Flavour of New Zealand
NZ popular culture 1960 onward
NZ popular culture 1960 onward
"Playdate" was registered at the G.P.O., Wellington, for transmission through the post as a newspaper. It was published by Union Investments Ltd. at its registerd office 312 Queen Street Auckland and printed by NZ newspapers Ltd. at their offices, Shortland Street, Auckland.
Playdate was a New Zealand monthly entertainment magazine of the 1960s dealing with films and popular music and aimed at the age group of teens to twenty-sixers. It had short stories which were: romantic, science fiction, adventure. It had previews of coming movies and articles with glossy black and white and colour photos of movie stars and pop music artists. As far as I am able to tell, Playdate's publisher (Union Investments Ltd.) was a subsidiary of Kerridge Odeon. It certainly worked out of the same offices of two other companies of which Bob Kerridge was the managing director.
Looking at archived bound volumes of Playdate is almost like looking at similar entertainment magazines of today. It's breathtaking to see how the formatting, style, and content 40-something years ago is not at all divorced from that of today. Perhaps the newsprint looks a bit older and the glossy pages don't quite have the snappy colours we have today.
Playdate kept a very close watch on overseas pop music as well as the pop music scene in New Zealand. When it started in May 1960, Playdate featured a NZ sales based music chart; thus the chart was a reflection of both overseas music and NZ music of the time. See below the list of record stores that were polled each month to create the chart.
Sadly by August 1960, Playdate stopped featuring this NZ music chart, preferring to featuring two Top Twenty charts from overseas; one from the US, one from the UK.
Because of the absence of NZ sales based music charts (as far as I know) from August 1960 to much later, I have used these overseas charts from Playdate to give an approximation of what was getting airplay in NZ. After considerable searching for the original copyright owner of these overseas charts, I am crediting Playdate magazine as the last known source. Communication is welcome from parties claiming to hold the copyright for these charts.
I have used the charts from the New Zealand Listener to fill the gap between February 1966 and 2nd May 1975 when NZ sales based music charts once again were recorded.
The Playdate "Top Twenty" monthly chart (May 1960 to Jul 1960) was compiled from the actual record sales supplied by the following: