Record Mirror was a British weekly music newspaper, published between 1954 and 1991. The paper became respected by both mainstream pop music fans and serious record collectors. It was the most progressive of the four competing music weeklies of its day, the others being Melody Maker, New Musical Express (NME) and Disc magazine.
Launched two years after the NME, Record Mirror never attained the circulation figures of its higher-profile rival, but during the 1960s and early 1970s it did achieve a respectable circulation based upon its reputation. The first ever UK album chart was published in Record Mirror in 1956, and during the 1980s it was the only consumer music paper to carry the official UK singles and UK albums charts used by the BBC for Radio 1 and Top of the Pops, as well as the equivalent US Billboard charts.
The title ceased publication in April 1991 when owners United Newspapers closed or sold off most of their consumer magazines, including their two music titles Record Mirror and Sounds, in order to concentrate on their newspaper business. In 2010 Giovanni di Stefano bought the rights to the name Record Mirror and relaunched it as an online music gossip website in 2011, bearing little relation to its previous incarnation.
Famous quotes containing the words record and/or mirror:
“No record ... can ... name the women of talent who were so submerged by child- bearing and its duties, and by “general housework,” that they had to leave their poems and stories all unwritten.”
—Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)
“The barriers of conventionality have been raised so high, and so strangely cemented by long existence, that the only hope of overthrowing them exists in the union of numbers linked together by common opinion and effort ... the united watchword of thousands would strike at the foundation of the false system and annihilate it.”
—Mme. Ellen Louise Demorest 1824–1898, U.S. women’s magazine editor and woman’s club movement pioneer. Demorest’s Illustrated Monthly and Mirror of Fashions, p. 203 (January 1870)