Description
Before Dark Star, there was Shoes & Strings, and before that, the Mike Oldfield Dorset Fan Club. This download contains those 24 back issues in PDF format.
It all started forty years ago, in 1986. The Mike Oldfield Dorset Fan Club was started by Chris Dewey and Paul Beard, in an attempt to fill the gap left by the closure of the Portsmouth-based official Mike Oldfield Fan Club. In the early days, its editor (Janet Arnold) helped us enormously by sharing news, photocopying our newsletters and sending our details out to fans asking for fan club addresses. The club was never promoted heavily, so remained very small, which meant that the newsletter was always only a few photocopies - a far cry from Dark Star. Back in those days, the magazines were put together with Letraset, glue, sticky tape and a typewriter, it was all very manual!
We rebranded as Shoes & Strings in 1991, bringing Michael Kuleczko into the team. September 1992 proved to be a major turning point, after handing out 1000 promotional postcards at the Edinburgh premiere concert. The readership reached 150, making a higher quality fanzine possible. Issues 20-24 were still photocopied, but now included colour self adhesive photographs, which were stuck in by hand. From then on, we just grew and grew.
Dark Star was launched in 1993 after the merging of View from the Beacon and Shoes & Strings and grew further following another postcard promotion campaign at the Royal Albert Hall, making another step up in quality possible through gaining 500 subscribers. Less than a year later, in January 1994, Mike's manager Clive Banks invited Dark Star to become the Worldwide official Mike Oldfield magazine, a challenge which we were delighted to accept. Once again, subscription numbers shot up allowing us to further improve our services and the quality of the magazine.
Supplied as an immediate 49MB ZIP download of PDF files.
To view the PDF files, you can download a free viewer directly from Adobe
