As far as fanzines go, Welsh Bands Weekly was pretty unique in its day.

In an era when a lot of fanzines were very DIY in style (cut 'n' paste images, handwritten articles, everything photocopied), we decided that Welsh Bands Weekly was going to be professionally printed - even if some of the earlier interviews, reviews and articles weren't terribly professionally written!

What's more, every issue was 100% bilingual; you could read the entire magazine in English, flip it over and read it again - more or less word for word - in Welsh. While this baffled a good many people - trying to explain it at Stereophonics gigs to drunken English geezers was often a challenge - to many learners of the Welsh language Welsh Bands Weekly was regarded as a useful learning aid.

The first few issues literally flew off the shelves. In fact, the only issue of which we still have a lot of copies left is Issue 9, and that's because we'd stopped taking bags of magazines to gigs to sell to drunken punters. With such a tiny printing budget (much of which came from car boot sales and pawning our belongings), our print runs had to be very small; apart from Issue 2, which had a print run of 500, every issue had a print run of just 300 copies. Of course, had we abandoned our principles and photocopied every issue, we could've saved a fortune and printed extra copies. However, we'd promised our readers litho-printed magazines, so that's what they got.

Early issues of Welsh Bands Weekly are now very rare and almost impossible to get hold of, although we've seen a few copies of Issue 6 for sale on a couple of online out-of-print book stores. What's more, apart from the odd interview here and there, back issues of Welsh Bands Weekly have never been available online.

That is, until now...

For the first time ever, you can now download every back issue of Welsh Bands Weekly in pdf format.

How to download your back issues of Welsh Bands Weekly

We've split all the back issues of Welsh Bands Weekly into their English and Welsh halves, scanned them, and saved them as pdfs for readers to download.

On this page you'll find links to download the English halves of each issue; simply click the link on the issue you want to read, and it'll open in a new window.

If you want to download the Welsh half of each back issue, click the "Cymraeg" link at the top of the page and you'll find yourself reading these instructions in Welsh (isn't technology marvellous?) - download your chosen back issue from the Welsh page instead of the English page and you'll find yourself reading the Welsh half of the magazine.

To open these pdfs you'll need Adobe Reader. Please be warned that some of these files are very large; if you're using a dialup connection they may well take ages to open. Once you've opened your selected back issue of Welsh Bands Weekly, you can either read it in your browser or click the "save a copy" button to save a copy onto your computer to read later.