 Issue of 4 June 1966 announcing link with Radio Luxembourg | |
| Categories | Pop music, teenagers |
|---|---|
| Frequency | Weekly |
| First issue | 18 January 1964 |
| Final issue | 27 September 1980 |
| Country | United Kingdom |
Fabulous 208 (retitled Fab 208 from 1969 onwards) was a British pop music magazine.
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Published weekly between 1964 and 1980 by Fleetway [1] (later IPC Magazines) and aimed at the teenage market, it ran for almost 900 issues, and oversaw a period of considerable change in popular music consumption, from the early years of the Beatles' career to the growth of the music video. Many of its contributors began their professional careers with the magazine including photographers David Steen and Robert Whitaker and writers Quentin Crewe, Sheena Mackay, Neil Aspinall and Michael Aldred.
First published as Fabulous on 18 January 1964, the Beatles appeared on the front cover, espousing the magazine's (then) unique selling proposition: full-colour pinups. At the time, Fabulous's competition - chiefly New Musical Express and Melody Maker - were newsprint publications. As Paul Jobling and David Crowley note, the Beatles went on to appear in every edition of the magazine for the next two years, and several early editions featured no other artists. [2] In June 1966, after a deal with Radio Luxembourg to carry its programme listings and related items, the magazine was retitled Fabulous 208 - 208 metres being Radio Luxembourg's broadcast wavelength. At its peak it had a circulation of 250,000, [2] and for the majority of the 1960s had the biggest market share of its type.
An innovation in the magazine's early years was celebrity guest editors, including Donovan, Cat Stevens, Gerry Marsden, the Kinks and Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich. Although its focus was pop music, Fabulous 208 was the first magazine of its type to cover other pop culture genres: fashion, films and television, and this later extended beyond the media to celebrity footballers such as George Best - a trend which was widely emulated in the late 60s and beyond, most notably by the ITV-sponsored Look-In .
Its readership had always been predominantly female, but as it moved into the 1970s the magazine repositioned itself more explicitly as a girl's publication, placing itself in competition with titles such as Jackie (which itself had launched only weeks after Fabulous) with more fashion features, and models replacing pop stars on the cover in most weeks. By the end of the 1970s it was being outsold by both Jackie and on the pop front by newly launched titles such as Smash Hits (from 1978). After a brief spell as rebranded as Fab Hits it was published for the last time on 27 September 1980, with the Beatles once again on the front cover.
Beatles for Sale is the fourth studio album by the English rock band the Beatles. It was released on 4 December 1964 in the United Kingdom on EMI's Parlophone label. The album marked a departure from the upbeat tone that had characterised the Beatles' previous work, partly due to the band's exhaustion after a series of tours that had established them as a worldwide phenomenon in 1964. Beatles for Sale was not widely available in the US until 1987, when the Beatles' catalogue was standardised for release on CD. Instead, eight of the album's fourteen tracks appeared on Capitol Records' concurrent release, Beatles '65, issued in North America only.
The British Invasion was a cultural phenomenon of the mid-1960s, when rock and pop music acts from the United Kingdom and other aspects of British culture became popular in the United States with significant influence on the rising "counterculture" on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. UK pop and rock groups such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Kinks, the Zombies, Small Faces, the Pretty Things, the Dave Clark Five, The Spencer Davis Group, Herman's Hermits, the Hollies, the Animals, Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Searchers, the Yardbirds, and Them, as well as solo singers such as Dusty Springfield, Cilla Black, Petula Clark, Tom Jones and Donovan, were at the forefront of the "invasion".
The English rock band the Beatles, comprising John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, are commonly regarded as the foremost and most influential band in popular music history. They sparked the "Beatlemania" phenomenon in 1963, gained international superstardom in 1964, and remained active until their break-up in 1970. Over the latter half of the decade, they were often viewed as orchestrators of society's developments. Their recognition concerns their effect on the era's youth and counterculture, British identity, popular music's evolution into an art form, and their unprecedented following.
Mod, from the word modernist, is a subculture that began in 1950s London and spread throughout Great Britain, eventually influencing fashions and trends in other countries. It continues today on a smaller scale. Focused on music and fashion, the subculture has its roots in a small group of stylish London-based young men and women in the late 1950s who were termed modernists because they listened to modern jazz. Elements of the mod subculture include fashion ; music and motor scooters. In the mid-1960s, the subculture listened to rock groups such as the Who and Small Faces. The original mod scene was associated with amphetamine-fuelled all-night jazz dancing at clubs.
Introducing... The Beatles is the first studio album released by the English rock band the Beatles in the United States. Originally scheduled for a July 1963 release, the LP came out on 10 January 1964, on Vee-Jay Records, ten days before Capitol's Meet the Beatles!. The latter album, however, entered the U.S. album chart one week before the former. Consequently, when Meet The Beatles! peaked at No. 1 for eleven consecutive weeks, Introducing...The Beatles stalled at No. 2 where it remained for nine consecutive weeks. It was the subject of much legal wrangling, but ultimately, Vee-Jay was permitted to sell the album until late 1964, by which time it had sold more than 1.3 million copies. On 24 July 2014 the album was certified gold and platinum by the RIAA.
fab was a Canadian gay magazine that published biweekly issues in Toronto, Ontario from 1994 to 2013. It published alternate weeks to the city's other biweekly gay publication, Xtra! The publication's official spelling uses a lower-case F: fab.
Top Gear is a BBC Radio programme broadcast between 1964 and 1975. It was known for its specially recorded sessions in addition to playing records. Top Gear began life in 1964 on the BBC Light Programme and was revived with a progressive rock focus in 1967 on BBC Radio 1, running with that format until its end in 1975. After its demise, host John Peel kept the same format for his own show on Radio 1 until his death.
Record Collector is a British monthly music magazine. It was founded in 1980 and distributes worldwide.
Dezider Hoffmann, also known as Dezo Hoffmann or Dežo Hoffmann, was a Slovak photographer, photojournalist and cameraman from Czechoslovakia. In the 1960s he photographed pop and showbiz personalities, including the Beatles.
Jackie was a weekly British magazine for girls. The magazine was published by D. C. Thomson & Co. Ltd of Dundee from 11 January 1964 until its closure on 3 July 1993 — a total of 1,538 issues. Jackie was the best-selling teen magazine in Britain for ten years, particularly in the decade of the 1970s.
16 was a fan magazine published in New York City.
Cathy McGowan is a British broadcaster and journalist, best known as presenter of the 1960s pop music television show Ready Steady Go!
Radio Luxembourg was a multilingual commercial broadcaster in Luxembourg. It is known in most non-English languages as RTL.
The "Fab 40" was a weekly playlist of popular records used by the British "pirate" radio station "Wonderful" Radio London which broadcast off the Essex coast from 1964 to 1967.
Disc was a weekly British popular music magazine, published between 1958 and 1975, when it was incorporated into Record Mirror. It was also known for periods as Disc Weekly (1964–1966) and Disc and Music Echo (1966–1972).
Art pop is a loosely defined style of pop music influenced by art theories as well as ideas from other art mediums, such as fashion, fine art, cinema, and avant-garde literature. The genre draws on pop art's integration of high and low culture, and emphasizes signs, style, and gesture over personal expression. Art pop musicians may deviate from traditional pop audiences and rock music conventions, instead exploring postmodern approaches and ideas such as pop's status as commercial art, notions of artifice and the self, and questions of historical authenticity.
Radio Dinner is the debut album by the creators of the American satirical magazine National Lampoon. It was released on Blue Thumb Records in 1972 after RCA Records had declined to issue the record. The humor on the album is steeped in the pop culture and politics of the era. It includes "Deteriorata", a parody of Les Crane's hit rendition of the poem "Desiderata", and commentary on the 1972 presidential race. Among several pieces satirizing the former Beatles, "Magical Misery Tour" is a parody of John Lennon's primal therapy-inspired songwriting and his 1970 Rolling Stone interview, later published in book form as Lennon Remembers.
Džuboks was a Yugoslav music magazine. Launched in 1966, it was the very first magazine in SFR Yugoslavia dedicated predominantly to rock music and the first rock music magazine to be published in a communist country.
The Beatles: All These Years is an ongoing book series about the English rock band the Beatles and their cultural impact. It is being written by English historian Mark Lewisohn based on research he has continued to gather since the 1980s, having prior authored six books about the band.
Peter Doggett is an English music journalist, author and magazine editor. He began his career in music journalism in 1980, when he joined the London-based magazine Record Collector. He subsequently served as the editor there from 1982 to 1999, after which he continued in the role of managing editor. He has also contributed regularly to magazines such as Mojo, Q and GQ.