Relive your youth with this memorial device. Spot the bands you like. The venues you visited. Pick up a guitar and make a racket. Can you make a song that lasts two and a half minutes? Besides being a memory hoard, Matthew Worley has created a panoramic vista of fanzines. Not content with the mainstream zines, if there can be such a thing, he digs into the provinces beyond Camden and Ilford to the lesser known, forgotten publications of Sunderland and Yeovil with Acts of Defiance and All the Madmen. Wherever there was a Gestetner or a Xerox machine, scissors, Letraset lettering, and youthful enthusiasm, the zines emerged as amateurish and vibrant as the music they celebrated, the antithesis of the high production values and progressive rock with its hour long symphonies and triple album art work.
There are many mini-biographies to devour, a few asides to the Situationists and Guy Debord and Raymond Williams, who celebrated community printing at the grassroots, for those who like theory. Of the famous zinists, Paul Morley and Jamie Reid have cameo appearances. Where the book delves into new areas, at least for me, comes in the exploration of the zines that started after the initial period when punk became mainstream, after The Clash signed to CBS. The overlap between politics and the zines and between musicians, who started out as zinists, is carefully explored.
What the book shows is a cultural explosion, often crude, but vibrant nonetheless, and in the provinces, as effective as anything, in publicising the new music before it joined the brands, in its no logo phase. For people of a certain age, this is a brilliant book for reminiscing, for future popular historians it could act as a very detailed road map of a short period where every one could be in a band and could be the editor of a short lived magazine. I wish I could see some of the zines dedicated to individual musicians, such as Jonathan Richman.
Any Cop?: I hope there are more books like this to come from Reaktion.
Richard Clegg
Bookmunch 