‘I heard Roxy Music at a Scouts gathering and was hooked’
I was obsessed with Roxy Music as a teenager. I heard their first two albums at a Scouts gathering and was hooked. Every week, I would buy the maagzines Sounds, NME and Melody Maker if they had any Roxy-related articles or photos, and take my scissors to them for the scrapbook [pictured above]. I eventually saw them at Birmingham Odeon in 1974 and still have the pristine programme and ticket stub. I never imagined that many years later I would be photographing them and Bryan solo for Getty. Looking through the book brings back many happy memories of my youth. Steve Thorne, 64, Warwick
‘On reflection, it’s a very uncool thing to have done’
Growing up near Birmingham, the home of Sabbath, in the late 70s and early 80s, I was always going to be into metal. I lived in a sleepy village, too, which is just the place to sell your soul to the devil. I heard Metallica for the first time on the Friday rock show on Radio 1. I was 17 and they were my new gods. I cut out everything I could find in Sounds and Kerrang! and put them in scrapbooks. On reflection, it’s a very uncool thing to have done.
I pasted in ticket stubs; my first was a Monsters of Rock one from 1985 and this was the start of my obsession with them. After the death of their first bass player Cliff Burton in 1986, these scrapbooks almost took on a role of religious artefacts. I kept them going through the art school years but inevitably my head was turned by other things. A good friend of mine recently did Metallica’s tour T-shirts and in June we went to Download (what Monsters of Rock became) to see them, 38 years after I first saw them there. We were in the snake pit (just in front of the stage) so had special wristbands. When I got home, mine went in my scrapbook. Simon Davis, 55, London
‘I saw nearly every rock band that came through LA’
In 1980 I was 18 years old and had just graduated from high school. That summer before going off to college, my friends and I saw nearly every rock band that came through LA. I kept a collage of most of the ticket stubs. It is fun to look through them now because I had forgotten how many bands I saw live back then. Van Halen, Queen, Elton John, the Who – all the big name performances. It’s also interesting to see that those tickets cost in the range of USD $10-20. When I think back to those times, I was making minimum wage ($3.10) at the supermarket and could manage a ticket to a big show for less than a day’s labour. It’s surprising to compare to today. Susan Lund, 61, Oregon, US
‘This was how I got the attention of my school mates’
Growing up in Brisbane in the 70s/80s was mostly spent playing sport and watching and listening to music. Countdown on Sunday night was the perfect end to the week as we watched with excitement to see which song would get the coveted No 1 spot. The next day at school there would be a discussion with a bunch of like-minded pop music aficionados around whether the song was deserving of the top position or if another song should have taken it.
As my interest in music increased, I made the decision to plaster my diaries with cutouts from various music magazines (Smash Hits, Rolling Stones, No 1, Countdown) and supplement every square inch of the diary with everything from chart, radio and concert flyers and stickers to Raiders of the Lost Ark picture cards. Constructing a labyrinthine scrapbook that could be unfolded to reveal previously hidden treasures was how I was going to get the attention and interest of my school mates. Mission accomplished. Fady, Sydney, Australia
‘It was called the Bruce Book’
I made my scrapbook in the mid-80s when I was 16. It was called The Bruce Book, with photos, magazine articles, newspaper cuttings, ads, and even song lyric sheets all about the Boss. Back in the mid-80s, Springsteen established himself as one of the biggest music acts in the world but it was actually quite hard to get hold of interviews and reviews as he was not keen on doing publicity. I then set about collecting articles from the likes of Record Mirror, Smash Hits, Melody Maker, and Sounds. I kept collecting till the late 80s when he took part in the Amnesty International Human Rights Now! tour with the likes of Sting, Tracy Chapman and Peter Gabriel.
after newsletter promotion
Little did I know my fandom would come in useful in later life as in the 90s I worked in advertising and one of the clients I worked with was Sony Music, who Springsteen signed to, and I got to work directly on his album launches. Things come full circle as I found myself down the road with another 70,000 people in Hyde Park recently singing along to all those massive 80s hits I collected the song lyrics of from Smash Hits all those years ago. Paul O’Grady, 54, Petts Wood, Kent
‘I still love Bowie’
I started my scrapbooks in the mid-70s. I stuck in the photos I’d collected over the years and asked school friends to save any they found for me. I cut out any text, whether it was interviews or whatever. Regretfully, these scrapbooks are a couple of the only things I have as memories of my youth. I still love David Bowie, though. Matt Davis, 62, London
‘In 1995, I worshipped Blur’
During the late 80s and early 90s, my brother used to give me mixtapes of whatever music he was into at the time. Being 15 years his junior, I worshipped him and everything he listened to – including Girls & Boys and Parklife by Blur, both of which featured on his 1994 mixtape. By 1995, my school locker was plastered with Blur posters and my scrapbook was coming along nicely. It was a compilation of photos cut from magazines, newspaper clippings and quotes from the band members, all of which were glued on to A4 paper and lovingly preserved in the plastic pockets of a black folder. I recently found it in a forgotten box in my old bedroom. I’m not generally a nostalgic person, but that’s one piece of teenage memorabilia that came back with me. Vicky Hampton, 43, Amsterdam, the Netherlands