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In concert, Mark did a Parliament song or two. The first two covers reflect the editor Alastair Dougal and my own liking of soul/funk, of which Mark Williams was a local exponent (although his music was filtered through the EMI pop music factory). The initial print run was a healthy 10,000 and it was easy to obtain a list of record stores from Kaikohe to Invercargill, so we were nationwide from issue one. The lack of a date is bizarre and the use of the word “rock” was probably to avoid being perceived as a “pop” publication. On this cover there is still a remnant of the magazine’s earlier working title, The Little Rock Paper in the words “ROCK PAPER”. There was not a lot of time to conceive a Rip It Up logo style, as the magazine’s name was only decided a few weeks before publication. The first Rip It Up cover was of dire quality – a very low-rent look compared to our forerunner, Hot Licks. The photo appears to be a poor-quality bromide and it is an appalling choice of photo considering my Commodores photos in the magazine’s centrespread looked excellent. Here’s a visual trip – good and bad – through memory lane. Rip It Up featured 45 local acts on its first 101 covers. However, after doing some research the answer was The Chills, whose five covers beat Split Enz’s four and a half.

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Free meant we could have non-commercial, alternative groups on the cover. If I was asked which New Zealand act was on the cover of Rip It Up the most frequently, prior to my leaving the magazine in 1998, I would have given the obvious answer, the biggest band of them all: Split Enz. With the advent of colour, more attention was given to the cover, particularly when the colour section of the magazine was sent to the printer a few days ahead of the bulk of the magazine.Īs Rip It Up was free until 1994, the quality of the cover was not as crucial as it would be if we were selling on a newsstand. Some early covers were done at the last minute, just before dawn and a precarious drive to the printer in Putaruru in South Waikato. On the deadlines for the early issues, the long hours preparing Rip It Up meant working through one or more nights.

If there was any good design in Rip It Up, it was likely to be inside the magazine, not on the cover. It is quite embarrassing to look at some of these early magazine covers featuring New Zealand musicians. There was a lot of driving around Auckland to collect stories typed on paper to deliver to typesetters, who would then retype the copy to create columns in the right typeface.

Then, we had to put those letters into the design – often having to send the words out for resizing to fit the space. To make story headings, we had to buy sheets of stick-on letters called Letraset and apply each individual letter on to a sheet of paper to make a word. Chris Bourkeįor a magazine publisher in the days before computers, the equivalent of Pagemaker and Photoshop was primitive: I call them the “Letraset Years”. Murray Cammick in the Rip It Up office, Darby St, Auckland, 1986. I also took many of the photographs we used.

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Alastair was the editor and I had the publisher role of contacting advertisers plus the design role of laying out the magazine editorial and many of the adverts.

As part-timers, putting together Rip It Upwas dysfunctional. Rip It Up was started by law student Alastair Dougal and myself while I was at Auckland Teachers Training College. Below, Rip It Up co-founder and long-serving editor and designer Murray Cammick shares the stories behind the 45 covers that featured New Zealand artists in the period being digitised: June 1977 to December 1985. This is exciting news for New Zealand's popular music history, and AudioCulture is proud to be involved. The first 101 issues of legendary music magazine Rip It Up are now on line at Papers Past, digitally scanned to ensure the photos are well reproduced, and the text word searchable.