called Romo (anyone else remember this travesty?)I think MM folded shortly after, joining the NME but pretty much dying in the process.