Rock magazines and punk: from ZigZag and Trouser Press to Mojo

Rock magazines covered punk later than the weekly papers and the fanzines, but they decided how it would be remembered. In the 1970s most glossy monthlies treated the new bands with suspicion. A few, notably ZigZag in Britain after Kris Needs became editor in 1977 and Trouser Press in New York, became genuine supporters. From the late 1980s a new generation of monthlies, above all Q (1986 to 2020) and Mojo (first issue October 1993), retold the story with long features, lists and anniversary issues, and turned punk and new wave into part of the rock canon. This page looks at both phases and explains how to use these magazines as sources. We describe them in our own words and reproduce no pages or covers.

Weekly papers, fanzines and monthlies

To understand the monthlies, it helps to see where they sat. The British weekly papers, described on our page about the music press of the 1970s, reacted within days. Fanzines appeared within hours of a gig. A monthly magazine planned its issues weeks or months ahead and needed advertising from record companies. That made monthlies slower and more cautious, but it also gave them room for long interviews and proper photography, which is why their features from the period are still quoted.

The 1970s: who took punk seriously

1. ZigZag (UK, 1969 to 1986). Started as a magazine about American West Coast rock and known for Pete Frame’s hand-drawn family trees of band line-ups. When Kris Needs took over as editor in 1977, ZigZag concentrated on punk and the bands that followed, and stayed with them until he left at the end of 1981. It is one of the few monthlies that changed course completely.
2. Trouser Press (USA, 1974 to 1984). Founded in New York by Ira Robbins and friends as a magazine about British rock, it was ideally placed when British punk and new wave arrived. It explained the London bands to American readers and covered the CBGB groups alongside them.
3. Creem (USA, 1969 to 1989). The Detroit monthly had championed the Stooges and the New York Dolls and moved naturally to punk. We describe it in detail on the music press page.
4. Rock Scene (USA). Edited by Lisa and Richard Robinson, a photo-heavy magazine that treated the downtown New York bands as stars before they had hits and gave Blondie, the Ramones and others some of their first glossy pages.
5. Rolling Stone (USA, since 1967). The most powerful American music magazine was slow to take the punk bands seriously, but by 1979 it was putting new wave acts on its cover. That shift tracks the moment new wave became commercial, as our page on new wave explains.
6. Interview (USA, since 1969). Andy Warhol’s magazine was about celebrity rather than music, but its New York setting meant that musicians from the downtown scene appeared in it as part of the city’s art and fashion world.
7. Beat Instrumental (UK). A magazine for working musicians, more interested in equipment and recording than in image. Its interviews with punk and new wave musicians tell you how the records were made, which is information the fan press rarely bothered with.
8. Oor (Netherlands). The leading Dutch music magazine covered British and American punk for continental readers and published long interviews with bands touring Europe.

Why so many punk-era articles were about Blondie

Look through the monthly magazines of 1978 to 1981 and one band appears far more often than its punk-scene peers: Blondie. The reason is simple. Blondie had chart hits, a singer who photographed well and a story that ran from CBGB to number one. For glossy magazines that needed covers that sold, the band was the ideal bridge between the downtown scene and mainstream readers. Our profile of Blondie tells the story from published sources.

The retrospective era: Q, Mojo and the canon

From the late 1980s, a new type of monthly looked back rather than forward.

1. Q (UK, 1986 to 2020). Founded by Mark Ellen and David Hepworth, presenters of the BBC’s Old Grey Whistle Test, as a glossy magazine for adults who bought CDs. Its lists of the greatest albums and its anniversary pieces regularly placed punk records in the canon. The final print issue appeared in July 2020.
2. Mojo (UK, since 1993). Launched by Emap with founding editor Paul Du Noyer. Mojo’s long features, oral histories and themed special editions made it the main place where the history of punk and new wave was retold for older readers. Many of the interviews that later books rely on first appeared there.
3. Uncut (UK, since 1997) and Record Collector (UK) took similar approaches, the latter with a strong focus on records, pressings and discographies.
4. Spin (USA, founded 1985) brought a younger tone and its own lists and retrospectives to American readers.
5. In Germany, Musikexpress, the German edition of Rolling Stone (since 1994) and Spex looked back on punk and the Neue Deutsche Welle in features and anniversary issues.

General interest magazines, such as Vanity Fair, also ran occasional long pieces on musicians from the period, usually tied to a book, a film or an anniversary.

How to use magazines as sources

Retrospective articles are often better written than the original reports, but they rely on memory, and memories shift. A musician interviewed in 2005 about 1977 may compress events, swap dates or repeat a story that has been told so often it feels true. When we write about the period, we use three rules:

1. Date facts from the time. Release dates, chart positions and gig dates come from contemporary sources, discographies and chart records rather than from anniversary features.
2. Use retrospectives for context. Interviews looking back are good for motives, working methods and the atmosphere of a scene.
3. Note disagreements. Where sources differ, we say so, and we list open questions in our fact checklist rather than picking the more exciting version.

Original back issues are collected for their interviews and photographs, and collectors often look for magazines alongside records from the same year. If that is your interest, our guide to collecting punk records covers condition grading, which applies in a similar way to paper.