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Raw Magazine was a British music magazine, which was published from 1988 until 1996. Established to rivalKerrang!,Raw focused onrock music for most of its history.
Raw was founded in the summer of 1988[1] by Dante Bonutto,Malcolm Dome, Mark Putterford and Steve McTaggart and photographer Tony Mottram drafted in fromMetal Hammer. They had come together onMetal Hammer magazine having split fromKerrang!, where Bonutto had been deputy-editor. The collective feeling there had been thatKerrang! was becoming too narrowly focused onheavy metal and thatMetal Hammer would allow them more scope to explore other areas ofrock music. This quickly proved not to be the case and the idea for a new magazine was born, a title that would be a true rock magazine, featuring heavy metal acts but not dominated by them.
To that end they teamed up with marketing manPete Winkleman and createdRaw alongside Phil Alexander, Kirk Blows, Dave Dickson, Dave Ling,Sylvie Simmons, Maura Sutton andPaul Suter, most of whom had also worked onKerrang! under the byline of `RAW` Rock Alive Worldwide.
The first issue went on sale on 31 August that year, as afortnightly publication, featuringOzzy Osbourne on the cover tattooing the RAW logo on himself,[1] photographed by Tony Mottram.RAW was based inLondon[1] and steadily grew to become a serious rival to the more establishedKerrang!.
But within the year,EMAP publications, having failed in their bid to take overKerrang!, decided to acquireRaw instead. The idea, at that stage, remained that the new magazine could overcome the heavyweightKerrang!, and that EMAP's money and publishing clout would allow theRaw team to achieve this. In the end, though, EMAP simply boughtKerrang! wholesale.
The originalRaw magazine, the staff, writers and photographers, remained largely intact, with the addition of Liz Evans, until the end of 1989 when Dante Bonutto announced he was leaving. He had been poached as anA&R man byEast West Records. The EMAP-appointed publishing director,David Hepworth, was assigned to find a new editor, and Dave Henderson was appointed.
The beginning of 1990 ushered in a new regime andRaw established itself as a viable alternative toKerrang!, with a fresh, more contemporary editorial approach, championing bands such as Nirvana, Soundgarden, Hole, L7 and Alice in Chains, alongside the more traditional rock stable. However, as soon asKerrang! became part of the EMAP stable of publications, Raw's survival, like Sounds, no longer mattered and despite changes of editor and editorial policy, makingRaw aBritpop magazine in December 1995, among the proliferation of music magazines during the 1990s, eventually it folded. The magazine published its last issue on 13 March 1996.[2]
In 1990, a weeklytelevision programme namedRaw Power was launched to accompany the magazine. It later changed its name toNoisy Mothers and was defunct in late 1995.
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