Ray Coleman: The Man Behind the Maker

RAY COLEMAN, who has died from cancer aged 59, played a leading role in the growth of the British music press in the Sixties and Seventies. Under his editorship Melody Maker became a flagship magazine for IPC Business Press, selling over 200,000 copies a week at its peak in the early Seventies. No other weekly music magazine has bettered this circulation since. In more recent years he became a respected author of solid, unsensational, accurate rock biographies.