Launched two years after the NME, and founded by former Weekly Sporting Review editor Isidore Green, Record Mirror never attained the circulation of its rival, though it published the first UK album chart in 1956.
By the end of 1960, circulation had fallen to 18,000, and Decca Records (the main shareholder) replaced Green with Jimmy Watson, a former Decca press officer, and changed the title to New Record Mirror.
In November 1963, the paper returned to the name Record Mirror and featured a colour picture of The Beatles on the cover, the first British music paper in full colour.
Disc was incorporated into Record Mirror in 1975, and the paper became a glossy magazine in 1982. It incorporated comic strips, jokes, gossip columns, and Q&A articles with pop stars of the day.
Record Mirror ceased to be a stand-alone publication in April 1991 when United Newspapers closed or sold most of their consumer magazines, including Record Mirror and its sister music magazine Sounds, to concentrate on trade papers like Music Week.
In 2010, ex-Dundee football club director and bogus lawyer Giovanni di Stefano bought the name Record Mirror and relaunched it as an online music gossip website in 2011. The website became inactive in 2013 following di Stefano’s jailing for fraud.
New Record Mirror was the first national British publication to publish an article on The Beatles and the first to feature The Rolling Stones, The Searchers, The Who, and The Kinks.
