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Forget blogging, the net and desk top publishing — some of the sharpest, funniest, and most radical ideas are being published by hand with dodgy ink and sticky tape. Ruth Hedges set out to find the best of the current Scottish fanzines.
ome may say that money makes the world go round. or that love
is all you need. but they’re wrong. it’s mad. blind. unapologetic
obsession — the spark of lunacy that inspires someone to hitch a lift across the country in pursuit of an unsigned Goth band. that gets them through the turnstiles every Saturday as impending defeat looms all too inevitably. that moves someone to give up home comforts in the fight for a better world or that inspires them to give up evening after evening to celebrate the ridiculous. And the manifestation of this? The fanzine.
Born (as we know them) in the ()()s. flourishing with the punk era and then peaking in the 80s. these underground labours of love. typed up. cut, pasted. stapled and photocopied for distribution. are testament to passion and a spirit of subversive irreverence. But such heart-on-the- sleeve enthusiasm. even if it is delivered with a bitter nod to the hopelessness (Dundee: It's Half Past Four and We're 2—() Down). is pretty unfashionable these days. ()r so you might think. In reality. they’re back with a vengeance.
Popbitch. the salacious web—cclebrity-gossip (‘Which Scientologist actor has a reputation for greeting his young male assistants at his hotel room clad only in a towel . . . and then "accidentally" dropping it‘.”) shocked. entertained and titillated the desk-bound generation when it broke onto the web four years ago. It still rouses the odd weak snort of disgust and amusement. while every hand who‘s ever strummed a chord now has a website. Political ideas and activism are spread and agitated though email and Brechin (‘ity has a message board on which fans can discuss the latest doing. So the famine should be dead. The labour- intensive homemade craft should have no place in our new information superhighways. but it does.
While old classics live on. new ones are cropping tip all the time — media-savvy cynicism has inspired something of a backlash. it would seem. with the power of the unofficial printed word finding its place again in underground culture. The urge to create something that can be picked tip in pubs. read on the terraces or found in a record store is there just as strong as ever. Perhaps more than ever when media. football. music and politics work as a slick. cynical corporate operation.
The fanzine is keeping it real — the raw. rough edges of culture and politics refusing to be smoothed away. We celebrate these labours of love and explore the best material of the moment from fledgling first issue publication The One ()‘Clnek (iim to the long established anarchist magazine I'kislwie I'm-us. (iet your staplers ready.
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Name is this music?
Started Dec 2002
What does it cover? Every damn thing that's going on in Scotland that can call itself music (despite the question inarki — gig reviews. CD rewews. interViews
How often 'Sneaks out whenever we can do it.
every six weeks or so'
Why? 'Response to lack of coverage of Scottish bands being picked up by the local press'
Production 'On a Mac with a very dodgy screen in my spare room. printed at Macdonalds in Leith. bring them home [Linlithgow] and tack on the free CD'
Circulation 1000
Available Fopp. Avalanche. Missing. Borders Buchanan Street). Mono
They say A professional maga7ine Wlill a famine ethic
We say Rock on
The 21118 scene — from then till now b» ml. Coopcr
SNIFFIN’ GLUE ZIGZAG g
1976 Late 197OS-Iate
Punk 19805
Now considered the ‘h'-dropping “'9‘” Punk 0
Notable for being the first of its generation to combine a low rent squat aesthetic with
granddaddy of “em all. year zero began with editor Mark Perry's seminal call to arms
via a street appropriation .y 4; perfect binding and proper of cut'n'paste DIY .. .. \‘ “Ia. distribution. this mag went culture. Bizarrely, , {a 3:: ‘l’y as professional as ll. _
’o . could while remaining
one of Perry‘s
COhOrts on 1' Q a grubby enough to\ Sniffin' Glue . 1f, 6 leave your hands was one ~ , 1’5 smeared With Danny cheap ink once Baker. you‘d done With it.
V CITY
THE NEXT BIG THING FUN 1977 1980—82 Garage Psych Punk The bleak, Corning right at ya. straight out of ¢ indusmali and Grangemouth. Lindsay Hutton's 45 o eVer’So' size mag grew Out of a general
smartarse north Fortnightly Manchester- based platform for creative expression. A provocatively bitchy pot-pourri of listings. reviews. gossip and cultural hi-Jinks prevailed. The Falls Mark E Smith published short stories here. while a young scribe by the name of Stephen Patrick Morrissey also contributed.
spirit of ‘76 to concentrate on the trashier end of the indie underground. .
22 THE LIST “fill‘ar W411.“