In early 1979, Tony D(rayton) ceased publication of his trailblazing punk fanzine Ripped & Torn, having experienced a seismic shift in his values by the emergence of anarcho-punks Crass on the scene. After nine months traversing Europe and rethinking his “decadence,” he came back to London and started a new fanzine, Kill Your Pet Puppy. Like its predecessor, KYPP proved highly influential, and at times equally controversial, gradually moving away from music coverage over the course of its six issues to become something more…

In this, his second appearance on The Fanzine Podcast (check Episode 13 for the Ripped & Torn story), Tony D. talks about his conversion to the Crass way of living, his sojourns in Europe, falling out with Adam Ant, falling in with a new squat scene, why Kill Your Pet Puppy initially had a far more shocking title, gaining the printing patronage of Joly MacFie at Better Badges, testing the boundaries of what a punk zine could achieve and represent, the attraction of the new ‘Positive Punk’ groups like Alien Sex Fiend, Southern Death Cult and Sex Gang Children, why he launched KYPP with an attack on host Tony Fletcher’s Jamming! fanzine, and why he eventually

ran off to join the circus. Literally.

For the full unedited interview with Tony D., and for more about fanzine culture in general, please visit https://tonyfletcher.substack.com/p/kill-your-pet-puppy-and-other-pop

The Kill Your Pet Puppy archives are at https://killyourpetpuppy.co.uk/news/the-complete-set-of-kill-your-pet-puppy-fanzines/

The Fanzine Podcast Theme is by Noel Fletcher. Logo by Greg Morton.

The Best of Jamming! Selections & Stories from the Fanzine That Grew Up 1977-86 is available from Omnibus Press and other online retailers.

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For the 33rd installment of the Fanzine Podcast, we welcome Chris Coleman, former editor of at least two important ‘zines from the 1980s post-punk UK Midlands: Stringent Measures and What A Nice Way To Turn Seventeen. The first of these zines straddled a vibrant local indie scene that included the likes of Eyeless In Gaza, In Embrace, Attrition, and the Glass Records label (about which Chris put together a special edition) along with Chris’s evident excitement for early U2. What A Nice Way To Turn Seventeen, while maintaining the fanzine format, declared itself musically with a first issue featuring interviews with The Waterboys, The Alarm - and Johnny Thunders, to whom it later dedicated a special issue (as it did Marc Bolan). WANWTTS also put out physical vinyl – EP’s and albums alike - that included the likes of The Jazz Butcher, Jasmine Minks, The Membranes, Mike Scott and Nikki Sudden, and which therefore continued to place the zine at the heart of the mid-80s indie music scene. To this day, Chris continues to release records of lost archived recordings on his Seventeen label.

Chris spent a Friday night indoors chatting with podcast host Tony Fletcher about his fanzine experiences back in the day. Other fanzines mentioned in this episode include Bucketful Of Brains, Alternative Sounds and Adventures In Reality, and the conversation also diverges into the likes of R.E.M. and The Smiths. We get to hear how Chris’s parents once collated and stapled and distributed zines for him while he was on holiday, and we find out which of the aforementioned musicians once commented to him, “You have great veins.” (Hint: it should be obvious.)

Visit https://tonyfletcher.substack.com/p/what-a-nice-way-to-turn-seventeen for images of some vintage What A Nice Way To Turn Seventeen, to find similar posts and pages dedicated to earlier Fanzine Podcasts, and for Tony’s twice-weekly writings.

Thanks to Noel Fletcher for the theme music, and Greg Morton at Omnibus Press for the logo template.

The Best of Jamming!: Selections and Stories from the Fanzine That Grew Up 1977-86 is available from here.

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It’s time for a new episode of The Fanzine Podcast, and we start 2025 off with one of the pioneers from the explosion of punk zines in 1977: V. Vale, editor and publisher of San Francisco’s legendary Search & Destroy along with its successor, RE/Search Publications.

Now in his late 70s, Vale – who grew up in foster homes in the Midwest and found refuge in public libraries – has been active in the U.S. counterculture pretty much all his life. He attended U.C. Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement of 1964-65, was active on the city’s hippy scene, worked at the equally legendary City Lights book/magazine shop, and was on hand when San Francisco’s first punk bands – Crime, Nuns, The Avengers, Sleepers, Negative Trend among others – emerged in 1977, at which point he decided to document the culture. Basing Search & Destroy on the format of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine (founded in 1969), Vale’s preferred newspaper print and unadulterated Q&A format combined with the energy of those interviews and the explosive visuals of its layout to make Search & Destroy a must-read zine far beyond the city’s borders. This was just as well given that Vale reckons it took two years to get 200 people on board the SF punk scene but that he printed 5000 copies of that debut issue, helped by donations from Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

...To read on, to see examples of Search & Destroy and RE/Search, please visit https://tonyfletcher.substack.com/p/search-and-destroy

To order from RE/Search Pubs, visit researchpubs.com

Thanks to Noel Fletcher for the theme music, and Greg Morton at Omnibus Press for the logo template.

The Best of Jamming! is available via https://omnibuspress.com/products/the-best-of-jamming-published-on-23rd-september-2021

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.