The music press of the 1970s: Creem, the British weeklies and the punk years

The music press of the 1970s was where most people first read about punk, long before they heard it. In the United States the key title was Creem, a monthly founded in Detroit in March 1969 by record shop owner Barry Kramer with Tony Reay as founding editor. In Britain four weekly papers, NME, Melody Maker, Sounds and Record Mirror, fought for the same young readers every Thursday. That competition made them quick to spot punk in 1976 and quick to argue about it. This page explains how these publications worked, who wrote for them and what they did for punk and new wave. We describe them in our own words and reproduce neither pages nor covers.

Creem: Detroit’s rock magazine

Creem grew out of Detroit’s rock scene and kept its noise. Barry Kramer ran a record store and head shop, and Reay named the magazine after the band Cream. The early issues were close to an underground paper; by the early seventies Creem was a glossy national monthly that billed itself as America’s only rock ‘n’ roll magazine. Its mascot, a cartoon milk bottle called Boy Howdy, came from the underground cartoonist Robert Crumb.

What made Creem matter was its tone. Lester Bangs, editor from 1971 to 1976, wrote long, funny, furious essays in which the writer’s own life was part of the review. Dave Marsh joined at nineteen. The magazine took the Stooges, MC5 and the New York Dolls seriously when most of the established press did not, and the phrase punk rock appears in its pages years before 1976, in reviews of sixties garage bands. Whether Creem actually coined the term is often claimed and hard to prove, so we leave it at that.

By the time the Ramones and Television were playing CBGB, Creem had become the natural American home for writing about them. It also gave the readers a format they would copy: irreverent captions, insider jokes and photo pages that treated rock stars as both heroes and figures of fun. Creem ran until 1989. The brand was revived as a magazine in 2022.

Rolling Stone and the establishment

Rolling Stone, founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and Ralph J. Gleason, was the opposite pole. By the mid seventies it covered politics, film and the biggest rock acts, and it was slow to take the New York scene seriously. That gap is part of why Creem, the Village Voice and the new local papers became so important for punk in America.

New York’s own papers

New York had a press that grew up with the scene. New York Rocker, launched in 1976 by Alan Betrock, covered the CBGB and Max’s Kansas City bands from the inside and printed long features on groups that had not yet released a record. Rock Scene, edited by Lisa and Richard Robinson, filled its pages with snapshots from backstage and turned the downtown bands into celebrities before they had hits. The Village Voice gave room to critics such as Robert Christgau, whose annual Pazz & Jop poll became a barometer of critical taste. Our page on New York punk explains the scene these papers documented. The fanzine Punk, started in January 1976, belongs to a different category and is covered under punk fanzines.

The British weeklies

Britain had an unusually strong weekly music press. Each paper had a different personality:

1. New Musical Express (NME), founded in 1952, had the largest circulation and in the early seventies a group of writers, among them Nick Kent and Charles Shaar Murray, who wrote about rock like Creem did. In 1976 the paper advertised for young writers and hired Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons, who became punk’s most visible critics. Paul Morley and Ian Penman later pushed the paper towards theory.
2. Melody Maker, founded in 1926, was older and more musician-oriented, with roots in jazz. Its writer Caroline Coon covered the London punk bands early in 1976 and helped define the scene for readers outside it.
3. Sounds, launched in 1970, was the paper most open to punk in its first year. Jonh Ingham, Giovanni Dadomo, Vivien Goldman and Jon Savage wrote some of the first serious pieces. Later Garry Bushell championed the street punk of Oi!. Sounds closed in 1991.
4. Record Mirror, the most chart-oriented of the four, gave more space to singles and pop. It became important for new wave and the electronic acts of the early eighties, and its reviews reached a younger, less committed audience than NME.

Because the papers came out every week, a band could go from a first review to a front cover within a few months. The timeline of London in 1976 shows how quickly the coverage built from the Sex Pistols’ first gigs to the 100 Club festival in September.

The German view

In West Germany, the magazine Sounds, published since 1966 and originally strong on jazz, was the place where serious writing about punk and new wave appeared. Writers such as Alfred Hilsberg and Diedrich Diederichsen covered the British bands and the new German groups. In January 1983 Sounds was merged into Musikexpress. Several of its writers moved to Spex, founded in Cologne in September 1980 by a group around Gerald Hündgen and Clara Drechsler and named after the band X-Ray Spex. Spex became the most influential German voice on pop culture until it closed in 2018.

Why this press still matters

These papers were not neutral observers. They chose which bands to put on the cover, decided which words stuck and argued about what punk meant while it was happening. Many of the terms used on this site, including new wave, were popularised in their pages. Original copies are now collected for the interviews and photographs they contain, and many issues from the period survive in libraries and private archives. For the glossy monthly magazines that came later and retold the story, see our page on rock magazines.