The latest episode of The Fanzine Podcast, and it is also the last issue of The Fanzine Podcast. We wrap things up with an in-person visit to RAPMM – the RILM Archive of Popular Music Magazines, a digital archive of what are in fact mainly fanzines, 133 titles and counting, spanning genres, decades and countries.

While RAPMM is essentially an online archive, it is operated from the City University of New York (CUNY)’s Graduate Center right by the Empire State Building, where many of the fanzines are also physically archived. It is there that host Tony Fletcher went to interview one of the prime archivists behind this project, Lindsey Eckenroth. Lindsey is among the rare Academics who is also a Fanzine Editor: Irrational Exit, which she runs with partner Joe, is a small-scale music zine that demonstrates that the culture is alive and thriving.

This Episode 37 runs long, but it is in two distinct parts: the first an interview with Lindsey about RAPMM itself, followed by a fun flick through a variety of physical zines she pulled out of the archives for me to look over and discuss. They include Bomp!, Bam Balam, Blaze, miau!, Razorcake, In Effect, Louder Than Bombas, Hardcore Architecture and more. Dozens of other zines get discussed over the course of the episode.

To see covers of some of these zines, screenshots of the RAPMM web site, and to read a longer article about this specific episode, please visit https://tonyfletcher.substack.com/p/the-final-fanzine-podcast

Tony Fletcher hosts another podcast, Crossed Channels, with Dan Epstein. Find it on your preferred streaming platform; full episodes are available to paid-up subscribers either of our Substack pages. More info at https://tonyfletcher.substack.com/podcast

'The Jamming! Fanzine Podcast Theme' is by Noel Fletcher.

Logo by Greg Morton.

The Best of Jamming!: Selections and Stories from the Fanzine That Grew Up 1977-86 is published by Omnibus Press

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Visit tonyfletchersubstack.com for more show notes, fanzine covers, the Ode To a Better-Badged Boychik poem and more. https://tonyfletcher.substack.com/p/how-14-yr-old-mark-jays-skum-zine

Mark Jay was just 14 years old in 1976 when, hanging out at the Rock On record shop next in Camden Town, close to his violence-ridden state school, an inadvertent reacquaintance with John Simon Ritchie - a.k.a. Sid Vicious - propelled him into the heart of the fledgling UK punk scene.

By the end of that year, Mark had started one of the first British punk fanzines, SKUM, and not only been befriended by Bernie Rhodes, The Clash, and members of the Sex Pistols, but by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, who having seen Mark’s cartoon of the Sex Pistols v. Bill Grundy TV fiasco, commissioned a ‘Story So Far’ from him that became the insert to the Never Mind The Bollocks album. Mark was among the only proper fans, and surely the youngest to attend the Pistols’ Silver Jubilee boat trip/concert on June 7, 1977, at which he was arrested and spend the night in jail. By then he was all of 15. He remembers it to this day as the best gig of his life.

Mark ceased publishing SKUM in December 1977, a year after he had started, and indulged his Beat Poetry obsession instead, starting a fanzine called All The Poets, printed in early 1979 by Joly MacFie (featured on Episode 3 of this podcast) at Better Badges, as a ‘guinea pig’ for his new printing press. Around the same time, he allowed my zine Jamming! to cut-and-paste his (first ever) Sid Vicious interview from SKUM 1 for my Jamming! 7, also printed at Better Badges.

At the end of September 2025, Mark and I had a real time conversation for the first time in over 46 years, which I recorded in entirety for this, the final UK episode of the Fanzine Podcast. It is, quite possibly, and not as much for the renewed personal connection as for Mark’s incredible origin stories, my favourite episode of them all.

Other fanzines mentioned in this podcast: Sniffin’ Glue, White Stuff, Bondage, Ripped & Torn, and London’s Burning.

Find Mark on Instagram. Further links:

SKUM archives

All The Poets archives

The Sex Pistols: The Story So Far poster

Mark Jay’s Sex Pistols Jubilee boat story and more on sex-pistols.net

Mark Jay’s films are all listed and linked at the bottom of this page:

To order Geshmack x Gesheft via Spinners (and Mark’s next poemtry pamflet ‘Five Years - between the gutter and the galaxies,‘ when published November 2025). Five Years will contain ‘Ode to the Better Badged Boychik at the Favourite Caff,’

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The Fanzine Podcast is back after an unintentionally long absence to talk with Howard Wuelfing, editor/publisher of two key Washington D.C. zines, which have just been gathered into an eponymous anthology: Descenes and Discords. These influential zines, the first focused on local activities, its successor intended to gather additional material about the national alternative/underground scene, ran between 1979 and 1981 and served not only to influence and impact upon music in D.C., but provided publication space for a number of writers who would go on to national prominence, among them Gerard Cosloy and Byron Coley.

In this episode, Howard discusses abandoning plans to become a lawyer to focus on becoming a rock writer instead, how exposure to CBGB’s but especially the publication New York Rocker set him and his partners on their way with Descenes, how they were able to access typesetting, advertising and printing, and their successful game plan for distribution, but how the careerism of local “new wave” bands caused the team to pack it in after six issues. Embarking eight months later with Discords, the new look monthly zine had a winning run of cover artists (from Pylon to Circle Jerks to The Bongos and Mission Of Burma) and provided space and encouragement for the younger generation of hardcore bands who would soon step into the space Discords helped create. Accordingly, Ian MacKaye of Teen Idols, Minor Threat, Fugazi and Dischord (no relation) Records, was interviewed by Howard for a special reflection article that opens the new anthology.

Descenes and Discords: An Anthology is available from DiWulf.com in the Americas, and EarthIslandBooks.com in Europe. Howard Wuelfing can be found at https://www.howlinwuelf.com/

The theme music for the Fanzine Podcast is by Noel Fletcher.

The outro in this episode is the 12” mix of “Put It Down” by The Dear Boys, available at thedearboys.bandcamp.com

Tony Fletcher can be found at tonyfletcher.substack.com

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