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Punk, Politics and British (fan)zines, 1976-84: 'While the world was dying, did
you wonder why?'

Article  in  History Workshop Journal · April 2015

DOI: 10.1093/hwj/dbu043

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Fig. 1. Sniffin’ Glue, No. 1, 1976.

Punk, Politics and British (fan)zines,

1976–84: ‘While the world was dying, did
you wonder why?’
by Matthew Worley

Music fanzines started out as a way of putting forward the views of music
lovers that the big music press didn’t recognise. Now we still use the name
although some fanzines have very little to do with music, but use the idea
to publish other arts and ideas [. . .] The fact is that anybody with some-
thing to say or wanting some outlet for their art can start a ‘fanzine’, even
if it’s only a one off consisting of two pages. Community presses are the
cheapest and beter [sic] badges, rough trade along with local record shops
etc. will distribute it. So why not do it?
Paper Alcohol Collective, Northampton1

University of Reading [email protected]

History Workshop Journal Issue 79 Advance Access Publication 7 March 2015 doi:10.1093/hwj/dbu043
ß The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved.
 Punk, Politics and British (fan)zines 77

Produced in the summer of 1976, the first issue of Sniffin’ Glue . . . and Other
Rock ’n’ Roll Habits does not now look like a portent of cultural change
(Fig. 1). Cheaply photocopied on eight sides of A4 paper and stapled in the
top-left corner, the title is scribbled in black felt-tip pen beneath which a
typed strap-line comments: ‘This thing is not meant to be read . . . it’s for
soaking in glue and sniffin’.’ The contents are scrawled over the cover page:
The Ramones, Blue Oyster Cult, ‘punk reviews’. Inside, the same combin-
ation of pen and type outline the magazine’s rationale: ‘We believe rock ’n’
roll, especially ‘‘punk rock’’, is about enjoyment and nothing else – leave the
concepts to the likes of Yes, Mike Oldfield etc.’ A series of breathless record
and gig reviews then follow, before the last page reveals a little more cultural

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context.2 First, the weekly British music press – which in 1976 comprised
Melody Maker, New Musical Express (NME), Record Mirror and Sounds –
is dismissed as being ‘so far away from the kids that they can’t possibly say
anything of any importance to punk rock fans’.3 Second, ‘punk rock’ itself is
given definition. Although the term formed part of the music-press lexicon
by the early 1970s, it had only just been adopted to describe a new wave of
bands committed to what Sniffin’ Glue characterized as ‘rock in its lowest
form – on the level of the streets. Kids jamming together in the dad’s garage,
poor equipment, tight clothes, empty heads (nothing to do now you’ve left
school) and model shops’.4 Third, ‘most’ contemporary British rock groups
are described as ‘past it’, with only a few fledgling bands – including the Sex
Pistols – noted for providing any sense of excitement. Finally, the fanzine’s
editor, Mark P [Mark Perry], a teenage bank clerk from Deptford, delivers
the first of what would become a series of rallying cries for those reading
Sniffin’ Glue to build a punk scene themselves, to ‘do it yourself’. ‘All you
kids’, he urged more definitively in no. 5 (November 1976), ‘don’t be satis-
fied with what we write. Go out and start your own fanzines . . . flood the
market with punk writing’.5
The period between Sniffin’ Glue’s appearance in July 1976 and its final
issue in August–September 1977 marked the emergence of punk as a recog-
nizable musical form and youth culture.6 Integral to this was the production
of countless fanzines inspired by Perry’s lead and the DIY ethos that under-
pinned British punk almost from the outset. Across the UK, fanzines helped
initiate, encourage and survey the upsurge of activity sparked by the Sex
Pistols, The Clash and others. From Scotland, Ripped & Torn appeared in
late 1976 in Cumbernauld, near Glasgow, billed as the ‘first Scottish punk
mag., written by fans . . . for fans’.7 This was followed by A Boring Fanzine
and Trash ’77 (both Glasgow), Edinburgh’s Hangin’ Around and Jungleland
and titles such as Crash Bang (Airdrie), Granite City (Aberdeen), Kingdom
Come (Dunfermline) and The Next Big Thing (Stirlingshire). In Manchester,
early fanzines included Ghast Up, Girl Trouble, Noisy People, Plaything and
Shy Talk; the Sheffield scene was covered by Gun Rubber, Home Groan and
Submission. The emergence of Birmingham punk was captured by Censored;
Leeds by New Pose and Pure Mania; Bristol by Loaded. Alternative Ulster
78 History Workshop Journal

and Private World reported from Northern Ireland; Heat and Raw Power set
up in Dublin; Rip Off and Up Yours in Wales. Back in England, Bombsite
committed to ‘fight for the new wave in the north west’,8 while events in the
north-east were detailed in Bored Stiff, Deviation Street, Gabba Gabba Hey,
Garage Land, Genocide and Out Now. In and around London, meanwhile,
multiple fanzines were produced over 1976–7, including 48 Thrills, Bondage,
Chainsaw, In the City, Jamming, Jolt, Live Wire, London’s Outrage, Panache,
Sideburns, Skum and White Stuff.9
Many of these – alongside other titles produced throughout Britain’s
towns, cities and villages10 – followed the Sniffin’ Glue template: fervid
text with cut ’n’ paste imagery that was xeroxed and sold at minimal cost

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in local record shops or at gigs.11 Most lasted for but a handful of issues,
printed in runs of tens or a few hundred. Several were one-offs created in a
flurry of excitement or inspiration. Some, however, began to develop
beyond the rather crude efforts of the first punk ’zines towards more diverse
and creative content and design. Sniffin’ Glue itself evolved over 1976–7 to
include critical analyses of punk’s development, photographs and contribu-
tions from others beside Perry. London’s Burning (1976), by the journalist
Jonh Ingham (sic), comprised collages of newspaper straplines, photos and
Clash lyrics, while the first edition of Jon Savage’s London’s Outrage (1976)
interspersed media clippings with pop cultural references and an essay fore-
telling Britain’s descent into fascism. The second issue, produced in 1977,
compiled photographs of desolate and graffitied London landscapes that
reflected punk’s dystopian vision of ‘No Future’ (Fig. 2).12 Indeed, the
graphic design of punk ’zines soon advanced to incorporate collage,
montage, illustration and a wider colour palette that contrasted with the
simply-typed or handwritten black-and-white aesthetic of most earlier ex-
amples. The influence of the punk band Crass (formed in 1977), who sought
to turn punk’s rhetorical reference to anarchy into coherent practice, led to a
groundswell of overtly political ’zines. The best of these – Acts of Defiance,
Anathema, Enigma, Fack, New Crimes, Pigs for Slaughter, Toxic Graffitti
(sic)13 – mixed limited music coverage with political tracts on subjects such
as vivisection, nuclear war, squatting and the various organizational and
intellectual props of ‘the system’. Others, such as Vague, began as fairly
conventional fanzines before transforming through in-depth analyses of
punk’s socio-cultural relevance to expanded essays on situationist practice
and the Red Army Faction.14 Rapid Eye Movement, too, morphed from a
punk ’zine into a book-length compendium exploring what its founder,
Simon Dwyer, called ‘occulture’.15
As this suggests, the fanzines that emerged with punk soon transcended
their ‘fan’ prefix.16 Some were produced by collectives to augment social
networks; others allowed for political (including anarchist, fascist, feminist
and socialist) agendas to be applied through punk and the so-called ‘post-
punk’ cultures that formed in its wake. By so doing, they spanned a subter-
ranean web of alternative media through which dissenting voices and
 Punk, Politics and British (fan)zines 79

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Fig. 2. London’s Outrage, no. 2, 1977, title page and p. 3.

Fig. 3. International Anthem, no. 1, 1977; International Anthem, no. 2 1979.

80 History Workshop Journal

formative political opinions could be expressed and discussed. The objective

of this article, therefore, is to recover and contextualize the political content
of fanzines associated with British punk into the 1980s. It will examine the
emergence of cultural critiques informed by punk’s relationship to popular
music and the culture industry; the expression of broadly socialist ideas
stimulated by punk and the ‘cultural turn’ ongoing across the left; and the
formulation of a recognizably anarchist politics born of punk’s DIY ethos.
More generally, the article sheds light on a culture described by Jon Savage
as akin to the English tradition of pamphleteering filtered through the coun-
ter-cultural politics of the ‘psychedelic left and pro-situ’ underground press
of the 1960s.17

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‘WHY READ THIS WHEN YOU CAN PRODUCE YOUR OWN!!!’18
The history of fanzines has been well told.19 Their origin can be traced back
to the home-made magazines produced by science-fiction fans in the US and
Britain from the 1930s; labours of love that enabled stories and critical
commentaries to be shared among enthusiasts. Thereafter, non-commercial
and non-professional publications emerged across a range of cultural
spheres, from comics, sport and cinema to sexuality and religion. Not sur-
prisingly, music provided – and continues to provide – a particularly fruitful
site of fanzine activity, with publications concentrated on specific genres or
artists dating back to at least the 1950s. To this extent, many of the early
punk fanzines followed in a set tradition, providing celebratory coverage of
the ‘new wave’ for the appreciation of like-minded ‘fans’.
And yet, the sheer number of punk-informed fanzines that appeared from
1976–7 suggests they signalled more than a simple by-product of musical
consumption. Already by the 1960s the distinction between fanzines, coun-
ter-cultural publications (such as Frendz, International Times, Oz) and sam-
izdat-style pamphlets rooted in a longer radical tradition had become
blurred.20 Indeed, these three points of connection were linked via Jamie
Reid, whose artwork for the Sex Pistols used détourned media graphics and
concepts cultivated during his time at Croydon Art School (with Malcolm
McLaren and Helen Wallington-Lloyd) and disseminated through the
Suburban Press he co-founded in 1970. The Sex Pistols’ own fanzine,
Anarchy in the UK (1976), displayed such a pedigree, featuring pictures of
the band’s early coterie with politically-charged skits that subscribed to one
criterion: ‘Does it threaten the status quo?’21 Crass, too, issued the first in a
series of International Anthem ’zines in late 1977, juxtaposing Gee Vaucher’s
artwork with collages, lyrics and extended essays by Penny Rimbaud
[Jeremy Ratter] that revealed the band’s counter-cultural heritage (Fig. 3).
As a result, punk and its associated fanzines came imbued with a subversive
aesthetic that helped tender broader political potential. As bands wrote
songs with political content and aligned themselves to causes such as
Rock Against Racism (RAR) and the Campaign for Nuclear
 Punk, Politics and British (fan)zines 81

Disarmament (CND), so fanzines provided the space to debate and deter-

mine the wider implications of punk’s cultural politics.
This was recognized at the time. For Tony Parsons, having been recruited
to the NME with Julie Burchill in late 1976 to cover punk’s emergence,
fanzines represented ‘the largest, nastiest, funniest and healthiest selection
of alternative music press in the history of rock ’n’ roll’.22 That is, fanzines
offered a creative space to contest and circumvent what Cobalt Hate
described in 1980 as the ‘bullshit ridden’ coverage of the weeklies.23 Not
dissimilarly, Jon Savage noted in 1976 how fanzines provided a literary and
graphic complement to punk’s musical and stylistic assault. As well as
democratizing youth cultural practice, fanzines pioneered a ‘new language’

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in the form of ‘visual and verbal rants’ freed from the pressures of censor-
ship, editorial dictates, subbing or deadlines.24
Most scholarly analyses of British punk fanzines have picked up on simi-
lar themes. Teal Triggs, in particular, has done much to extol the graphic
innovations of punk ’zines, demonstrating how their visual language formed
an essential part of punk’s cultural revolt and helped forge a unique
aesthetic that has since been absorbed into conventional design. Both
Triggs and Tricia Henry have made explicit the extent to which punk’s
graphics resembled (and occasionally drew from) approaches pioneered by
modernist art forms earlier in the century.25 More broadly, sociological
accounts of British punk have – like Savage before them – noted how a
fanzine’s cut ’n’ paste assemblage reflected the culture’s early sartorial brico-
lage and sense of agency. Dick Hebdige, for example, pointed to the jumbled
pagination, spelling mistakes and cheap production-values of punk fanzines
as an indication of their ‘urgency and immediacy . . . memos from the front
line’.26 Dave Laing, meanwhile, emphasized how the language and imagery
used by fanzines helped define punk’s boundaries within (and against) the
music industry and society more generally.27 If the abiding legacy of punk
was to provide a cultural process that transformed the passive observer
into active participant, then fanzines deserve their place alongside the inde-
pendent labels and self-released records that so readily embodied the
DIY spirit.28
Such approaches make sense. The cut-up imagery and irreverent text of
most fanzines did indeed replicate punk’s acerbic style, which in turn
appeared to embody the rhetoric of social dislocation and decline that
shaped the media and political discourse of the 1970s. Simultaneously, the
very process of writing and distributing a fanzine affirmed punk’s stated
intention of reclaiming popular music and youth culture for those who
made, listened to and lived it. Guides to producing a fanzine became a
staple feature of punk ’zines, as important as Sideburns’ seminal diagram
of three chords and the instruction: ‘This is a chord. This is another. This is
a Third. Now form a band’ (Fig. 4).29 Furthermore, the content of most
British fanzines revealed punk to be very much a conscious response to on-
going cultural and political developments.
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Fig. 4. Sideburns, no. 1, 1977, p. 2.

History Workshop Journal
82
 Punk, Politics and British (fan)zines 83

We should not overstate matters. There were countless fanzines that

simply imitated the existing music press, providing less an alternative than
a weak complement. Many, too, remained fixated on music and the internal
dynamics of youth culture, squabbling as to just who or what constituted
‘punk’ and delineating tribal rivalries (punks, teds, mods, skins etc.) that too
often spilled over into violent confrontation.30 Record reviews, self-made
charts, band interviews and tales of a night out watching a gig continued to
provide the bulk of a typical fanzine’s copy. In other words, they comprised
the usual concerns of teenagers enthused by pop music and the shifting
contours of style and taste within popular culture more generally.
Nevertheless, punk also generated overtly political expression. Though its

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obituary was drafted many times within the music press and media, punk’s
enduring relevance and diffusion continued long into the 1980s and was
chartered across a seemingly never-ending production line of fanzines.31
Some of these, moreover, set out to define and direct punk’s purpose
beyond the ‘enjoyment’ demanded in the first issue of Sniffin’ Glue and
towards more ambitious objectives of cultural and political change.

‘FREEDOM IS PRECIOUS, MOST PEOPLE DON’T HAVE IT, THEY

SUFFER QUIETLY AWAY FROM OUR TV SCREENS’32
Punk, initially at least, was presented as a response to the perceived state of
popular music in the mid 1970s; that is, to a diluted pop mainstream (as
broadcast on Top of the Pops and Radio One) and the domination of rock
’n’ roll by an increasingly aged and detached elite.33 Just as The Clash dis-
missed ‘Elvis, Beatles [and] the Rolling Stones’ as irrelevant to the lives of
young people in 1976–7, so Tony D (Tony Drayton) opened his first issue of
Ripped & Torn with a tirade against ‘those boring cunts (like the whole of
Led Zeppelin, The Who, Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder etc.) lazing away
in some hot tropical paradise, whilst us poor punters have to make do with
any shit they care to pour on us’.34 At the very least, punk signalled a
generational, stylistic and attitudinal shift in popular music and its asso-
ciated culture.
Such interpretation formed the basis of much early fanzine content.
’Zines helped reaffirm the idea of punk as a challenge to the mainstream
music and media industries, demystifying their processes and opening-up
access to production and dissemination. Or, to quote Rick O’Shea in
Heat (1977), punk meant ‘putting yourself against established sys-
tems . . . makin’ a stand and clearing the way for other bands to follow’.
The aim, as Mark Perry saw it, was to ‘take in everything, including posters,
record covers, stage presentation, the lot!’35 Fanzines, by extension, were
designed to facilitate this by providing a medium through which those clo-
sest to the culture could define, contest and shape it from within. ‘It is up to
us, the audience’, Edinburgh’s Hangin’ Around (1977) insisted, ‘to cast out
the bandwagon jumpers and free loaders and to weed out the posers and the
money grabbers’.36
84 History Workshop Journal

What this meant in practice could vary. As well as giving the ‘institutio-
nalized music industry’ a ‘good kick’,37 fanzines tended to elevate local or
grass-roots expressions of punk culture above those presented by the na-
tional music papers or record industry. While Sheffield’s Gun Rubber fea-
tured a graffitied wall displaying the slogan ‘I don’t care about London’,
later ’zines – for example Anti-Social (Coventry), Defused (Cumbria), Wool
City Rocker (Bradford) – actively prioritized coverage of local artists as
editorial policy. ‘Name’ bands were interviewed and reviewed as they
passed through a particular town or city, but most fanzines found space
to promote local groups, clubs and records. Some even became closely
related to local venues, such as Bradford’s Knee Deep in Shit, which covered

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the city’s ‘1 in 12 club’ from 1981, while others set up cassette labels to
distribute compilations and demo tapes through the fanzine network.38
Not dissimilarly, ’zines served as a point of connection between bands
and the wider punk culture. Those interviewed were typically quizzed as to
their politics, their objectives and the amount of money they earned or
conditions of their contract. For bands to appear disconnected from their
audience base was to provoke accusations of succumbing to the lure of the
star-system and betraying their punk roots. Most notoriously, perhaps, The
Clash soon came under attack for their apparent absorption into the rock ’n’
roll mainstream, though other bands were similarly mocked, condemned or
ignored once they were deemed to have transgressed punk’s shifting param-
eters in one way or another.39
Finally, ’zines offered a very real alternative to the established music press,
covering bands and scenes dismissed by the NME and others, and enabling
those within the culture to rebut media distortions and reassert cultural iden-
tities. The cult-status of the pre-pop Adam & the Ants can only really be
understood through the attention given by Panache, Vague and specialist
‘Ants-zines’ produced at the turn of the decade.40 Nor can the brief-but-
notable influence of bands such as A. P. F. Brigade, Brigandage, Crisis, Six
Minute War or UK Decay be adequately appreciated without reference to
fanzines. Crass, meanwhile, tended to eschew contact with a music press they
considered little more than a conduit for corporate interests, preferring in-
stead to give interviews to fanzines through which they also distributed state-
ments and information.41 Coming from a different direction, ’zines such as
Hard as Nails and Skinhead Havoc did much to reassert street-level cultures in
the face of challenges from the far-right and distortions within the mass
media. In particular, they covered reggae and soul to reveal a far broader
cultural heritage than that depicted in the music weeklies or tabloids.42
At a basic level, then, fanzines allowed those engaged with punk to con-
struct their own cultural narratives. These in turn fed into a hardening
critique of the media and music industry that shaped punk’s cultural pol-
itics. First, the machinations of the music business were dissected and related
to broader analyses of cultural commodification. For David George, writing
in Dirt (1978), punk’s exploitation by an ‘arrogant capitalism’ reaffirmed the
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85
Punk, Politics and British (fan)zines

Fig. 5a. Enigma, no. 4, 1982.

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Fig. 5b. Nihilistic Vices, no. 1, 1979, p. 20.

History Workshop Journal
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87

Fig. 5c. Kill Your Pet Puppy, no. 1, 1980, p. 2.

Punk, Politics and British (fan)zines
88 History Workshop Journal

need for bands and ’zines to critically assess their commitment to a ‘non-
sexist, non-racist, non-violent, non-capitalistic, non-exploitative rock move-
ment’.43 As this implies, fanzines tended to emphasize their non-profit
motive, with prices set low to cover costs and content designed without
consideration of commercial impact.44 Preference was similarly given to
bands that sought to by-pass major labels in favour of smaller independents
or self-released their own records. Tony Medlycott, whose Aftermath sur-
veyed punk’s dissemination across east London in 1979–81, saw independ-
ently produced records (and ’zines) as the basis for a ‘new underground’; an
‘opposition’ concerned with ‘putting over their views’ rather than pandering
to ‘record companies, popular radio, large audiences and so on’.45 Indeed,

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such affinities were confirmed by Rough Trade’s willingness to distribute
’zines through its emergent distribution network and by the offer from
nearby Better Badges to print fanzines on a ‘print now, pay later’ basis.46
The result, of course, was to expand the potential reach of a fanzine and
prompt an increase in the number of titles available.
Second, a fanzine’s media critique often extended beyond the perceived
limitations of the music press. The power of the media proved a constant
source of fascination in punk and was reflected in countless band names,
song titles/subject-matter and graphics.47 In particular, punk revealed and
explored how the media commodified, objectified and anaesthetized. So, for
example, The Secret Public, published by Linder (Linda Mulvey) and Jon
Savage in 1978, comprised photomontages that spliced together porno-
graphic images, household appliances and advert-speak to expose the gen-
dered false promises of the media spectacle. More generically, at least by the
1980s, ’zines used newspaper lettering and cut-out headlines to reassert
punk’s contemporaneity and sense of engagement. Headlines depicting
crisis or horror were juxtaposed with bland advertising imagery, while
benign media set-pieces (a woman in a kitchen, children playing) were set
against acerbic essays on gender stereotyping or impending war (Fig. 5). In
effect, television, radio and the print media were recognized as forces of
control that reinforced social moralities, stifled dissent and distracted
from the inequities of everyday life.48
Such critical analyses were partly born of experience. Punk had
entered the wider public consciousness on the back of a media-generated
moral panic following the Sex Pistols’ infamous appearance on Thames
Television’s Today programme on 1 December 1976. It had also been codi-
fied and commodified over the course of 1977, revealing the speed by which
its perceived challenge could be disarmed, repackaged and transferred into
profit. Certainly, by late 1977, a note of despondency was discernible in
fanzines as they assessed punk’s impact and future potential. Rants against
‘posers’ and the commercial availability of a punk ‘uniform’ became stand-
ard copy long into the 1980s.49
Equally, however, punk’s appraisal of the media and the exploitative
nature of the music industry bore traces of critical analyses that had
 Punk, Politics and British (fan)zines 89

gained prominence over the 1960s.50 This, in part, was due to the influence
of those such as Malcolm McLaren, Jamie Reid, Bernie Rhodes and Penny
Rimbaud whose familiarity with counter-cultural or leftist politics fed into
punk’s construction.51 But it also revealed punk’s interrelationship with
broader debates as to the political significance of cultural form and practice.
Almost from the outset, punk had been defined either as a product or a
reflection of the severe economic and political dislocations of the 1970s. It
should be no surprise, therefore, that punk’s fanzines referenced and
engaged with the political environment into which they emerged.

ROCK ’N’ ROLL MAGAZINES FOR THE MODERN WORLD52

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British punk emerged and developed at a distinct historical juncture.
Although scholars have begun to question both the nature and extent of
the ‘crisis’ facing Britain in the 1970s (demonstrating how its meaning was
constructed and exploited to forge a hegemonic narrative), significant socio-
economic, political and cultural change undoubtedly did take place.53
Indeed, to summarize the defining motifs of the period is to create a textual
montage akin to the collages of media straplines and images generated by
punk fanzines at the time. Thus we may point to inflationary pressures
producing industrial confrontation, economic instability and a ‘winter of
discontent’ (1978–9); to a global economic depression, an oil crisis (1973–
4) and a sense of post-imperial insecurity played out through Britain’s rela-
tions with Europe, devolution debates and the Falklands War (1982); to
simmering social tensions evoked by a resurgent National Front (NF), the
riotous summer of 1981 and such media ‘folk devils’ as muggers, football
hooligans, glue sniffers and punk rockers; to the bloody conflict in Northern
Ireland, mainland IRA bombings and terrorist attacks at home and abroad;
to a re-emergent cold war and a revitalized CND; to long-term unemploy-
ment, deindustrialization and the picket-line battles that culminated in the
miners’ strike of 1984–5. Underpinning it all, moreover, were slower shifts
across Britain’s socio-economic base – from industrial production to the
service sector – and evolving socio-cultural attitudes. More generally, the
period saw the broadly collectivist values of the post-war settlement give
way to the individualist principles of neo-liberalism, as all three British
mainstream parties underwent notable realignments and the ‘popular au-
thoritarianism’ that Stuart Hall recognized as the kernel of Thatcherism
buried itself deep into the national psyche.54
Punk resonated, at least in part, because it reflected and engaged with the
implications of all this. Political symbols, slogans and signifiers of ‘crisis’
formed a core component of punk’s iconography. The early designs of
Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood contained swastikas, images
of Marx, situationist references and quotes from Buenaventura Durruti.
The Sex Pistols’ second single (‘God Save the Queen’) provided a critical
riposte to 1977’s Silver Jubilee celebrations wrapped in a defaced image of
the Queen; their first, ‘Anarchy in the UK’ (1976), coincided with Denis
90 History Workshop Journal

Healey’s application to the International Monetary Fund for a loan to offset

Britain’s economic instability – the song’s title providing both a totem of the
country’s sense of decline and a cry for self-emancipation. As for The Clash,
they delivered songs of barbed social commentary that referenced the 1976
Notting Hill riot, unemployment, boredom, hate and war. Given the wider
context, punk’s ire and claims to relevance were easily construed as a youth-
ful reaction to political failure and a bleak (no) future.55
Such interpretation soon filtered through the music press and mainstream
media into the fanzines. While many involved with punk resisted and re-
jected the political connotations applied to it, others embraced its potential
for critical and political comment. A fanzine such as Guttersnipe (1978–80),

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for example, was produced by a mainly teenage collective from Telford who
juxtaposed gig reviews and band coverage with social-realist images of graf-
fitied walls, ‘kids’ on the street, newspaper clippings and council housing.
Inside, articles on anti-racism, teenage sex, Ireland, apartheid and violence
were featured alongside interviews with local unemployed youths, ex-Borstal
inmates and survivors of failed suicide attempts. The effect was to locate
punk as a vehicle for socio-political reportage; a mode of documentation
and stimulus for protest.56
As this suggests, the substance and look of Guttersnipe chimed with the
times to create a veritable ‘structure of feeling’.57 Moreover, its emphasis on
youthful disaffection, political tensions and economic crisis was evident in
other fanzines keen to align punk’s emergence to wider political and social
themes. In particular, anti-racism and anti-fascism featured regularly in the
late 1970s, partly as a consequence of the NF’s presence on certain inner-city
streets, and partly in response to a sense that Britain was heading towards a
crisis that would reap only an authoritarian solution. As newspaper editor-
ials evoked fears of socio-economic collapse and rumours of military
(or allegedly communist) coups circulated, so punk’s lyrics and imagery
responded to and echoed the media clamour.58 Articles critiquing punk’s
adoption of the swastika appeared in Jolt and Ripped & Torn, images of NF
marches fed into fanzine photomontage, while the fourth issue of Flicks
presented itself with a large swastika covered by the slogan ‘smash fas-
cism’.59 Similarly, tales of police harassment and terse dismissals of the
political establishment reaffirmed the notion of punk as a creative response
to despondency, especially as the 1970s gave way to the 1980s.60
To some extent, the politicized content of punk fanzines was informed by
attempts on the left and far-right to claim – or use – punk for ideological
purposes.61 So, for example, members of the Young Communist League
(YCL), Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and other leftist tendencies inter-
preted punk as a retort to capital’s failings: a means to ‘protest against
the frustrations and conditions that affect working-class youth’.62
Similarly, on the far-right, punk was understood by some young activists
as a violent and exciting reaction to the ‘hum-drum life of the liberal soci-
ety’.63 Not surprisingly, therefore, the fanzines produced from 1976 soon fed
 Punk, Politics and British (fan)zines 91

into an on-going debate as to the meaning of specific (youth) cultural forms

and their potential for facilitating social and political change. In other
words, fanzines were recognized either as a form of alternative media to
the mainstream or as samizdat-style publications designed to propagate rad-
ical perspectives. The YCL displayed its affinity to punk’s youthful revolt by
revamping the graphic design of its newspaper, Challenge, to reflect that of a
fanzine, while the SWP went one better by launching the short-lived Red
Rebel, a ’zine-like youth paper that mixed political tracts and interviews with
bands such as the Angelic Upstarts. Rock Against Racism, which worked
closely with the SWP and the Anti-Nazi League (ANL) in the late 1970s,
also published its own ’zine-style newspaper, Temporary Hoarding, from

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1977, combining music coverage with political essays and punk-informed
photo-collages of strikes, RAR gigs, slogans and demonstrations.64 From
the opposite direction, the NF’s Eddy Morrison launched a Punk Front
fanzine in Leeds in 1978, having already begun to integrate music coverage
and racist politics in a smaller, self-produced magazine called British News.
Thereafter, both Morrison and Joe Pearce, editor of the Young National
Front’s Bulldog magazine, initiated Rock Against Communism (RAC) as a
counter to RAR, replete with an associated fanzine, Rocking the Reds.65
Of course, ’zines were also produced independently by young political
activists enthused by punk and its potential. The aforementioned
Guttersnipe included SWP members among its collective and the early
1980s saw a number of punk-and-poetry ’zines emerge featuring ‘ranters’
(Attila the Stockbroker, Little Brother, Seething Wells, Mick Turpin, Tim
Wells) keen to use the infrastructure of punk to communicate and propagate
their socialist politics. A flick through Another Day Another Word
(Liverpool), Blaze (Peterborough), Cool Notes (London), Molotov Comics
(Leeds), Stand Up and Spit (London) and Tirana Thrash (Harlow) offers a
portal into the period of incipient Thatcherism via fierce – if sometimes
humorous – tirades against unemployment, fascism, ‘trendy lefties’, police
brutality and the recast shadow of the cold war.66
Simultaneously, the political content of punk fanzines related closely to
the ‘cultural turn’ evident in late twentieth-century politics.67 As new sites of
struggle emerged over the 1950s–60s – in culture, language, youth, race,
gender, the media – so the personal became political and greater emphasis
was placed on individual responses to questions of sexuality, identity, leisure
and pleasure. This, typically, took the form of lengthy interviews with bands
such as the Au Pairs, Gang of Four, The Mekons, The Pop Group, The
Raincoats, Red Crayola and Scritti Politti on matters of creative autonomy,
gender, hegemony and praxis.68 But it also expressed itself in poems and
short stories that offered stark portrayals of alienation, misogyny and anx-
iety.69 Brass Lip (1979), from Birmingham, focused its attention solely on
bands committed to exploring gender politics, discussing their relationship
to the women’s movement and exposing the sexism endemic in the music
industry (Fig. 6).70 Previously, too, Lucy Toothpaste (Lucy Whitman)’s Jolt
92 History Workshop Journal

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Fig. 6. Brass Lip, no. 1, 1979.

had applied a feminist critique to punk that later found expression through
RAR and Rock Against Sexism (RAS). Both Temporary Hoarding and the
RAS associated ’zine, Drastic Measures, featured articles by Toothpaste and
others on the dynamics of ‘Sex & Violence & Rock & Roll’.71
Perhaps the best example was Manchester’s City Fun (1978–84), in which
writers such as Andy Zero [Andy Waide], Liz Naylor and Cath Carroll
combined irreverent humour with critical analyses that covered the broad
contours of the new and libertarian left.72 Articles on RAR, CND and the
city’s gay scene sat next to barbed commentaries on Factory Records or
Paul Morley’s postmodern pretensions in the NME, while anti-consumerist
critiques fed into amusing TV columns and media reviews. The mood could
shift from the dogmatic – ‘This society is based on hierarchy and exploit-
ation. This is reflected in our relationships with others. Discrimination takes
place at a pre-conscious level’73 – to the satirical, as in Ray Lowry’s regular
cartoons. But underpinning it all was a critical sensibility informed by the
leftist impulses of the time: towards feelings, desire and cultural expression
that might point the way beyond the confines of patriarchy, the state or the
market.
Finally, and more generally, the fanzines inspired by punk opened-up
spaces of enquiry that provided outlets for creativity, intellectual explor-
ation and political experimentation. This could take a variety of forms, be
it collections of artwork (The Eklektik), homages to Wyndham Lewis’s
Blast! (Dat Sun), essays on urban living that drew from situationist influence
 Punk, Politics and British (fan)zines 93

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Fig. 7. Toxic Grafity, no. 5, 1980, Cover; p. 15; p. 23.

94 History Workshop Journal

(Adventures in Reality), or introductions to the likes of Wilhelm Reich,

Henry Miller and Austin Osman Spare (White Stuff).74 For fanzines related
to or informed by the industrial culture around Throbbing Gristle, attention
centred on systems of control and the darker corners of the human condi-
tion: murder, fetishism and the abject.75 An interest in Aleister Crowley and
the occult was also evident by the early 1980s, as were references to William
Burroughs, Brion Gysin and other underground writers/artists.76
Occasionally, too, reading lists and book reviews were offered, with texts
such as Stuart Christie and Albert Meltzer’s The Floodgates of Anarchy
(1970), Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970), Ursula le Guin’s The
Dispossessed (1974), William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) and Raoul

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Vaneigem’s The Politics of Everyday Life (1967) being cited as points of
reference for the aspiring punk activist.77
Taken altogether, and befitting punk’s youthful demographic, the fan-
zines produced into the 1980s revealed a vibrant, reflexive and sometimes
crude (cultural) politics. Though their authors, subjects and readership
claimed to recognize the limitations on punk’s providing a medium for
social or political change, they sought solutions either by exerting control
over the punk and ‘post-punk’ cultures of which fanzines were part or by
extending punk’s protest beyond the commodified parameters of youth cul-
ture. This occasionally led to or complemented engagement with organized
political movements and campaigns. Increasingly, however, punk’s cultural
politics began to shun the dichotomies of ‘left’ and ‘right’ in favour of an
explicitly anarchist tendency alive to the fallacies of the media spectacle and
set against the defined contours of state and society. In the words of Kill
Your Pet Puppy’s Tony Drayton:

Anarchy gives people back their self-respect, their PERSONAL

IDENTITY, but to do so it has to destroy the false, national gods and
institutions that have stolen your individualities and forced you to be
slaves to their alters . . . The whole MYTH of society is breaking down,
break down with it or help smash it into irrelevance. The capitalist con-
cepts are obsolete . . . when an individual confronts the system with its
own irrelevance it is an anarchistic act . . . ‘Punk’ exposes the myth –
punks are the frontline, the shock troops that herald the collapse of the
MYTH, the DEATH of a civilisation that ruled by fear of DEATH.
Punks [sic] one and only message, one and only philosophy has to be
YOU CAN BE YOU, YOU DON’T HAVE TO ACCEPT WHAT
YOU’RE TOLD TO BE ANYMORE . . .78

THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM . . .79

British punk’s relationship to anarchy can be traced back to its origins.80
That said, the Sex Pistols’ call to arms, ‘Anarchy in the UK’, initially served
more as a signal of intent than a commitment to any political creed. For all
 Punk, Politics and British (fan)zines 95

his and Jamie Reid’s prior connections to King Mob, McLaren was in thrall
to the disruptive thrill suggested by anarchy rather than its ideological
underpinning. Talking to the NME in 1976, he stated that: ‘I just see it
[anarchy] as a reaction against the last five years of stagnation . . . a state-
ment of self-rule, of ultimate independence, of do-it-yourself’.81 Johnny
Rotten (John Lydon) wanted to ‘be’ anarchy; to embody it rather than
pursue it as a political aim in itself. Crass, however, adopted the term
more decisively, using it to forge a recognizable alternative to the Sex
Pistols’ warning of a future measured only by shopping schemes, council
tenancies and atrophy.82
This took time. Like the Sex Pistols, Crass (who formed in 1977 and

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released their first record at the end of 1978) initially used the term ‘anarchy’
and the anarchy symbol of a circled ‘A’ as part of an evolving linguistic and
semiotic arsenal designed to provoke and disrupt. In the Crass case, this
included the peace emblem associated with CND, all-black militaristic stage
apparel, references to nihilism and existentialism, slogans declaring ‘Fight
War Not Wars’ or ‘There is no Authority but Yourself’, and a distinctive
motif that seemed to comprise a mesh of cross, swastika and union jack.83
Such ambiguities – clashing symbols – were very much part of the early
Crass aesthetic, serving to obscure or nullify received meaning in order to
incite questioning as to the nature of power and its dissemination. By 1979,
however, their strategy had led to the band’s being courted and attacked by
political factions on both the left and right, prompting a more assertive
association with anarchy as a pathway beyond established political binaries.
‘Boring fucking politics that’ll get us all shot’, Steve Ignorant (Steve
Williams) sang on the band’s Stations of the Crass album (1979), ‘left
wing, right wing, you can stuff the lot . . . Anarchy and freedom is what I
want’.84 To this end, the band lived collectively in Dial House on the edge of
Epping Forest and cultivated a creative hub that inspired countless bands,
records labels and political initiatives to unfold over the 1980s and exist
outside the prevailing structures of the music industry and society more
generally.85
Not surprisingly, Crass’s influence soon became evident in punk fanzines.
The band’s approach fitted perfectly into the DIY ethos of the culture, while
their uncompromising sound, look and lyrics resonated with those who took
the radical implications of punk’s emergence seriously. Already, discussion
as to punk’s political meaning had found its way into some early punk
’zines.86 In the wake of Crass, whose record sleeves opened out to reveal
articulate dissections of religion, geo-politics and social relations, and whose
International Anthem provided a template for combining visual and textual
assaults against ‘the system’, debate extended beyond the realm of creative
expression. Toxic Graffitti, for example, produced by Mike Diboll, featured
band interviews alongside politically-charged collage, essays on anarchy and
diatribes against state repression (Fig. 7). By issue five (1980), known as the
‘mental liberation issue’, the music coverage was all but subsumed within a
96 History Workshop Journal

series of nihilistic ruminations on the inanity of work, the illusion of politics

and the stifling abjection of everyday life.

God is a lie. There is no god, god is a con-trick, death is oblivion . . . I

reject religion, I reject work, in a system of capitalism (or state capitalism,
as in fascism, or communism, the same thing) . . . work is slavery, it never
sets you free, that’s a fucking lie, the ‘myth’ of capital . . . yes, I reject
contemporary values and past values . . . I see no political solution, for
politics left or right is lies . . . REALIZE THE INSANITY OF
‘CIVILIZATION’ AND ITS STINKING OVERKILL, OVEREAT,
OVER EVERY FUCKING THING, THEN ACT TO DESTROY IT.87

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Others followed suit. Cobalt Hate emerged from Stevenage in 1979 as a
scrawled mess of slogans, rants and cut-up media text – the third issue of
which came under a strapline of ‘anarchy, heresy, nihilism, contempt’
(Fig. 8). Among those gathered in and around the Autonomy Centre set
up in London’s Wapping area in 1981–2 and the Centro Iberico (1982) in
Westbourne Park, ’zines such as Book of Revelations, Enigma, Paroxysm
Fear, Pigs for Slaughter, Precautions Essentielles Pour La Bonne and Scum
provided hardline anarchist treatises that urged direct action against prop-
erty, fascist groups and the state. Guides to graffiti and the effects of CS gas
were offered, drawing from a class-conscious interpretation of anarchy that
later fed into the Class War initiatives of the mid 1980s.88 More esoterically,
those involved in the Kick and Kill Your Pet Puppy collectives began to
conceive a punk-inflected anarchy centred on ‘beating reality rather than
escaping it’. This, Richard Cabut wrote between 1980 and 1982, suggested
an anarchism that was more of a ‘mystic affair than a political one’, revol-
ving around an ‘experiment in life’ that comprised squatting (or housing co-
ops), creativity and resistance to the ‘conventions and expectations of
society’.89
Such debate led to serious disagreement between those who perceived
anarchy as a ‘state of mind’ (a revolution that began and ended with the
individual) and those who envisaged a collective movement committed to
smashing the state. Discussion also ensued between those who took a paci-
fist position and those who advocated a politics of physical confrontation.90
There developed simultaneously, however, a relatively coherent ideological
foundation to punk’s DIY anarchism. Religion was recognized as an archaic
root of oppression, a moral and institutional construct deployed historically
to protect ruling elites by mentally, emotionally and physically enslaving
those over whom they governed. The state, meanwhile, was presented as
an apparatus of repression that wielded power in defence of vested interests
(politicians, the owners of capital); its forces – the police, military and law
courts – were utilized to control, suppress and, where necessary, destroy all
vestige of resistance. The media, of course, served as an opiate for the masses
and a means of indoctrination. At the social level, too, the family existed as
Punk, Politics and British (fan)zines 97

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Fig. 8. Cobalt Hate, no. 3, 1980.

Fig. 9. Acts of Defiance, no. 6, 1983.

98 History Workshop Journal

a site of conditioning through which gender roles, patriarchy and hegemonic

values were imposed, then further reinforced via the education system. The
interests of capital were serviced through the exploitation of science and a
war machine that projected the threat of nuclear holocaust to both terrorize
and subjugate; the cold war was a power-play of two elite systems engaged
in a destructive endgame. From a British perspective, Margaret Thatcher
became the icon of state oppression: the instigator of war (The Falklands)
and the public persona of a system willing to crush those seeking to exist
outside or challenge her vision of Britain’s ‘new beginning’ (Fig. 9).91
Consequently, by the early 1980s, there existed countless ’zines keen to
combine politically-charged interviews with fierce condemnations of the war

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state and its various adjuncts.92 In effect, punk’s cut ’n’ paste approach was
refracted through a dystopian lens: images of nuclear mushroom clouds,
tortured animals and starving children segued into polemics designed to
puncture the ‘reality’ constructed by politicians and media simulacra. Or,
as described by Anathema (1982),

Your future is in the hands of someone else. Hands now tied by financial
bounds. Mind controlled with chains of language and a lack of ideals.
Always taking the easy way out . . . Authority is authority, power is
power . . . To rule you need power. To have power you must keep
it . . . Make promises, lie to them/us, smile, profit . . . Time for dinner,
turn on the radio. Oh no, third world’s dim light is almost out. Fourth
Reich is rising fast on a tide of public unrest.93

Yet the importance of these ’zines related as much to their establishing

networks of young punk activists as it did to developing a recognizably
anarchist politics. Integral to punk was its means to agency, and this ex-
tended to the political realm once anarchy was adopted as more than just a
symbol of self-expression. Thus, if we take a selection of the anarchist ’zines
produced in the north-east as an example, we can trace a politically-engaged
milieu seeking to transfer theory into practice.94 Alongside discussion as to
the practical and intellectual limits of anarchy, links are revealed to local
action groups (Sunderland Anti-War group, Tyne & Wear anarchists, anti-
fascist cells), anarchist bookshops (Red and Black in Middlesbrough) and
national movements including CND, the Animal Liberation Front (ALF)
and the Hunt Saboteurs Association. Essays on the women’s movement give
way to debate as to the effectiveness of CND demonstrations or the ram-
ifications of the Falklands War and the miners’ strike. In addition, those
involved formed part of local musicians’ collectives that set up venues such
as The Bunker in Sunderland to host benefit gigs and rehearsals, and to
provide room for political and community groups to meet. At the grass-
roots, then, punk’s fanzines bled into an oppositional and politically-active
culture some way removed from the transitory delights of the pop chart or
the vagaries of youth cultural style.
 Punk, Politics and British (fan)zines 99

The anarchism articulated through punk fanzines bore a contentious re-

lationship to previous traditions of anarchist thought, even as it mirrored
many of its historic tensions.95 It was an anarchism forged from a variety of
impulses, be they realignments on the left occasioned by the advent of new
social movements and the prevailing influence of the sixties counter-culture
or an inverse response to the socio-economic, cultural and technological
changes of the late twentieth century. Here was an emphasis on individuality
and freedom at odds with the rhetoric of the New Right but equally scathing
about communism and the social-democratic left.96 Because of this, perhaps,
the anarchism proffered through punk’s fanzines could be dogmatic and
insightful, idealistic and proscriptive. A misanthropic tone ran through

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some of the fanzines’ text, revealing a disdain for ‘ordinary’ people or the
uncommitted that suggested an elitism as dour as it was smug.97
Nevertheless, the ’zines formed part of a broader anarchist movement that
bolstered the ranks of CND, brought animal-rights’ activism into the public
domain and rendered a significant enough presence to excite condemnation
in parliament and attention from the police.98 If the Battle of Beanfield
(1985) was the most vicious response to the traveller culture that had
roots in punk’s anarchism, then the Stop the City protests organized in
1983–4 served as part of a continuum that leads to the anti-globalization
and anti-capitalist demonstrations of more recent times.99

‘I DON’T LIKE FANZINES ANYWAY, THEY’RE BORING AND

UNCONSTRUCTIVE, BUT IT’S BETTER THAN READING
THE SUN’100
The anarchist ’zines of the early 1980s were perhaps the closest punk came
to producing the catalogue of radical, ‘pro-situ’ pamphlets evoked by Jon
Savage. Not only did the spirit of ranters such as Abiezer Coppe ripple
through the centuries to find vent in the writings of Mike Diboll, Lee
Gibson, Andy Martin, Jah Ovjam (Graham Burnett), Ian Slaughter (Ian
Rawes) and others, but the libertarian politics of the sixties counter-culture
were diverted from the utopian panoramas of hippiedom towards the bleak
vistas of a punk culture enveloped by economic depression, heightened geo-
political tensions and the blunt trauma inflicted by Thatcherism on the
British body politic.101 In between, the cultural spaces opened up by punk
provided for fanzines of diverse quality and style. Some – perhaps most –
focused primarily on music, holding fast to punk’s urge to reclaim rock ’n’
roll for the young people who made and listened to it.102 Others expanded
the fanzine template to incorporate collage, poems and short stories; many,
too, engaged with the prevailing themes of the day: alienation, consumerism,
drugs and glue, sexual politics, the distorting lens of the mass media, racial
tensions, youth cultural violence and the impending threat of nuclear war. In
all cases, the politics of fanzine culture were located as much in the mode of
production as their content.
100 History Workshop Journal

From a historical perspective, punk fanzines offer a snapshot of the inter-

ests, concerns and opinions of a significant milieu of British youth in a
period of notable socio-economic, cultural and political change.
Culturally, they reveal the shifting parameters of the musical and stylistic
forms that emerged in and around British punk over the late 1970s into the
1980s and beyond. Crucially, too, they demonstrate the extent to which
(youth) cultures are not simply produced and consumed but constructed
and utilized. The fanzines that first emerged in lieu of informed media cover-
age soon cultivated their own narratives and interpretations of punk’s mean-
ing and development, many of which existed some way (geographically and
culturally) from the hubbub of London.103 Conversely, fanzines enabled

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access to the established culture industry, providing a ‘way in’ to journalism
or the music industry for those who wished to pursue it.104
Politically, fanzines provided opportunity for opinions to be espoused
and ideas explored. By so doing, they opened up an alternative space for
young people estranged from or denied access to existent political realms.
This was taken to a glorious extreme in the anarchist ’zines, but the cultural
critiques offered by City Fun and Jolt, or the anti-Thatcherite diatribes of
the poet ranters, serve to remind us of a vibrant leftist milieu struggling to
make sense of a shifting political terrain. Arguably, of course, the gender
politics and disavowals of racism featured in several punk fanzines were as
integral a part of the socio-cultural changes affected over the 1970s and
1980s as the economic and political transformations initiated by government
and capital. Simultaneously, the adoption of an anarchist identity across a
significant strand of punk culture may be seen as symptomatic of a more
general disengagement from mainstream or traditional politics. Certainly,
punk ’zines (and most punk bands) tended to eschew political affiliation;
subcultures and popular music were embraced as an alternative to – or a
diversion from – a world of mundane work/school, staid relationships, inane
media distractions and the distant squabbles of a seemingly entrenched
political elite. For this reason, perhaps, even those attempts by organiza-
tions on the political left and right to exploit and direct punk’s apparent
dissatisfaction brought only scant reward. Punk’s abiding impulse was to
‘do it yourself’, not conform to the diktats and doctrines of self-appointed
ideologues.
Ultimately, punk fanzines served as a product of agency, a means of
participation and a platform for creative and political expression. They
could be insular and elitist, repetitive and simplistic, puerile and naı̈ve.
But the best took up punk’s cultural critique to provide an alternative
press alive to the fallacies of media representation and free from the de-
mands of the marketplace. In the process of their production and formative
political expression, fanzines embodied punk’s DIY spirit and call to action.
They cultivated an alternative space to engage with or voice estrangement
from more formal political mechanisms and ideas. Looking back on
them now, they appear a mix of youthful exuberance and engrained
 Punk, Politics and British (fan)zines 101

disaffection – the product of a generation whose future appeared overcast by

uncertainty but whose culture was rich with possibilities.

Matthew Worley is professor in modern history at the University of

Reading. He has written widely on British politics and is currently research-
ing the relationship between youth culture and politics in the UK during
the 1970s and 1980s. The project has received Leverthulme funding and has
so far resulted in a series of articles for Twentieth Century British
History, Contemporary British History, the Journal for the Study of
Radicalism and Punk & Post-Punk. Worley also initiated the Subcultures
Network, which has recently published Fight Back: Punk, Politics

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and Resistance (Manchester University Press).

NOTES AND REFERENCES

This article is part of a wider research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust. My thanks to
Chris Low, Toast (Spirit of ’69) and David Wilkinson for their insight and help in finding
material. Thanks, too, to Russ Bestley for his expert help with images and to Nic Bullen, Rob
Challice (Enigma), Rich Cross, Mike Diboll, Tony Drayton (Ripped & Torn and KYPP), Russ
Dunbar (Acts of Defiance), Steve Hansell, Steve Ignorant, Alistair Livingston, Tony Moon
(Sideburns), Mark Perry (Sniffin’ Glue), Alan Rider, Lucy Robinson, Roger Sabin, Jon
Savage, Andrew Smith, John Street, Tox (Trees & Flowers), Suzy Varty (Brass Lip), Gee
Vaucher (International Anthems), Gary Watts (Suspect Device) and Tim Wells for their
thoughts, help and comments.
1 Editorial to Do You Know Vanessa Redgrave? no. 2, 1981, p. 2. The title of this article
comes from Kill Your Pet Puppy, no. 2, 1980, p. 4.
2 Mark Perry, ‘The Last Page’, Sniffin’ Glue, no. 1, 1976, p. 8.
3 The rationale for this was the unsympathetic coverage given to The Ramones’ first visit
to London in the summer of 1976.
4 The earliest use of ‘punk’ in such a context came with the journalism of Lester Bangs, Dave
Marsh and Mike Saunders, before Lenny Kaye’s 1972 sleevenotes to Nuggets (Elektra, 1972), a
compilation of mid-1960s garage bands, helped cement the term in relation to rock music stripped
down to its bare essentials and imbued with an irreverent ‘teenage’ attitude. Thereafter, the US
magazine Punk, produced by Legs McNeil and John Holmstrom from January 1976, helped
connect 1960s garage bands with the approach and attitude of The Stooges, MC5, Lou Reed and
New York bands such as The Dictators and The Ramones.
5 Mark Perry, ‘No Doubt About It . . .’, Sniffin’ Glue, no. 5, 1976, p. 2.
6 The best account of British punk’s emergence remains Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming:
Sex Pistols and Punk Rock, London, 1991.
7 Ripped & Torn, no. 1, 1976, p. 1.
8 Bombsite, no. 2, 1977, p. 2.
9 Other London, or near-London, titles from 1976–7 include: Cells, City Chains, Cliche´,
Fair Dukes, Flicks, Kid’s Stuff, London’s Burning, More-On, Napalm, The New Wave, Shews,
Sound of the Westway, Strangled, Summer Salt, Sunday Mirra, Surrey’s Burning, Tacky/No
Future, These Things, Up & Coming and Zip Vinyl. White Stuff was produced by Sandy
Robertson, who moved from Scotland to London in the period between writing and printing
the first edition of his fanzine. Tony Drayton also moved to London in 1977, bringing his
Ripped & Torn ’zine with him. He later launched the influential Kill Your Pet Puppy on 1 Jan.
1980, at an Adam & the Ants gig. Zip Vinyl was written in French by Mark Loge and P.
Sarfatee, both based in London.
10 For example: Damaged Goods (York), Look at the Time (Peterborough), Love and Peace
and Negative Reaction (Cambridge), Punkture (Stone), Breakdown and Reaction
(Southampton), Revenge (Grimsby), Rotten to the Core (Nottingham), Situation Vacant
(Derby), Spit in the Sky and Stranded (Exeter), Strange Stories (Southend), Viva La
Resistance (Preston) and Vomit (Norwich).
102 History Workshop Journal

11 In London, Compendium Books, Rock On, Rough Trade and Small Wonder sold ’zines
(Rat Scabies of The Damned called Rock On the ‘W.H. Smith of punk rock’, Gun Rubber, no.
5, 1977, p. 20); elsewhere independent book and record shops did likewise, as did Virgin. Gigs,
however, were the main site of sales – raising money for drinks in the process – before fanzine
reviews in the ’zines enabled postal networks to develop. Some ’zines were given away free, but
most sold at a low cost of between 5p and 50p.
12 London’s Burning, no. 1, 1976; London’s Outrage, nos. 1 and 2, 1976–7.
13 The spelling of ‘graffiti’ changed with each issue – for instance Graffitti, Grafitty,
Grafity and Graffity.
14 For extracts, see The Great British Mistake: Vague, 1977–92, AK Press, Edinburgh,
1994.
15 See Rapid Eye, vols. 1–2, Annihilation Press, London, 1989–92. A third volume was
published by Creation Books in 1995.
16 For explicit rejection of the ‘fan’ prefix, see Antigen, no. 1, 1982, p. 2; City Fun 2: 2,
1980, p. 2; Toxic Grafitty, no. 4, 1979, p. 23.

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17 Savage, England’s Dreaming, p. 279.
18 The title of this section is taken from Cool Notes, no. 3, 1982.
19 Teal Triggs, Fanzines, London, 2010, p. 18; Stephen Duncombe, Notes from
Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture (London and New York, 1997),
Microcosm Publishing, Bloomington, 2008 edn, pp. 15–17; Below Critical Radar: Fanzines
and Alternative Comics from 1976 to Now, ed. Roger Sabin and Teal Triggs, Slab-O-
Concrete, Hove, 2000; Chris Atton, Alternative Media, London, 2002; Fredric Wertham, The
World of Fanzines, Illinois, 1973.
20 Nigel Fountain, Underground – London’s Alternative Press, 1966–74, Comedia, London,
1988; Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture (1968), Paladin, London, 1970; BAMN: Outlaw Manifestos
and Ephemera, 1965–70, ed. Peter Stansill and David Zane Mairowitz, Harmondsworth, 1971.
For a recent article covering comparable ground, see Mia Lee, ‘Political Pornography in the
West German Underground Press’, History Workshop Journal, 78: 1, 2014.
21 Anarchy in the UK, no. 1, 1976.
22 Tony Parsons, ‘Glue Scribe Speaks Out’, NME, 12 Feb. 1977, p. 12. Parsons’ early
support for fanzines was short-lived, see Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons, The Boy Looked at
Johnny: the Obituary of Rock ’n’ Roll (Pluto Press, 1978), London, 1987, pp. 36–7.
23 Cobalt Hate, no. 3, 1980, p. 2.
24 Savage, ‘Diary entry’, 8 Dec. 1976, in England’s Dreaming, pp. 279–80.
25 Triggs, Fanzines, pp. 16–17; Triggs, ‘Alphabet Soup: Reading British Fanzines’, Visible
Language 29: 1, 1995; Triggs, ‘Scissors and Glue: Punk Fanzines and the Creation of a DIY
Aesthetic’, Journal of Design History 19: 1, 2006. See also Tricia Henry, ‘Punk and Avant Garde
Art’, Journal of Popular Culture 17: 4, 1984; Russ Bestley and Alex Ogg, The Art of Punk,
Omnibus Press, London, 2012; Punk: an Aesthetic, ed. Johan Kugelberg and Jon Savage, New
York, 2012; Jon Savage, Punk 45: Original Punk Rock Singles Cover Art, Soul Jazz, London,
2013. For contemporary recognition of this, see Jonh Ingham’s dedication to John Heartfield in
London’s Burning, no. 1, 1976, p. 2; Wendy Shock, ‘Dadadadadada . . .’, Negative Reaction, no.
5, 1978, p. 13; The Eklektik, no. 2, 1982.
26 Dick Hebdige, Subcultures: the Meaning of Style (1979), London, 2007, pp. 111–12. See
also Shane MacGowan’s sign-off in Bondage, no. 1, 1976, p. 6: ‘This whole things was put
together etc. etc. with the help of a box of safety pins. All the photos are ripped out of other
mags. Sorry it’s all hand-written but I haven’t got a typewriter’.
27 Dave Laing, One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock, Milton Keynes,
1985, pp. 14–15.
28 Alex Ogg, Independent Days: the Story of UK Independent Record Labels, Cherry Red,
London, 2009; Rob Young, Rough Trade, Black Dog, London, 2006; David Hesmondhalgh,
‘Post-Punk’s Attempt to Democratise the Music Industry: the Success and Failure of Rough
Trade’, Popular Music, 16: 3, 1998, pp. 25–74.
29 Sideburns, no. 1, 1977, p. 2. For guides to making a fanzine, see Adventures in Reality,
Issue G, 1981, p. 21; Alternative Sounds, no. 17, 1980, p. 15; City Fun, no. 3, 1978, p. 4;
Guttersnipe, vol. 2, no. 1, 1980, p. 7; Rising Free, no. 6, 1983, pp. 14–15.
30 For an entertaining example see the interview with a teddy boy in Fair Dukes, no. 2,
1977, pp. 9–11.
 Punk, Politics and British (fan)zines 103

31 Just a few notable examples would include: 0533 (Leicester), Alternative Sounds
(Coventry), Artificial Life (London), Attack on Bzag (Leeds), Burnt Offering (Northampton),
City Fun (Manchester), Dayglow (London), Final Curtain (Grays), Grim Humour (Herne Bay),
Grinding Halt (Reading), Guttersnipe (Telford), Hard as Nails (Canvey Island), Have a Good
Laugh (Newcastle), Harsh Reality (Ipswich), Hit Ranking (Cheam), Inside Out (Edinburgh),
Kick (London), Kill Your Pet Puppy (London), New Crimes (Southend), NMX (Sheffield),
Raising Hell (Leeds), Ready to Ruck (Folkestone), Safety in Numbers (Portsmouth), Suss
(Luton), Trees and Flowers (King’s Lynn) and Vague (Salisbury/London).
32 Taken from Bits, no. 1, 1981.
33 See, for example, Paul Simonon (The Clash) in Negative Reaction, no. 5, 1977, p. 5,
commenting on the origins of punk: ‘It’s kids who watch Top of the Pops, and they see all these
shitty groups, and there’s nothing to do. And they see a guy play guitar in a club and they think
it takes about a hundred years to learn to play.’
34 Tony D, ‘Can Rich ‘‘Stars’’ Rock?’, Ripped & Torn, no. 1, 1976, pp. 5–6.
35 Rick O’Shea, ‘Punk Rock Rules’, Heat, no. 2, 1977, p. 13; Mark P, ‘ ’Ope I Die Before I

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Get Old’, Sniffin Glue, no. 3½, 1976, p. 4.
36 ‘So What Else is New?’, Hangin’ Around, no. 6, 1977, pp. 3–4.
37 Tim T., ‘Punk is . . .’, Blades ’n’ Shades, no. 1, 1977, p. 2.
38 See also Barbequed Iguana, a fanzine linked to The Jacquard club set up by Jon Fry and
Jon Vince in Norwich. For cassettes, see ’zines such as Apathy (Bradford), Hit Ranking
(Cheam), New Crimes (Southend) and New Systems (Penarth). For examples of the cassette
network, Stabmental, no. 2, 1980, pp. 9–11, New Crimes, no. 6, 1982, p. 20 and New Systems,
no. 1, 1982, pp. 2–3. A few ’zines also issued flexi-discs or singles (e.g. Grinding Halt, In the City,
Sniffin’ Glue, Toxic Grafity and Trees and Flowers).
39 Anti-Climax, from Ipswich, seemed to revel in its dismissal of The Clash, but see
also ‘All That Glitters Turns to Rust’, Anathema, no. 2, p. 21; ‘Money Corrupts’, Chainsaw,
no. 5, 1978, p. 7; Youth in Asia’s ‘CBS (Cash Before Sincerity)’, Hit Ranking, no. 16, 1982,
p. 18.
40 These included Family of Noise, Ligotage, The Night Porter and Zerox.
41 See, for example, Bring into Being, no. 1, 1983; Fight Back, no. 1, 1984; Intensive Care,
no. 2, 1980; Kill Your Pet Puppy, no. 1, 1980; Toxic Grafitty, no. 4, 1979.
42 Other examples include Ready to Ruck, Skins and Tell Us the Truth. See also ’zines such
as Boots & Braces, Cool Notes and Stand Up and Spit, which covered soul and reggae beyond
mere token reference. Indeed, reggae fanzines such as Nick Kimberley and Penny Reel’s
Pressure Drop (1975) and, later, Ital Rockers and Small Axe, could form the basis of an equally
useful analysis of fanzine culture. In the mainstream, Black Echoes helped fill a void in music
coverage of the period.
43 David George, ‘The End’, Dirt, no. 1, 1978, p. 3.
44 The fact that some fanzines included adverts proved contentious, while price-rates
provoked questions of moral economy. Indeed, certain titles, such as In the City and
Jamming, were criticized by other ’zines (and their readers) for being too commercially
orientated.
45 ‘The Opposition (The New Underground)’, Aftermath, no. 3, 1980, p. 13.
46 Tony Fletcher, ‘Better Badges and Fanzines’, Jamming, no. 7, 1980, pp. 13–16. See also
Tony Fletcher, Boy About Town: a Memoir, London, 2013.
47 A few obvious examples amongst hundreds: The Adverts, Alternative TV and
Magazine; the covers of PiL’s ‘Public Image’ and The Exploited’s ‘Dead Cities’ singles,
Sham 69’s That’s Life album cover; Cock Sparrer’s ‘The Sun Says’ and The Jam’s ‘News of
the World’; the lyrics to Subway Sect’s ‘Nobody’s Scared’ (‘Media teach me what to speak/take
my decisions’).
48 See for example ‘The Spectacle’, A System Partly Revealed, no. 2, 1982, p. 5; ‘Fuck the
Press’, Live Wire, no. 7, 1977, p. 4; ‘Wake Up World’, Ripped & Torn, no. 16, 1979, p. 13;
‘Don’t Believe Media Lies’, Sunday the 7th, no. 2, 1981, pp. 12–13. A System Partly Revealed
was produced by John Cato, who bookended his anarchism with stints in the British Movement
and Combat 18, both Neo-Nazi organizations.
49 Collage, Anti-Climax, no. 6, 1980, p. 8; Pete Nasty, ‘Punk Hits the Glossies’,
Heat, no. 2, 1977, p. 3; Hate and War, no. 2, 1982, p. 6; ‘Fashion Parade’, IQ32, no. 2,
1983, p. 6.
104 History Workshop Journal

50 ‘Popular’ expressions of this could include Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The
Medium is the Massage, London, 1967; John Berger, Ways of Seeing, Harmondsworth’s, 1972
(based on a BBC series). By the 1980s, Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1967) had been
translated beyond small anarchist or leftist circles. Debord’s influence can be seen via Reid’s
design work on Leaving the 20th Century: the Incomplete Works of the Situationist International,
transl. and ed. Christopher Gray, Free Fall, London, 1974.
51 For the ‘art school’ influence on punk and pop music generally, see Simon Frith and
Howard Horne, Art Into Pop, London, 1987.
52 Sub-heading adapted from the strapline of White Stuff, no. 1, 1977: ‘A rock ’n’ roll
magazine for the modern world’.
53 Reassessing the Seventies, ed. Lawrence Black, Hugh Pemberton and Pat Thane,
Manchester, 2013; Colin Hay, ‘Chronicles of a Death Foretold: the Winter of Discontent
and Construction of the Crisis of British Keynesianism’, Parliamentary Affairs 63: 3, 2010;
Joe Moran, ‘‘‘Stand Up and Be Counted’’: Hughie Green, the 1970s and Popular Memory’,
History Workshop Journal 70: 1, 2010; Nick Tiratsoo, ‘‘‘You’ve Never Had it so Bad’’: Britain

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in the 1970s’, in From Blitz to Blair: a New History of the Britain since the 1970s, ed Tiratsoo,
London, 1997.
54 Stuart Hall, ‘The Great Moving Right Show’, Marxism Today, January 1979, pp. 14–
20. For a comprehensive overview of the period, see Brian Harrison, Finding a Role? The United
Kingdom, 1970–1990, Oxford, 2010.
55 For example, Caroline Coon, ‘Rotten to the Core’, Melody Maker, 27 Nov. 1976, pp.
34–5; Tony Parsons, ‘Go Johnny Go’, NME, 2 Oct. 1976, p. 29; Dave Marsh, ‘Dole Queue
Rock’, New Society, 20 Jan. 1977, pp. 112–14.
56 These examples come from Guttersnipe, nos 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 1978–9 and vol. 2, no. 1, 1980.
A BBC ‘Open Door’ documentary was broadcast about the fanzine in 1980.
57 This, of course, refers to Raymond Williams’ notion of a ‘culture as lived’, as developed
most completely in his Marxism and Literature, Oxford, 1977.
58 For a discussion of supposed military coups and authoritarian clampdowns, see
Respectable Radicals: Middle-Class Campaigns in Britain in the 1970s, ed. Roger King and
Neill Nugent, London, 1977; Phillip Whitehead, The Writing on the Wall: Britain in the
Seventies, Brook, London, 1985, pp. 202–20. Andy Beckett, When the Lights Go Out: Britain
in the Seventies, London, 2009, pp. 376–82.
59 Bored Stiff, no. 2, 1977, p. 2; Breakdown, no. 1, 1977; Flicks, no. 4, 1977; ‘Smash the
National Front Now’, Gabba Gabba Hey, no. 3, 1977, p. 9; Lucy Toothpaste, ‘Off Your
Rocker’, Jolt, no. 3, 1977, p. 7; ‘When Did You Stop Wearing Nazi Paraphernalia?’, Ripped
& Torn, no. 7, 1977, p. 7.
60 For example, see Bits, no. 1, 1981; Kick, no. 4, 1982, p. 5; Nihilistic Vices, no. 1, 1979;
Toxic Graffitti, no. 3, 1979.
61 Matthew Worley, ‘Shot By Both Sides: Punk, Politics and the End of ‘‘Consensus’’’,
Contemporary British History 26: 3, 2012.
62 Anthony Wall, ‘Punk’, 5 March 1977, p. 74. See also I. Wright, ‘New Wave’, Challenge,
February–March 1977, p. 14; Dave Laing, ‘Interpreting Punk Rock’, Marxism Today, April
1978, pp. 123–8.
63 Interview with Steve Gaunt, a Young National Front organizer in Leeds, British News,
March 1978, p. 3.
64 Fanzine workshops were held at some RAR conferences, with the specific objective of
using ’zines to raise political issues and encourage political engagement. See Temporary
Hoarding, no. 7, 1978, p. 16; Big Flame, August 1979, p. 11.
65 Later far-right magazines that may be placed in a ’zine-tradition include White Noise
and Blood & Honour.
66 The listed ’zines were produced by Mick Turpin, Janine Booth, Richard Edwards,
Seething Wells (Steven Wells), Tim Wells and Attila the Stockbroker (John Baine). See also
various Bradford ’zines from the time that included poems by Joolz, Seething Wells, Nick
Toczek and others
67 Dennis Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Post War Britain: History, the New Left and the
Origins of Cultural Studies, North Carolina, 1997.
68 See, for example, Adventures into Basketry (Nottingham), After Hours (London),
Dangerous Logic (London), Let’s Be Adult About This (London), Mental Children (London),
Printed Noises (Manchester) and Voice of Buddha (London).
 Punk, Politics and British (fan)zines 105

69 For example, ‘The Working Woman’, Acts of Defiance, no. 3, 1982, p. 10; ‘Look What
is Happening’ collage in Between the Lines, no. 1, 1979, p. 7; ‘Short Story’, Black Dwarf, no. 2,
1979, pp. 4–6.
70 Brass Lip, no. 1, 1979. See, especially, the essay ‘Roxex’ (pp. 16–17), which takes as its
starting point the advert for the Rolling Stones’ Black and Blue album.
71 Lucy Toothpaste, ‘Sex & Violence & Rock & Roll’, Drastic Measures, no. 3, 1980, pp.
6–7; Lucy Toothpaste, ‘Sex Vs Fascism’, Temporary Hoarding, no. 7, 1978, pp. 4–6.
72 David Wilkinson, ‘Difficult Fun: British Post-Punk and the Libertarian Left on the
cusp of Neoliberalism, 1978–83’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Manchester, 2013.
73 ‘A Breakdown of Oppression’, City Fun, no. 12, 1981, p. 6.
74 The Eklektik, no. 2, 1982 (produced by Andy Palmer of Crass); Dat Sun, no. 1, 1978;
Adventures in Reality, Issue G, 1981; White Stuff, Nos. 4 and 6, 1977.
75 See, for example, ’zines such as, Flowmotion, Industrial News, Intolerance, Kata and
Stabmental.
76 See, for example, All the Madmen, Concrete Beaches, Kick and Rapid Eye Movement.

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77 And Don’t Run Away You Punk, no. 1, 1984; Incendiary, no. 1, 1984; Kill Your Pet
Puppy, no. 4, 1981.
78 Tony Puppy, ‘Apocalypse Now, Part 1’, Kill Your Pet Puppy, no. 2, 1980, pp. 4–6.
79 The heading is taken from the fanzine produced by the Poison Girls.
80 Jim Donaghey, ‘Bakunin Brand Vodka: an Exploration into Anarchist-Punk and Punk-
Anarchism’, Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies 1, 2013.
81 Nick Kent, ‘Meet the Col. Tom Parker of the Blank Generation’, NME, 27 Nov. 1976,
pp. 26–7. For McLaren and Reid’s relationship to King Mob see David and Stuart Wise, ‘The
End of Music’, in What is Situationism? a Reader, ed. Stewart Home, AK Press, Edinburgh,
1996, pp. 63–102.
82 Penny Rimbaud, ‘The Last of the Hippies – an Hysterical Romance’, in Crass, A Series
of Shock Slogans and Mindless Totem Tantrums, Exitstencil Press, London, 1982; Richard
Cross, ‘The Hippies Now Wear Black: Crass and the Anarcho-Punk Movement, 1977–84’,
Socialist History 26, 2004; George Berger, The Story of Crass, Omnibus, London, 2006.
83 The emblem was designed by Dave King to represent various forms of repression. The
symbol is enveloped by snakes eating their own tails.
84 ‘White Punks on Hope’, Stations of the Crass, Crass Records, 1979.
85 Ian Glasper, The Day the Country Died: a History of Anarcho Punk, 1980–84, Cherry
Red, London, 2006. Dial House had existed as a collective and creative space long before 1977.
86 ‘Punk and Politics’, Ability Stinks, no. 1, 1981, p. 6; ‘Posh or Poor’, City Chains, no. 2,
1977, p. 10; ‘Marxism and the Mass Media’, Jolt, no. 2, 1977, p. 5; Plaything, no. 2, 1977, p. 1.
87 Mike Diboll, ‘The Admition’, Toxic Grafity, no. 5, 1980, p. 18. Issue number ‘5’ seems
actually to have been the third issue of the fanzine. It had previously been titled No Real
Reason.
88 Class War, A Decade of Disorder, Verso, London, 1991.
89 Quotes taken from Kick, nos. 3 and 4, 1980–2. See also All the Madmen and And Don’t
Run Away You Punk.
90 Richard Cross, ‘British Anarchism and the End of Thatcherism’, in Against the Grain:
the Far Left in British Politics, ed. Evan Smith and Matthew Worley, Manchester, 2014. Also,
compare ’zines such as Fack and Toxic Graffitti to Andy Martin’s Scum or Ian Rawes’s Pigs for
Slaughter.
91 This was the term used in the 1979 Conservative Party manifesto.
92 A few examples would include A New Body (Peterborough), A System Partly Revealed
(London), Bring into Being (Rochester), Coming Attack (Leighton Buzzard), Fack (North
Cheam), Fight Back (Blackburn), Guilty of What (Stirlingshire), New Crimes (Southend),
Nihilist Vices (London), Re-Action (Welwyn Garden City), Scrobe (Whitehaven) and Twisted
Nerve (Meriden).
93 ‘Life Today . . . Is It Really Life?’, Anathema, no. 1, 1982, pp. 17–18. Anathema was
produced by Lee Gibson, who changed the name of his ’zines frequently. Other titles included
Protesting Children Minus the Bondage and Kiss the Earth. See Lee Gibson, A Punk Rock
Flashback, Lulu, London, 2013.
94 Titles from the region include Acts of Defiance, Anathema, a Trip into Realism,
Cardboard Theatre, Hate and War, IQ32, No Comment and Testament of Reality.
95 Richard Cross, ‘‘‘There is No Authority But Yourself’’: the Individual and the
Collective in British Anarcho-Punk’, Music and Politics 4: 2, 2010.
 106 History Workshop Journal

96 For criticism of the left, including such initiatives as RAR, see ‘Fascists – What Next?’,
Toxic Graffitti, no. 3, 1979, p. 3, following on from Crass’s condemnation of the political left as
printed in Kill Your Pet Puppy, no. 1, 1980, pp. 13–15. See also New Crimes, no. 4, 1981, pp.
10–11.
97 For a critique of these attitudes, see Tom Vague, ‘Those Not So Loveable Spikey Tops’,
Vague, no. 14, 1983, p. 29.
98 A local example would include the police raid on the Freewheel bookshop in Norwich,
during which copies of the fanzine Final Straw were seized on account of an article demonstrat-
ing how to prepare petrol bombs.
99 The Battle of the Beanfield, ed. Andy Worthington, Enabler Publications, London,
2005; Kevin Hetherington, New Age Travellers: Vanloads of Uproarious Humanity, London,
2000; George McKay, Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties, Verso,
London, 1996.
100 Bondage, no. 1, 1976, p. 6.
101 Selected Writings: Abiezer Coppe, ed. Andrew Hopton, Aporia Press, London, 1987;

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Jerome Friedman, Blasphemy, Immorality and Anarchy: Ranters and the English Revolution,
Ohio, 1987; Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English
Revolution (1972), London, 1991. Graham Burnett wrote the New Crimes ’zine.
102 This remained true even as punk evolved and new or revived music styles and genres
developed in its wake. See, for example, Maximum Speed (Mod) or Are You Scared to Get
Happy? (C86), with its strapline: ‘Getting back to basics . . . a punk rock fanzine’. See Pete Dale,
Anyone Can Do It: Empowerment, Tradition and the Punk Underground, Farnham 2012, pp.
150–1.
103 There are echoes here of the ideas developed from Jürgen Habermas’s concept of the
public sphere, especially with regard to Nancy Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: a
Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’, Social Text 25–26, 1990.
Thus fanzines may be seen to have helped punks form a ‘subaltern counterpublic’ committed
to formulating alternate and sometimes oppositional ‘interpretations of their identities, interests
and needs’ (p. 67). See also Michael Warner, Public and Counterpublics, New York, 2009.
104 Garry Bushell (Napalm), Cath Carroll (City Fun), Steve Lamacq (A Pack of Lies),
Gavin Martin (Alternative Ulster), Paul Morley (Girl Trouble), Sandy Robertson (White Stuff),
Jon Savage (London’s Outrage), Adrian Thrills (48 Thrills) and Johnny Waller (Kingdom Come)
are just a handful of examples.

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