Trouser Press Magazine Archive

Trouser Press magazine published a total of 95 issues between 1974 and 1984. They’ve all been scanned and posted here. The contents are searchable within each issue. Click here for an index of every review, article, column, flexi-disc and news item that ever appeared in the magazine.

TP 51, June 1980

Our green-tinted (and ambivalent) nostalgic streak was on display here, floating serenely beneath a Public Image Ltd. banner line. The article inside was a background piece on the brain trust guiding Capitol Records’ reissues of Fab Four rarities, written by the late Nicholas Schaffner, a longtime friend of the magazine who authored fine books on the Beatles and Pink Floyd. Another notable contributor to the issue was Dave Marsh, who did a piece on managers for us.

TP 52, July 1980

The only color picture of Pete Townshend we could get our hands on at the time was this cruddy label handout, so we did the obvious thing for someone with so much to say: we ran some of his remarks on the cover. The interview inside, conducted by Charles Shaar Murray, was a reprint from the New Musical Express. (And how ’bout the nifty page-turner trick in the upper right corner?)

TP 53, August 1980

That yellow background was as bright as a thousand suns. It was considerate of us to grant Dave Davies as much cover space as brother Ray. But old thinking still prevailed when it came to female musicians, who were still being ghettoized, tucked off in a corner.

TP 54, September 1980

Ebet Roberts photographed the Rolling Stones at a New York press event to unveil Emotional Rescue. Amazingly, at least on the actual full-size cover, you can see Mick Jagger’s eyes through his shades. And doesn’t Keith look the picture of health?

TP 55, October 1980

The studio pictured on the cover was, in fact, the one where Springsteen was recording. The guitar, however, belonged to a Trouser Press staffer. Witty concept or journalistic deception? You decide. We didn’t, as a group, fancy Bruce much, so the decision to put him on the cover was an exercise in passive disinclination.

TP 56, November 1980

Our second Cars cover was a nifty trompe l’oeil which more or less succeeded in looking like a cover in progress … toward the waste bin. It was fun scrawling “Entire concept weak! Redo!!” on our own concept and then printing it. We had never actually employed such a formal approval process and had to create a fake form for this project. Then we had to convince the printer to ignore all of the supposed instructions.

TP 57, December 1980

How do you like the tie-matching ruler ringing our second Cheap Trick cover? The photo is by David Tan, but dig the crazy background, a high school art project from the personal archives of our publisher.

TP 58, January 1981

When Gary is blue … cover photo by Mitch Kearney. Remember when techno-rock (you know, pop go the synthesizers!) was a big wave-of-the-future deal? Isn’t nostalgia wonderful?

TP 59, February 1981

If you can’t make it out clearly, the grey square offset around Mitch Kearney’s laconic photo of Rockpile is a forest of barren trees. Why? Maybe it was a reference to the fact that we weren’t able to print any of our inside pages in color! Or, as noted with a solemn image on the inside front cover, John Lennon had recently been murdered.

TP 60, April 1981

Amy Hill, one of our favorite artists, painted a commercialized Clash wading into New York for the April 1981 cover. (The absence of a March issue was to prepare for a new on-sale schedule required by our imminent great leap forward. See TP 61.)