RipItUp: Tales of a music magazine

Murray Cammick at RipItUp's Crummer rd offices, probably early 90s

Former RipItUp editor Murray Cammick has written a great piece at Audioculture on the history of his magazine, from its inception back in 1977, thru the 80s and 90s, and onto its current state of being. It's a fascinating insight into a very important magazine that held a hugely influential spot on sharing and documenting our musical development.

I remember when I was a teen, how I used to get the bus into town at the weekends on Saturday morning (cos the shops weren't open Sundays), to go and wander round town to find a record shop with the latest issue of this awesome free mag. I learned a lot from reading RipItUp.

Excerpt: "... Where did we get our writers? To use a skateboard analogy, if you build a fine ramp, skateboarders will come running to you. In 1977 the music writers came running to RipItUp, holding pieces of paper.

"We started with friends who also had just gained degrees at Auckland University – Peter Thomson, Frank Stark, John Malloy, Bruce Belsham, soon added George Kay and Roy Colbert from Dunedin, Ken Williams and Duncan Campbell from the Radio Inewsroom, and Jeremy Templer became a key writer even though we had sort of stolen his idea. Alastair Dougal, Frank Stark, myself and the less frequent contributor Louise Chunn had all written for the 1976 Craccum arts or music pages, so the core of RipItUp came from Craccum... "

The colour guide for the printers, RIU Sept 1983. Old school design styles

...and the finished product. Photo by Kerry Brown