Mojo was a pretty cool magazine when it first arrived - it had a striking and unusual design, and at that point there weren't places that were devoted almost entirely to the rock past. Apart from Record Collector and Goldmine, and those were for record collectors. They were about prices and peculiar formats and long detailed discographies. But Mojo was a place for people to read about rock etc history who liked music for music, rather than collectability. Music and all the legends and tales, the personalities, etc. The stories they told hadn't yet been completely flattened by repetition as yet. There was practically speaking no Internet for most people - no Wikipedia, no fan sites, no blogs. It was a long before the boom in rock docs and long long before the shelves of WH Smiths were full of those whole one-off magazine spin off issues devoted to one artist's entire discography, or mags like Prog Rock, or that one that is all about Eighties British pop and synth music, or any number of other entirely archival magazines you can find in a magazine store now. And even the boom in rock books had not really happened. So much of what you read in those first few years of Mojo would be completely unfamiliar and often fascinating. It was music journalism, rather than music criticism - there was no ideology, and not much flashy prose either. But on that level, it was a really good read. And it had a sense of humor and fun with the lay-out and visuals, and unusual columns and regular items etc. They did a lot of work archivally digging up cool old photographs and posters and flyers and memorabilia - stuff that is scattered all across the internet now, but at that time, this would be the first and most likely only place you'd see it.
Since those early days it's more like a backwards-looking Q with a less distinctive appearance. And everyone else has copied them and the stories have been told and retold and there's hardly any more juice to be squeezed out of the archives.
www.mojo4music.com
