Fanzine Culture And The Resurrection Of The Crazed

A new collection of writing from 1980s psychobilly fanzine The Crazed has us misty-eyed with nostalgia for zine culture – and pondering its modern-day revival.

In recent years, there has been a two-pronged revival of the fanzine, a printed phenomenon that by all rights should have been killed off by the rise of websites, blogs and social media. It perhaps speaks to our innate desire to have physical objects rather than the ephemeral world of the digital that print has refused to die despite the best efforts of both technologists and cultural propagandists (we can say this about other media too – the myth that no one buys DVDs* or CDs anymore that is repeated ad nauseam as if saying it often enough will make it true).

On the one hand, the fanzine revival has seen the launching of new publications that ape the style of the zines from the 1980s and 1990 – the Xerox years when the widespread availability of the photocopier democratised the whole idea of the fanzine. My first awareness of fanzines as a thing was reading about them in House of Hammer and then stumbling upon back issues of some of the bigger horror zine titles at collector’s fairs or through mail order. The fanzines of the 1970s seemed almost as elite as their professional rivals – thick, glossy, chin-stroking affairs that seemed to have access to endless interviewees and content. It was a world for those with vast disposable incomes and contacts, it seemed, a closed world that a teenage kid in the North of England was never going to join. The change came with the music zines, scruffy little photocopied affairs devoted to a band or a genre that you could pick up at gigs for a pittance. This, I figured, was a world that I could access. I dabbled in contributing to some music zines but when I discovered American horror and exploitation zines like Gore Gazette, Subhuman and Video Drive-In, the way was clear and it was a matter of when, not if, I dived into that world – one that, arguably, I have never quite left. Suddenly, all you needed was an opinion, a typewriter and access to a photocopier – either at a local copy shop, where a few hundred A5 zines with 16 pages would cost very little or at your workplace, where they could be run off on the quiet for free. The 1980s were the punk rock, DIY glory days of the fanzine no matter what the subject matter – by the 1990s, a lot of us had moved on to glossier, more ‘professional’ semi-pro zines, having gone through the learning curve and feeling the need to move forward.

The new zines seek to copy the look and feel of the 1980s publications, but it often feels a tad contrived. A few weeks ago, I was talking to a fellow fanzine veteran who was scathingly dismissive of the new kids on the block – a bit of grumpy old manism, perhaps, but with valid arguments. As he said, we used cut-and-paste techniques because that was all we had – even an Amstrad PCW was a luxury well into the mid-1990s and most zines had to be created by hand. A bit like modern-day ‘grindhouse’ movies that add fake film damage as if that was something 1970s filmmakers deliberately included in a movie rather than an irritating result of film prints being worn out by repeated use, to see people now using cut ‘n’ paste as if it adds ‘authenticity’ in a world where they have easy access to the sort of desktop publishing software (and hardware) that we all would’ve killed for back in the day feels contrived and misguided. There is an inherently pretentious inauthenticity to what they do. I mean, produce small-run zines that are run off on laser printers by all means – the idea remains valid and I’m not saying that there is no value in these new zines – I enjoy some of them very much. But let’s not pretend that using Letraset, Prittstick and scissors is anything more than an affectation. There are easier, better ways of producing these zines today.

I will say that young people today often seem amazed by fanzines. I’m saying this as somehow who has sold back issues of Sheer Filth at the Satanic Flea Market where 20-somethings marvelled at the very idea – in a world where most print magazines are increasingly glossy and book-like, the black-and-white photocopied** booklet seems increasingly amazing and otherworldly, hence its attraction to the current generation of publishers I suppose. “How do you get to produce something like this?” asked one goggle-eyed customer, and at that point, it sunk in with me just how alien a concept and visual style this is now. No wonder the idea has been taken up by monied hipsters and self-styled cool kids.

The other part of the fanzine revival comes in the form of collected volumes of older publications, making the transition from scruffy and disposable fanzine to important historical document. I did it with Sheer Filth, which was collected in its almost-entirety for a FAB Press book several years ago, but it wasn’t the first – Slimetime and Sleazoid Express had beaten us to it and there may have been others. In recent years, there have been several more books collating the lost history of various zines, mostly in the music world. There’s a sense to this – music fanzines arguably recorded a specific moment of history in a way that movie fanzines didn’t, if only because they tended to be full of interviews with bands, always more accessible than filmmakers and usually more here today, gone tomorrow. The music fanzine is a snapshot of a particular scene at a moment in time and so ideal as a historical document to preserve; a lot of horror movie fanzines only ever featured film reviews, and not even new films at that. The best of them still reflect the time in which they were produced and are vital guides to the anarchic outsider cult movie fandom of the era, and it’s a pity that we don’t have collected volumes of things like Gore Gazette and Ungawa in particular. But music zines perhaps lend themselves to a more obvious sense of nostalgia and cultural history.

The latest of these is Earth Island Books’ The Resurrection of The Crazed, which pulls together all four issues of The Crazed, a psychobilly zine by Paul Wainwright circa 1987. I was never a psychobilly fan as such – I knew several people who were on the scene and didn’t mind the odd album from the odd band. There was a certain cross-over between the psychobilly scene and horror fandom – quiffs were not exactly an unusual sight at horror film festivals or in Psychotronic Video, a shop run by Bal Croce of the Sting-rays. If you can be connected to a musical scene through osmosis, then I guess we all were, and plenty of that influence was filtered through to my own zines via writers like Cathal Tohill. I never had the haircut, bought the records or fought my way through gigs at Klub Foot but enough of the content of The Crazed is familiar to me for it not to feel like an exploration of the unknown.

Speaking from experience, the greatest conundrum when putting together a book collection of old zines is just how authentic you stay. The temptation is simply to reproduce the original zines as originally published – and maybe that is the most authentic way of recreating the original experience. But that usually isn’t going to be the best reading experience – even if an editor still has the original master copies of each issue, everything is going to look very muddy and messy. As well as improving photo quality, you might want to tidy up the text a bit – the enthusiastic writing of a 19-year-old might no longer seem so impressive. At the same time, if you interfere too much with the original content, you risk losing whatever it was that made the zine worth preserving in the first place.

The Crazed ran for 4 issues, which is pushing it as far as compiling a book goes (Wainwright’s otherwise detailed stories of the zine’s production become elusive when it comes to page count per issue). The text here is never going to cause eye strain, and there is a lot of new content to take the book to 260 pages. But that doesn’t mean it’s lacking in content. If you wanted a historical study of the major psychobilly bands of the 1980s, then this is it (with a few exceptions). Like most music zines that dug obsessively into a scene, this is awash with interviews – The Meteors, Demented Are Go, King Kurt, The Coffin Nails, GuanaBatz and a load of bands who will be less well known to anyone except the more devoted Flat Top. As you might expect, these are a mixed bag, with ‘short’ being the most frequent connecting feature for most band’s answers to questions. I’ve interviewed rock bands and so I sympathise – between arrogance and stupidity, many have little to say and often cannot be drawn on the work that you’d imagine they might have passionate feelings about one way or another; they also probably suffer from both interview fatigue if they are at all popular and the insecurity of trying to explain themselves while not coming across like buffoons. When the interviewer is a fan rather than an objective or cynical journalist, it often becomes even more difficult. Wainwright’s early Q&A interviews often feel a bit stilted but he seems to have realised that and as time goes on, he switches to articles in which the one-sentence answers are woven into a bigger piece and so feel more curated and less awkward. Still – rock stars, eh?

But all this is, again, a record of a time and place. Young fans interviewing young bands. No one is expecting ground-breaking rock journalism in these pieces because that was never the intention. I doubt that Wainwright saw The Crazed as the first step on a career in music journalism – he was just recording a moment in time and once that moment had gone, for him if not the bands, he packed it all up and moved on. A lot of fanzines of all sorts probably did the same – most of the horror zines I read lasted for a handful of issues and then the editors slipped back into boring normality. Maybe they got married or had kids or simply moved on from a teenage obsession. Even if you never quite abandon the things you are into, they sometimes become less important to you as time goes by.

Reading this book now, it’s clear that Wainwright was not going to be the long-term chronicler of the Psychobilly scene. He cheerfully admits to having gotten into the music because he was searching for something outside the pop mainstream of the 1980s to be a fan of, which is… interesting. He’s not alone in this, I’m sure – there have always been kids who actively seek out a tribe and then adopt the look and the lifestyle. But I find it weird anyway because everything I’ve ever been into, I’ve discovered organically. You hear a band or two on the radio and like them, then seek out more of the same, then slowly become immersed into that whole world. I’ve never actively gone out looking for a New Thing. I may be misunderstanding Wainwright here. When he says “I needed to establish an identity” as a teenager, he might be talking about a subconscious desire. But it doesn’t come across that way. I don’t doubt for a minute that he loved this music, lived, breathed and ate it for a few years – but it makes sense that he would exhaust that obsessive love. Never disowning or abandoning the music perhaps, but no longer being consumed by it. He notes that it was the closure of the original Klub Foot in Hammersmith that was the beginning of the end, and that makes sense – communities, at least pre-social media, were often held together by a physical place. Take that away and it all becomes fractured, the intensity of feeling felt by being around like-minded people all the time becoming diminished. When you are sat at home just listening to records without continual reinforcement, things stop seeming to be quite as important as they once were.

The Resurrection of the Crazed has the obsessive feel of teenage fandom and the enthusiasm of middle-aged nostalgia. It’s not great journalism and it doesn’t need to be – that wasn’t the point then and certainly isn’t now. If you want a detailed and thorough history of British psychobilly, this isn’t the book for you. It’s not really the book for me, beyond feeding a fascination for all things fanzine that refuses to go away. But if you were part of that scene in 1987-88 – if you were someone who might have been buying the original zine while queueing for a gig – then this might be a pleasant trip down memory lane.

DAVID FLINT

* Don’t feel smug, Blu-ray and UHD buyers. The only reason those formats are not mentioned is because they have barely penetrated the mainstream public consciousness.

** After the first few issues, Sheer Filth was printed rather than photocopied, though the production methods remained the same. Printing was better quality, more reliable and, once you reached a certain run size, cheaper than photocopying. We talk about zines being photocopied because that was how they began and how, to the untrained eye, they still looked – but Sheer Filth was far from being the only zine of the time to make the leap to offset litho printing.

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