Rip It Up

Many New Zealanders will have fond memories of going into the local record store to pick up the latest Rip It Up. The magazine was launched in June 1977 as a free monthly distributed via record shops nationwide. Rip It Up was a first in that it gave both overseas and New Zealand music equal space and importance.

Rip It Up was created by photographer and former Craccum designer Murray Cammick, and musician and writer Alastair Dougal, who was its first editor. The name 'Rip It Up' came from Little Richard’s 1956 song of the same name. Rip It Up initially filled a gap left by the closure of the earlier music magazine Hot Licks, which ran from 1974 to 1976. In 1979, Dougal decided to concentrate on his law degree, and Cammick took over the editorship.

Coverage of New Zealand music was a significant part of Rip It Up from the beginning, at a time when mainstream radio stations barely played any local music. The first New Zealand band to feature on the cover was Hello Sailor (August 1977:3). From 1981 Rip It Up provided strong colour covers featuring a series of young local bands, giving them invaluable and otherwise unavailable nationwide exposure. The widely read local news columns in each issue played a similarly important role in showcasing new regional music and artists over the next two decades.

Rip It Up’s crucial support ushered in a widely acknowledged golden era in local music, creating the momentum for a local industry that continues today. As New Zealand music historian John Dix noted in 1988, the magazine 'played no small role in the public’s growing awareness of the homegrown product.' The magazine had a large circulation too, reaching 30,000 by the mid-1980s.

Cammick continued to edit Rip It Up until 1986, when Chris Bourke was appointed editor. After Bourke left in 1988, Cammick once again became editor. In 1994 Rip It Up was sold to Liberty Publishing, a company who also owned the National Business Review. Cammick remained as editor and the main change, at least initially, was that Rip It Up was no longer free: it was $2 an issue.

Over the years, many well-known New Zealand music writers worked on Rip It Up, including Chris Bourke, Russell Brown, Kerry Buchanan, Duncan Campbell, Louise Chunn, Mike Chunn, Jay Clarkson, Roy Colbert, Simon Grigg, Leonie Hayden, Scott Kara, George Kay, Karl Puschmann, John Russell, Jewel Sanyo (Gillian Samuel), Chad Taylor, Redmer Yska, and Donna Yuzwalk. As well as Cammick’s photographs, Rip It Up in the 1970s and 80s included work from photographers and designers such as Laurence Aberhart, Rhondda Bosworth, Kerry Brown, Terence Hogan, Glenn Jowitt, Chris Mauger, Bryan Staff, Carol Tippet, and Polly Walker.

Cammick remained editor until 1998. The years following brought many changes in ownership and editorship. With the departure of Cammick, Liberty appointed David Glynn as editor; he stayed in the role less than a year. By the end of 1998 Liberty sold Rip It Up to Tim Connell of Molten Media. In late 1999 the publisher became IT Media, also owned by Connell, with Richard Cooke as publisher, and Scott Kara as editor from early 2000. In 2001 Satellite Media, which produced TV shows, became the owner and launched the Rip It Up website. Kara left in 2004, and Martyn Bradbury became editor for a year. From 2005-2009 Karl Pushmann was editor, and in 2009 Satellite absorbed the hip-hop magazine Back2Basics, whose editor, Philip Bell (DJ Sir-Vere) became Rip It Up’s editor.

In 2011, Leonie Hayden became Rip It Up’s first and only female editor, and she remained in the role until 2013 when the magazine was sold to Grant Hislop’s company Hark Entertainment. In October 2013 Hislop combined the magazine with his own listings title, Groove Guide, and Rip It Up continued until October 2015, co-edited by Hislop and Andrew Johnstone. The magazine also became a free monthly again under Hark’s ownership.

For the 21 years that Rip It Up was published and edited by Cammick it remained focused on music. After Cammick’s departure in 1998, the magazine’s focus changed with its various owners, editors, and the advertising climate. The fragmentation of musical genres meant that Rip It Up could no longer cover the entire music scene, and mainstream newspapers and magazines began featuring music stories once seen as the preserve of Rip It Up. At various stages after Cammick, editors tried including more political content (Bradbury) and popular culture and satire (Puschmann). During Bell’s and Hayden’s editorial tenures, the magazine featured more hip-hop, Maori, Polynesian and female artists.

In 2016 Hark Entertainment put the magazine and its archive up for sale, and it was purchased by music entrepreneur Simon Grigg, himself an early contributor to Rip It Up, and the founder of the New Zealand music history website AudioCulture.

Rip It Up was the longest running music magazine in New Zealand and published 377 issues over 38 years. When it began, overseas magazines such as Rolling Stone or NME would take months to arrive in New Zealand, so a local magazine that covered music was very important. Its focus on the New Zealand music scene made it the journal of record for New Zealand popular music from 1977 to 2015. As Grigg said in a 2016 interview, Rip It Up is '40 years of New Zealanders being New Zealanders listening to music', telling the story of both the music and the culture.