TX Magazine

Early days, first ideas

TX first surfaced as a supplement in the Anoraks UK Weekly Report, kind of as a way of gauging interest. AUK was a four page news bulletin covering mainly the Irish pirates and offshore stations plus a bit of land-based pirate news, put together with incredible devotion by Barrie and Ruth Johnson in Blackpool. The idea for a publication that covered the London pirates seemed to go down well, so plans were then made for a proper magazine.

I was looking for some other people to write for it and luckily the first person I approached said yes: Christopher England. I'd been a fan of Chris' shows on London Music Radio and Radio Shoestring, mixing music and listener interaction, and he agreed to write a kind of diary column to try and stir up some controversy and get people talking. Other people were harder to recruit and I ended up writing way more than I ever expected to as the magazine developed.

With the magazine an unknown, it was also a problem gathering news and information in the early days. Other sources were ruthlessly raided for pirate stories and there was also some occasional jumping to the wrong conclusion based on events heard on the dial. Not long after the magazine started I received a phone call from Eddie, one of the behind the scenes people at LWR. He'd obtained my home number from John Burch of the Caroline Movement and gave me a warning about running stories unchecked, making it clear that he'd rather I called their office first to clear stories about the station. I then began to take fact checking a bit more seriously.

For the first year, the magazine was put together on a Sinclair Spectrum. This was somewhat embarrassing and never admitted at the time, but it was the only thing I could afford. As well as writing much of the copy for the magazine, I ended up developing the software used to put it together, creating the fonts used and designing all the graphics and layouts. I remember at the time being heavily influenced by Neville Brody and his work on The Face (wasn't everyone), but lacked either the talent or the technology to really pull it off. However, despite its cheesiness and some of the roughness, people did seem to like the fact that TX at least made an attempt at a more appealing presentation. It certainly made a change from the closely typed pages of print that seemed to be the norm in anorak publications at that point.

TX Magazine poster

TX did follow the anorak magazines in another way though. Thinking it was what people wanted to read, the early magazines attempted some rather tedious logging of every little event that happened during London pirate broadcasts. After a while, it became apparent that this wasn't in fact terribly interesting except to the more, umm, obsessive listeners, and they seemed to have a problem with the more light-hearted approach the magazine took anyway. Gradually this gave way to more general news coverage and an increasing emphasis on the programming the stations put out.

The first four issues were printed (well, photocopied) and distributed as little A5 magazines by Barrie and Ruth at Anoraks UK. By issue five, however, I was seeing a big future for TX and decided to take things into my own hands and handle printing and distribution myself. Still a teenager, I was probably guilty of a bit of naïve over enthusiasm at the time, so apologies should go to them for putting up with me despite all the hassle I undoubtedly caused them.

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