About Sounds

Sounds

Sounds was a British weekly music newspaper published in London by Spotlight Publications from 10 October 1970 to 6 April 1991. Launched by former Melody Maker staff under first editor Jack Hutton to rival Melody Maker and the New Musical Express, it became one of the three great British music weeklies, alongside those two titles, for two decades. It championed punk and post-punk, gave sustained coverage to the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, and was produced by a company whose heavy-metal supplement grew into Kerrang!, one of the most successful British music magazines of the following generation.

Sounds never consistently enjoyed the fashionable status of the NME, and its own historians acknowledge that. What it had instead was loyalty, speed and range. It was the first of the music papers in its coverage of punk, it built a network of regional freelancers who reported local scenes the London titles missed, its centre posters became a signature, and between 1979 and 1985 it outsold Melody Maker. Its circulation, about 164,000 in 1973, peaked at around 170,000 in 1981 before falling away in its final years. United Newspapers closed it in April 1991, alongside Record Mirror, after selling its music titles to EMAP Metro.

A breakaway launch in 1970

Spotlight Publications was set up by Jack Hutton and Peter Wilkinson, who left Melody Maker to start their own company. Sounds, first published on 10 October 1970, was the company's first project: a weekly paper aimed initially at the progressive rock market, described by Hutton in his recruiting of former colleagues as a left-wing Melody Maker. The launch was audacious in scale. Accounts of the paper's circulation history record an initial print run of 200,000, a direct challenge to the established weeklies from a standing start.

Hutton, himself previously editor of Melody Maker, persuaded a number of noted writers to join the new paper, among them Penny Valentine from Disc and Music Echo, and Steve Peacock and Jerry Gilbert from Melody Maker. That recruitment mattered. The British music press ran on bylines; readers followed writers between titles, and a breakaway paper staffed by familiar names arrived with borrowed credibility. Sounds was catalogued under ISSN 0144-5774 and published from London throughout its life, as part of the Morgan-Grampian group through its parent Spotlight Publications.

Posters, progressives and the early 1970s

Sounds was known for giving away posters in the centre of the paper, initially in black and white and then in colour from late 1971. The centre poster was a simple device with lasting effects. It turned a disposable newspaper into bedroom-wall decoration, kept the title visible all week, and gave young readers a reason to choose Sounds over a rival covering the same concerts and releases. In the pre-internet music economy, where the weeklies were the main source of news, reviews and images, such physical signatures built habitual loyalty.

The paper's early focus was progressive rock, the dominant serious rock form of the moment, and its sales rose quickly. Trade figures reconstructed from the paper's own reports show weekly sales climbing through early 1972, and Sounds reported an audited circulation of about 164,000 in the first half of 1973. John Peel, the broadcaster, contributed a regular piece to Sounds from July 1973 into the early 1980s and for a period wrote its singles review page, a sign of the paper's standing in the period. Through 1974 and 1975, however, sales fell as sharply as they had risen, as an increasingly confident NME and Melody Maker regained ground.

Alan Lewis and the punk turn

The revival of Sounds is associated with editor Alan Lewis, who took over in the mid-1970s and adopted a more irreverent approach, coupled with comprehensive news and reviews coverage. Lewis saw the potential of punk as early as any editor in the business, and Sounds is credited as the first music paper in its coverage of the new music. Circulation stabilised and then surged from 1978, reaching an all-time high of around 170,000 in 1981, and the paper outsold Melody Maker from 1979 to 1985.

The punk commitment was editorial as much as musical. A paper that had lost ground writing about established progressive acts repositioned itself around energy, argument and discovery. Its regional structure helped: Sounds used freelancers across the United Kingdom to contribute gig reviews and articles about up-and-coming local bands, so its punk and post-punk coverage was national rather than purely metropolitan. Mick Middles, for example, reported on the Manchester scene for Sounds from 1978 to 1982, writing about bands including Buzzcocks, Slaughter and the Dogs, The Fall and Joy Division as those acts emerged. The paper is also credited with coining the term new musick for the music that later became generally known as post-punk.

Heavy metal and the birth of Kerrang!

Sounds' other great specialisation was heavy metal, above all the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, the movement of young British metal bands that emerged at the end of the 1970s. Where other weeklies treated metal with condescension or neglect, Sounds covered it seriously and consistently, earning the loyalty of a readership that bought the paper every week. It also covered Oi! music in its late-1970s and early-1980s heyday, extending the same seriousness to a working-class punk offshoot that other papers largely avoided or sensationalised.

The most durable consequence of the metal coverage was Kerrang!. The magazine began as a supplement within Sounds, devoted to heavy metal and hard rock, before being spun off as a separate publication. Kerrang! outlived its parent by decades and became an international brand, but its origin lay in Sounds' recognition that metal fans constituted a large, underserved and loyal market. Few British music papers can claim to have incubated a successor of that scale, and the supplement-to-magazine path remains the clearest measure of how well Sounds understood its audience.

The 1980s: Britpop's name and Nirvana's first interview

Sounds retained an ear for new scenes through the 1980s. John Robb joined the paper in 1987, covered the Manchester music scene, and coined the term Britpop in his coverage of bands such as Oasis and Blur, years before the label became the defining marketing term of mid-1990s British guitar music. Robb also carried out the first interview with the Seattle band Nirvana, and Keith Cameron wrote about the band for the paper, placing Sounds at the opening of the grunge story as it had been at the opening of punk.

Those episodes demonstrate the paper's continuing method: regional and freelance reporting, early commitment to unproven acts, and writers encouraged to name what they were hearing. The same method had limits in a changing market. Through the later 1980s the paper is generally judged to have lost its way, as glossy monthlies, style magazines and a fragmenting music scene eroded the weeklies' central role. Weekly sales fell steeply from the 1981 peak, reaching around 40,000 by the time of closure, according to reconstructions of the paper's circulation history.

Ownership changes and closure in 1991

Spotlight Publications was part of the Morgan-Grampian group. In 1987 Morgan-Grampian was acquired by United News and Media, later United Newspapers, and Sounds passed into that larger portfolio. The end came in 1991, when United Newspapers sold its music titles to EMAP Metro and Sounds ceased publication. Its final issue was dated 6 April 1991, and Record Mirror, its stablemate, closed at the same time. A weekly that had survived twenty years, three musical revolutions and repeated changes of fashion ended as a line in a corporate disposal.

The closure was not a judgement that Britain no longer wanted music journalism. Kerrang!, the paper's own offspring, continued. The NME and Melody Maker continued. What ended was the economics of the third weekly: a mass-circulation music newspaper needed the advertising and the youth audience concentration of an earlier media era, and by 1991 both were dispersing to glossies, television and the first stirrings of a new media landscape. Sounds' two-decade run had spanned almost exactly the classic age of the British music weekly, from progressive rock to the eve of Britpop, a term its own writer had coined.

Circulation history in outline

The verifiable spine of Sounds' commercial history runs as follows. Launched in October 1970 with an ambitious print run reported at 200,000, it reached an audited circulation of about 164,000 in 1973. Sales fell through the middle of the decade, recovered under Alan Lewis from the later 1970s, and peaked at around 170,000 in 1981. Between 1979 and 1985 it outsold Melody Maker, one of the two rivals it had been founded to challenge. By closure in 1991, weekly sales had fallen to roughly 40,000. That arc, rise, fall, second rise and long decline, mirrors the paper's editorial history with unusual fidelity.

Circulation alone understates the paper's reach. Music weeklies were shared, passed around schools, colleges and workplaces, and kept for their posters and reviews. A sale in the tens of thousands represented a readership several times larger, concentrated in exactly the young, music-buying demographic that record companies and concert promoters most wanted to reach. That concentration was the commercial foundation on which Sounds' editorial risk-taking, its punk coverage, its metal specialisation and its regional reporting all rested.

Legacy

Sounds is preserved in national collections, including the Science Museum Group's collection, which records its history, its founding by former Melody Maker employees and its place as one of the first music papers to cover punk. Anthologies of British music writing treat it as one of the core titles of the weekly press's golden age, alongside the NME, Melody Maker, Record Mirror and the specialist and Black music titles of the period.

Its concrete legacies are unusually easy to list: early and serious coverage of punk and post-punk, the naming of post-punk in its new musick formulation, the naming of Britpop, the first interview with Nirvana, sustained advocacy for the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, and the creation of Kerrang! as a supplement that became a magazine in its own right. For WorldNM, Sounds stands as one of the essential British music magazines of the twentieth century, a London weekly whose history from 10 October 1970 to 6 April 1991 maps the history of British popular music in the same years.