In a quiet moment before #75 drops

In a quiet moment before the finished copies of #75 arrive (later in the day, since you ask) I want to reflect a bit on the latest issue, and perhaps make a request. This issue will be the third new BoB in eight months. I should repeat that, as it’s pretty much unheard of in recent years. I suspect you’d need to go back to 1998 to find such fecundity, and if you look at the previous three (#70 to #72) they took 27 months. Ok there were some other external impingements and there has been a certain sea change in the ocean in which we swim. But that said it is a considerable improvement and I start to be quite pleased.

Except in a way I’m not. With all my bias admitted I think this is an incredibly good issue but hovering over it is a phantom issue with a chain of pages and stories drifting behind it. As we have to balance the number of pages we can have to the cost of post, which once you get to the continent and further becomes a serious matter (the printers used heavier stock for #74 without asking us and that put a significant excess on our overseas mail, especially as the issue did so well). So there’s been a lot of holding over, and as we all know holding over often means in reality dropping.

We do want to avoid that. We have some fantastic records here that should have been in, as we also have some fantastic records that we know are going to be current in the autumn. We have a fantastic piece in the pipeline on Mr Terry Edwards, and as our photographer of choice is making a brief visit back to these islands we anticipate some fine and exclusive shots of him. Plus we have a number of other old favourites who we’re in conversation with even now. So it’s hopeful that we can catch up a bit. Thus aiming bravely to have another magazine by early October. Though this does also depend on the kind people who took out three-issue subscriptions last autumn when the ‘BoB 400’ was mooted actually re-subscribing.

And it depends on advertising. In some ways we’d love to be self-sufficient so we could have 100% editorial content, though that’s not really desirable as we do see ourselves as something of an information exchange. However we do want to be exchanging the right sort of information, and I’ll freely admit that at times in the last years we’ve had to take ads that we’d prefer not to have run. What’s good is we do have in Alive, in Zip, in Easy Action, and a few others consistent supporters, but we’d also like to spread into the smaller ads. We do offer an 1/8 of a page for a very cheap rate and we’d quite like to run two pages with 16 different bands or shops or websites advertising themselves. So think about it kids and do drop us a line.

And the request: it’s to record labels and bands. Please don’t put out any new records between now and September, give us a chance to catch up.