Well, we made it! Here's Issue two of IN TUNE, your free musician's mag., hopefully having evaded your dog's fangs as it dropped through the letter box this morning. Quite how we managed to get this issue together through the pre-Christmas alcohol/gluttony/chaos I'll never know, but we did, and here IT is!

I know it sounds like a cliche, but I really do have to say that your response to the first issue of IT has been fabulous - we've had letters, 'phone calls, cards - just about every form of communication imaginable, (short of 'stripper-grams', he hinted!) welcoming us and wishing us well for the future. What on Earth can I say - except thanks, and that we'll try as hard as we can to continue giving you our very best, every month!

Convention has it that the Editorial page is a sort of cross between giving an editor the chance to plug what's in his issue each month, and the opportunity to jump up on a soap-box and spout his current party-line, in the (usually vain!) hope that someone's out there listening to him.

Being the sort of ego-maniac that you maybe have to be to edit a magazine (that's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it!) I certainly will be having a few sledge-hammer subtleties to impart over the coming months, but I'm not about to chance my arm with boring you to death this early in the mag's life, so let me just stick this month to saying that we're taking very careful note of your ideas for the mag. (as we said we would) and that we're already steering IN TUNE with your help. Thanks for the feedback - those letters do get read and thought about, and if you keep the ideas coming in, we'll keep responding to them.

Some - er - 'comment', has arisen about the presence of a certain feline character who seems to have imposed himself throughout the mag's first issue. 'Son of the Office Cat?' - 'F.F.C.'s British cousin?' (for 'Fabulous Furry Freak Bros.' veterans only, that one, I suspect), 'Korky The Cat's illegitimate by-blow from a chance encounter with Prudence Kitten?' - keep the guesses rolling in, folks! Yes, the IT Cat keeps us all on the right side of insanity down here at the IN TUNE asylum (and I'm not about to reveal which side of the dividing line that is!) and we look on him as a sort of mascot (he, on the other hand, looks on us as an easy way of getting food and somewhere comfortable to sleep - so it goes!). We're never quite sure where he's going to crop up in the mag ourselves, and if that makes you feel that we're maybe not taking ourselves too seriously and that, like most musicians, we're probably half-crazy, then he's earned his 'puss-o-glop' for this month!

As promised, January's IN TUNE has another truck-load of instrument and equipment reviews, bags of news, more of Chris May's thoughts on guitar making, Rick Biddulph on the perils of continental touring, and lots more.

Finally, all of us on IN TUNE send our best wishes to you for 1985 - whatever it is that your music is saying, we hope that you'll be saying it clearer, louder, better and to more listeners by this time next year!