This strange poster turned up on a music auction site a while ago, yours for £495! Beyond our pay grade obviously but worth grabbing the jpeg. We say strange, but given Magazine’s carefully crafted album art and publicity, this really kicks against all that. It is obviously in the Polytechnic “house style” of the late 1970s onwards, which was used on tickets as well, and the gig took place at the newish Phoenix Hall.

We would put money on the picture from a fashion shoot being lifted from a women’s magazine of the time, but it is seriously at odds with the group’s own image! Despite that it does make for an interesting poster, printed in orange and blue.

Simon adds: “I did go to this show, 1980, it was sadly the only time I got to see Magazine live. They were certainly one of my favourite post-Punk era outfits and I got all their albums. Howard Devoto was certainly a bit of an acquired taste vocally but as a unit they really worked for me, being a proper rock band without drifting into cliche. Although certainly not a guitar band, contrary-wise, guitarist John McGeoch was a huge part of their sound and I think this would be his last tour, they were promoting the very dark Secondhand Daylight album.

He left the band at the end of this tour to join Siouxsie & The Banshees. And Magazine were a massive influence on a huge number of Eighties groups. And locally young Jarvis Cocker was an admirer: “(Real Life – the band’s debut) was such an important record for the time because it showed that you could still do something that had attack to it combined with a real intelligence, without going into ponce territory.” Nicely put!”