Straight No Chaser is an influential British music magazine based in London, originally published between 1988 and 2007, it restarted publishing in mid 2017 in a limited edition format, released once a year. The magazine covers various forms of black music and electronic music. The magazine was founded by journalists Paul Bradshaw, Neil Spencer, and Kathryn Willgress to cover music of black origin including hip hop, dance, reggae, Latin and African styles that were largely ignored by mainstream media. It emerged in June 1988 coinciding with 'The Second Summer of Love'.
Publishing
It was published in the UK and distributed for sale across Britain, much of Europe, metropolitan areas of the US and Japan. Claiming to be the first magazine to be designed and laid out exclusively on AppleMac computers, the first few issues were designed by Ian "Swifty" Swift at Neville Brody's studio where he worked as assistant designer of influential culture magazine, The Face. Starting out as a quarterly, the team then moved to 43B Coronet Street, Shoreditch, London, N1 6HD. It moved to pent annually a year from 1992, however the actual number of issues released would fluctuate year on year and it didn't have a regular release date, so regular purchasers of the magazine often had to keep an eye out for its release when it happened. It also had a slightly differing version that was published and distributed for sale separately in Japan. Occasionally a covermount CD or tape was also included with the magazine, sometimes either only for a limited number of copies or for its initial print run for that issue, but other times only for sale on the Japanese edition.
Tenth year anniversary
In July 1998, to celebrate the magazine's tenth birthday, Paul Bradshaw gathered all of the current contributors for a photograph with photographer Peter Williams. In tribute to Art Kane's famous 1958 group portrait of New York jazz players, A Great Day in Harlem, the photo was named A Great Day in Hoxton. Alongside prominent music business faces such as Gilles Peterson and James Lavelle were many talented designers, fashion professionals, writers, dancers, and fellow photographers.
SNC magazines' main slogan was Interplanetary Sounds: Ancient To Future, which basically meant it covered Jazz music at the centre, with other black music's from around the world—especially soulful electronic music—forming the core of its focus. While most of the magazine contained charts from eminent DJ's on the scene or articles on underground music scenes around the world, it also had an eye on contemporary artwork, and underground fashionable trends in and outside various music communities usually not generally well-known about outside of the world's big urban centres. Alongside cutting edge graphics, the magazine championed the works of emerging writers, photographers, and illustrators as well as providing an alternative context for world renowned writers including Commonwealth Writers' Prize winner Pauline Melville, and Booker Prize winner Michael Ondaatje. The magazine was often compared with the US magazine publication Wax Poetics which came along later, and could be argued copied Straight No Chaser's style in some design and content ways.
Editions
The original magazine had 92 issues, released across two volumes of 46 issues in each: the first volume from 1988 to 1998, the second from 1998 to the last edition in 2007. In 2017, a new volume of the magazine was released, with three issues being released so far.
Volume 1: 1988 to 1998
Photo cover artists featured on the first volume issues:
For various reasons, not least the spread of the internet and declining magazine sales, plus the changing affects in the general music culture from vinyl and CD collecting to more digital downloading, Bradshaw decided to shut the original magazine down in 2007 with the last issue being number 46 from volume 2, the Summer edition released around August that year. No digital versions of the magazine were ever released, and there have so far been no plans to reissue them as such.
