Song · Magazine
“Shot By Both Sides” by Magazine
From the album Real Life (1978)
“Shot By Both Sides” by Magazine appears on 4 radio countdowns from 2 stations between 1978 and 2002. It was first released in 1978 on the album Real Life. Its best result is #5 on the John Peel's All-Time Festive Fifty (1978). In the combined RockLists rankings it is #3,301 alternative song of all time.
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"Shot by Both Sides" was the Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley song that launched Magazine, first as a January 1978 single produced by Mick Glossop that got as far as number 41 in the UK. Two months later the band cut it again with John Leckie behind the board for their debut album, Real Life, and that is the take here: Devoto singing his own words with a clenched sneer, John McGeoch's guitar coiling and lunging, Barry Adamson on bass, Dave Formula on keyboards and Martin Jackson on drums, with Leckie engineering and Haydn Bendall assisting.
It came out on Virgin, and it has since been held up as a founding stone of post-punk, with pop punk and new wave laying claim to it too. The single's sleeve, by Malcolm Garrett, borrowed from an 1886 work by the Symbolist artist Odilon Redon.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
RockLists rankings
Alternative & Modern Rock
All Rock Formats
All-time and decade countdowns
| Year | # | Station | Countdown | of |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1978 | 5 | John Peel (BBC Radio 1) | John Peel's All-Time Festive Fifty (1978) | 50 |
| 1979 | 17 | John Peel (BBC Radio 1) | John Peel's All-Time Festive Fifty (1979) | 50 |
| 1982 | 47 | John Peel (BBC Radio 1) | John Peel's All-Time Festive Fifty (1982) | 50 |
| 2002 | 1828 | Fred (XM 44) | Fred XM Top 2002 Songs of All-Time (July 2002) | 2002 |
Also listed as: Shot by Both Sides.
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