I was going through old boxes of junk and came across a magazine from 1973. It was one of those papery pages of song lyrics called Words ‘A Record Songbook’ with photos.
To think that somehow I’ve kept this for 53 years is astonishing and certainly not deliberate. They were quite the thing around this time and there were several of them. The odd thing is along with the lyrics, there were also little features on groups and in this copy, one such group was Procol Harem. This when the rest of the magazine was about David Cassidy and Gene Pitney.
So it feels like an odd juxtaposition between the rock and pop worlds and a reminder that the two co-existed and is probably the reason inappropriate bands released singles that hadn't a hope of being successful and perhaps an illustration of the lack of genre cliques at the time.
It’s interesting to note how even handed they were about all music. There was little sense that one thing might be for one audience and not another.
Same thing applied to other mags like Popswap where drooling pieces about the Osmonds were alongside a report about Mott the Hoople on tour, Alice Cooper beside the Rubettes.
We forget now that the venn diagram of music intersected quite often. Though there was an albums v singles mentality more broadly, but by and large, the industry treated them very similarly. A band like Cockney Rebel for instance had a foot in both camps when they had great hits like Mr Soft and balladeering bedroom poet album album stuff like Sebastian. Even heavy bands would feature in these publications, possibly aimed at the sister’s reading who had older brothers. I had an Ian Gillan poster out of one issue! And good luck to anyone transcribing Yes lyrics!
I wonder if they were issued to the magazine by the record company or whether they just wrote down what they heard. They were only a few pennies and printed on the ‘furry’ cheap paper. They feel like something from a bygone age,
