Barry McCabe

It is my intention to post a blog every Thursday (schedule allowing). Let me explain what New Spotlight was and what it meant to me (and probably a lot of other people) at that time.

New Spotlight was a weekly music magazine. It was originally called Spotlight but that was before my time. I don't remember when I first started buying it religiously but lately when going through some old stuff I discovered a bunch of them from the early  '70's.

Now let me paint the scene a little about that time. I was around 15 years old and had just started to play the guitar. National radio (RTE) played very little music and practically all the music they did play was - well, not rock music, let's put it that way. There was no internet, no instant access to news and information, etc., so Spotlight (or New Spotlight in my case) was basically the ONLY source for any music info. It came out every Thursday and I can still remember the excitement of picking up my copy each week. If for some reason it wasn't there until Friday I was so disappointed!

It had - a letter's page called "Sound Off", it had a short news page (or pages) called "Scene", Larry Gogan's "Disc Preview", it had articles, it had a "charts" page and to me at that time the most important page of all was Pat Egan's "Heavy Sounds". This was my only way to find out what was going on in the rock world and my only way to get info about Rory Gallagher!!

The idea is that I will transcribe Pat's page here each week to show you what was happening within the rock music scene in Ireland in the early seventies. Happy reading. P.S. if I have time I'll try to do the charts as well because that will really show you what was selling in Ireland at the time.

Please feel free to leave a comment if you are one of the musicians mentioned in Pat's column, if you know some of the musicians mentioned or if you have any memories or stories to tell from this time.

Tip: if you're interested in reading them in chronological order you'll need to click on the 'archive' button and start with the 1st entry - June 21st 1973. Sometimes the info does follow on from the week before.