Black Echoes

Black Echoes started out in early 1976 as a weekly paper dedicated to all forms of black music. In a world before the internet printed magazines and papers were the main source of news for music lovers and mainstream music papers such as NME and Melody Maker enjoyed significant sales. Black Echoes wasn’t the first UK publication to feature black music as two magazines got there first: The monthly Black Music from 1973 and the fortnightly Blues & Soul (originally Home Of The Blues) from 1967. The difference with Black Echoes was that being a weekly paper and having a larger newspaper format meant that there was far more up to date content and there was just a lot more of it.

Right from the start there was significant space given to soul, reggae, funk, northern soul, jazz, blues, disco and so on. There were front page portraits of artists, pages of charts, interviews and biographies, live reviews, single and LP reviews. Even the adverts both big and small are fascinating, be it a full page advert for a Trojan or Motown LP or little corner page advert for a northern soul all-niter or a reggae sound system clash.

So if you are a serious student of music, a fan who just wants to read about how it happened as it happened, or you just want a great advert or cover to frame on your wall, original copies of Black Music are superb.

We have lot’s of early copies of Black Echoes for sale at Retrospectro, see them all here.

If you buy 10 or more copies we’ll give you a 10% discount before postage (pay the full amount and we’ll refund the difference or contact us with a list of the issues you want and we’ll send you a paypal invoice for the correct amount).

6 thoughts on “Black Echoes

  1. Hi guys, I used to contribute a chart to BE back when I could bend over in silence. I operated as Strawberry disco at that time, I would be eternally grateful if you had a copy of this landmark newspaper with one of my contributions.

  2. I still have over 80 copies of the newspaper …not sure why kept them so long but I bet their worth a bit now …my copies are from late 70’s to 80’s

  3. Hi am trying to get a copy of the black echoes interview with The London Sound System Moa Anbessa! I think it was between 1978-1980.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.