In Praise of Occasional Staples: James Brown on the Age of the Zine

Scrolling through instagram recently I came across an account for the Raising Hell fanzine, an A5 hardcore print zine I was close to over four decades ago. It was quite a shock, like a 20th century space-bound time capsule smashing back into earth and its content coming to life. There was the familiar energy and enthusiasm for Euro-wide hardcore punk scenes exploding over every single centimetre of white space, flyers for old gigs I'd been to and bands I'd seen. There were new issues too, relaunched in the bedroom-bound days of lockdown – pandemic as retro-teenage incubator. It all began in 1983 when Ben (who would go on to become the editor of Raising Hell), two other mates Andy and Sean and myself started a fanzine in Leeds called Attack On Bzag! It was what a lot of young music fans did back then – be in bands, write fanzines, go to endless gigs and on political marches. The mainstream seemed pretty bland at the time; a different world of high end pop, all Culture Club and Paul Young, but we joined a thriving musical underground. The country was littered with tiny circulation zines held together by occasional staples, rabid enthusiasm, and single colour collage lay-outs. Every independent record shop in every town – Probe in Liverpool, Selectadisc in Nottingham, Red Rhino in York – would have a stand of fanzines on its main counter and any time I hitchhiked to other cities to see a band I'd head straight to those shops to find new ones. This was a far larger publishing underground than the alternative press of the 60s, a massive network of independent music fanatics all communicating through their pages, and by post or in person at gigs. ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISEMENT Every week a recycled envelope would arrive, soap smeared over the stamp so you could re-use it, and out would fall the new issue of Love And Molotov Cocktails from Coventry or Furious Apache from Scotland, Slow Dazzle from Greenock, Rox from Blackpool or The Legend! from Peckham. I've still got over 30 of the hundreds of mid-80s zines I'd been sent or bought in what was a booming cottage industry. Apart from loving music and knowing how to use a basic hand-turned printing press, none of the four founding editors of Bzag! had much knowledge or experience of the world of print. Three of us were still at school, one was on a Youth Training Scheme, which helped pay for printing. We sold all 200 copies of the first issue, but after that debut there was only me and Ben left writing, laying out and selling the entire zine. It became an obsession. Most of the new music we heard came via John Peel or Leeds independent record shop Jumbo Records, but alongside writing on bands, we had cartoons, collage art and a full-on attitude about the world. The editorial highlight of the early issues was probably 'conducting' an interview with Peel in which we typed out questions, and then for the answers just dropped in totally irrelevant and random passages we'd taped from his show the night before. It was stupid, fun and a good example of how doing something different when faced with blank pages to fill can take you into different dimensions. ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISEMENT Ben drew some really naive pictures of Peel and as a sidebar I added a guide to getting a free meal at the BBC Maida Vale Studios in London by saying you were with a band doing a Peel Session. This was something I'd experienced when I accompanied a favourite local band The Three Johns to record there. Amazingly, John Peel and his producer John Waters went on and on about it on their co-presented Saturday teatime show on Radio One, the tone all faux-shock horror, laughing about our cheek. For two teens fresh out of school and shovelled onto the dole this was really exciting. One minute Peel and Walters were talking about American comedian Eric Bogosian and playing Misty In Roots, and the next they were reading out bits of our fanzine. This was like a big green light to a different world at a time when unemployment was pretty much the sole option for many of us after we left school. Not long after this issue we met the Dead Kennedys and MDC in their dressing room at Leeds Poly, and that night I sold so many copies of Bzag! (at 20p a go) that my army surplus combat trousers were bulging with coppers. I had to stand at the back of the gig clutching the small change to stop it from wearing through my pockets, while Ben was down the front in the waves of stage divers rolling off the stage. Soon after this he amicably veered off to Raise Hell in his own hand printed mini-riot bible, dedicated to thrash punk, hardcore and its many micro-divisions. I kept going with Bzag! and two years later aged 21, with a forensic knowledge of pretty much every dive venue and local emerging music scene was recruited to run the NME live reviews pages. Raising Hell covers courtesy Raising Hell ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISEMENT As I became more visible, Ben pretty much disappeared. For years, the only reference I could find of him anywhere was a tiny news report of someone with the same name as him winning a court case for being on the receiving end of some police brutality at a squat gig. I assumed this might have something to do with why he'd chosen to become undiscoverable. Life rolled on, and undoubtedly the strangest thing that changed from those teenage years was that Chumbawamba, the rag tag local theatrical punk performers who'd be at every squat gig or benefit festival we ever attended in West Yorkshire, signed to EMI and had a massive global hit with 'Tubthumping'. This was as weird as me ending up editing a glossy fashion magazine in Vogue House. Finding Raising Hell again was both welcome and timely. All this year I've been seeing references to a new fanzine scene across London, workshops in bookshops, libraries, and the Photobook cafe in Old Street. I'd already plunged back into it myself. In two weeks in spring I hauled over 500 padded A4 envelopes in multiple journeys to the local post office, daily revisits with bag after bag armful after armful of Zine Age Kicks, a self-published dubplate visual version of my memoir Animal House about my life as a writer and editor in music and men's magazines. The section I'd enjoyed most was digging out and reprinting the covers of those old fanzines. ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISEMENT In 1983 when we started Bzag! there were at least 12 fanzines in Leeds and Bradford alone. Molotov Comics, Knee Deep In Shit, The Wool City Rocker, Whippings and Apologies and Tongue In Cheek were the first I discovered, then there were Kill Your Pet Puppy and Panache from London, which I'd found in an anarchist bookstore. 80s fanzine land was not only a genuine underground press, but existed as the entry point to a national network of fans, gig promoters, fledgling indie record label bosses and bands all crashing on one another's sofas and sharing vans, line-ups and dressing rooms. I'd walk into my friend Mike Stout's student flat in Headingley and the mushroom-cloud haired bassist of The Jesus and Mary Chain would be snogging a member of The Shop Assistants. Stay with The Membranes in Manchester and they'd shave your hair into a mohican. Climb into the back of The June Brides' van and you'd find an armchair nestled amidst the guitar cases and drum kit. Find yourself in a Brixton chip shop after a gig with The Mekons, Very Things and Hagar The Womb, and you'd bump into Louise from RayGun fanzine and Ian Astbury of Death Cult in his huge Russian Ushunka, fresh back from hanging around at Live Aid. At the GLC Festival at Rockwell Park a hilarious breakdancing chef called Richard Edwards from the Cool Notes and Out On The Floor recruited a young Steve Lamacq of Pack Of Lies in Harlow and I to run a fanzine stall. Zines as featured in James Brown's Zine Age Kicks The first time there was any real sizeable mainstream focus on this scene was when an NME writer called Neil Taylor was lured into the darkest holes in the ground by the appeal of The Jesus & Mary Chain, and stumbled across a whole lava flow of noisy spiky bands, influenced by The Fall, Beefheart, the Gang of Four and the Velvet Underground. This was quickly packaged together as an NME reader offer – the C86 tape – which you could get by collecting vouchers from three weeks worth of issues. For those of us editing and writing our own fanzines, promoting these bands, and putting their early indie singles out – quite often the same people did all three – you could have called it C84 or C85. ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISEMENT It wasn't just press attention that gave the scene more momentum. When Thatcher's government introduced the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, which made part time independent work whilst still claiming unemployment benefit legal and indeed encouraged, we no longer had to hide our tiny illicit earnings. In return for an extra £4 a fortnight (on top of the previous £24) we were removed from the unemployment figures but not the dole itself. It was a government sleight of hand to get the figures down, but acted as another green flag for people trying to get somewhere. Most importantly for the fledgling creative entrepreneurs, we were free to do what we wanted to do. Primal Scream, who also ran the Splash! One club in Glasgow, were still on that scheme when they were making Screamadelica half a decade later. Fanzines were such a vital and easy to create medium that loads of bands had them too. The Scream's fellow Glaswegians The Pastels had their own fanzine, Juniper Berry Berry. Alan McGhee, the guy behind the band Biff Bang Pow, had the Communication Blur fanzine which came with the earliest Creation Records flexi discs, The scene stretched like this from Plymouth to Aberdeen, Liverpool to Lincolnshire and over the North Sea to Holland, Germany and beyond. It just seemed natural that if you were obsessive enough to be into new independent music you were probably operating on multiple levels. In Liverpool football casual band The Farm promoted gigs, and lead singer Peter Hooton co-edited music zine The End. In Manchester, Postcard Records-influenced punk funksters Big Flame had a brilliant weekly night called The Wilde Club where the likes of Debris editor Dave Hallam would DJ. In Hull The Unity Club put on bands like The Three Johns, Redskins, and Newtown Neurotics, who often toured to raise money for striking miners. It had its own fanzine, New Youth, featuring local bands like the Gargoyles, Housemartins and 3-Action. Earlier this year, an American print archive asked if they could scan or take copies of Bzag! for their cultural archive. I've recently been interviewed about the fanzine era for books and academic studies, but this interest has not only been retrospective. In Plymouth I came across young photographer Anna Leader, who is creating her own music zine SOUND, and found the brilliant independent mod mag Detail after they convinced Paul Weller to guest edit an issue. At independent football publishers Stanchion Books' annual event at Brixton Library this summer, half the room were selling fanzines. I picked up brilliant zines from Leedsista, Tiro, Lower Block and Trekuartista 95. At a time when the millions of influencer voices on social media are becoming repetitive, bland and needy, a keen appetite for independent analogue print has emerged. Now, do you want to buy a fanzine? You can buy Zine Age Kicks direct from James Brown via his Instagram, from the MagCulture shop or in person at an event at the Photobook Cafe in London on 15 September – info on the flier below, tickets here.