Belief, Understanding, Experience
Matthew Worley, Zerox Machine: Punk, Post-Punk and Fanzines in Britain, 1976-88
Reaktion Books, 360pp, £20.00, ISBN 9781789148596
reviewed by Alexis Forss
The hiss of tape and a murmur of studio ambient: someone laughs, cusses, or maybe crashes into something. Then the clicking drumsticks and here comes the count-in. Onetwothreefour! Amateurism, demystification, and materiality announce themselves at the top of a punk track, cleansing and corroding, nihilating and liberating, not only blasting towards a new musical future but also carving out a hard rock orthodoxy. And anyone can play. Maybe this rings a bell: ‘This is a chord. This is another. This is a third. Now form a band.’ That came from Tony Moon’s Sideburns zine of January 1977.
For the hardcore, those three chords were both means and end. Or, to the more progressively-inclined, they could be stepping stones, leading backwards through the provocations of Situationism and Dada and onwards into newer sonic expanses. Punk cannot be reduced to a capsule definition: its heterogeneous and frequently antipathetic membership spans the degraded psychedelia of Industrial and the thrash of Oi! This polyphony of antisocial racket is more than merely reflected by the zine culture that it rocked into existence.
More than simply reporting the scene, fanzines (as opposed to the prozines, the massively influential music press that only slowly came around to punk) were the scene. They were cheaply made in squats and bedrooms on haphazard schedules. Photocopied by whoever’s friend or parent had access to a Xerox machine at the local printshop or council offices, distributed at gigs or sometimes sold at sympathetic record stores, they amounted to a people’s history of punk.
While punk music and its offshoots were, to no small extent, a product of Britain’s art schools, zine culture was a working-class phenomenon. While The Sex Pistols disappointed fans of the early singles by releasing something as predictable as a slickly-produced album, the kids who picked up scissors, decals, and staplers were fully committed to walking the DIY walk. Their zines’ wonky layouts, torturous cacography, and reappropriated pop imagery are as constitutive of punk as the grand visions of Malcolm McLaren and Tony Wilson.
With all their stunts and ambitions of orchestrating music, fashion, and visual art, these businessmen remained in fundamental hock to the commodity form and the profit motive. It was through gift of the gab and post-'68 posturing that they spun commercial fiasco into myths of bloody-minded integrity. And for punk kids in Leeds, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Grimsby and Sheffield — to whom the King’s Road and the Lesser Free Trade Hall must have seemed impossibly remote — zines were a way of getting in on the action. And most were sold for amounts verging on the nominal.
Matthew Worley’s Zerox Machine: Punk, Post-Punk and Fanzines in Britain, 1976-88 is about those who were inspired not by Moon’s message of three chords but by the medium: busted typewriters, felt-tip pens, stencils, and Letraset; off-set lithographic printing; cut-and-paste blackmail text and photographs ripped from the music mags. On the evidence of this book, their number was legion. By my rough count of the index, nearly 900 zines are covered. Worley has skimped on nothing, has sought out everything, and has skimmed nothing. He honestly seems to have tracked down and read all four issues of Industrial News, all seven of Gun Rubber, all five of New Pose, all fourteen of Temporary Hoarding, all 12 of Sniffin’ Glue. I could go on. Worley certainly does.
By any measure this was a work of scholastic fanaticism, a delirious yet methodical plunge into the rag and bone shop of culture. It reminded me of All of the Marvels, Douglas Wolk’s account of reading and somehow digesting all 27,000 Marvel superhero comics. Call them crazy, but such undertakings have their value. That either man was able to summarise his findings in less than 350 pages constitutes an act of no little service: they’ve done the primary reading so we don’t have to. The resulting books are uncannily sane compendia of mass culture, bursting at the seams with smashed pulp. I wouldn’t want go without either.
Worley’s argument is that while ‘fanzines might seem little more than cultural detritus,’ they actually ‘afford a rich source of social insight,’ ‘a welcome collapsing of what Raymond Williams considered to be the problematic relationship between documentary and social culture; that is, fanzines blur the lines that entangle across life expressed “not only in art” but in “ordinary behaviour.” If youth-based cultures such as punk revolved around creativity, be it in terms of style, music, performance, language or art, then they further served to realise shared modes of belief, understanding, experience, and identity.’ So we’re not being offered ‘the history of zines’ but ‘zines as history.’
This is an excellent production by Reaktion Books. The text is laid out in unjustified double columns, paying homage to the crooked typographies and meandering scrawls that made so many zines barely legible. The backflap boasts of the 113 illustrations contained within, and rightly so. Zines were evidently a visual culture at least as much as a delivery system for information and attitude, and you don’t have to be a fully paid-up follower of Marshall McLuhan to appreciate how the means of production presupposed a suite of (anti)political and aesthetic stances. (The Canadian media theorist himself toyed with zine-like collage and détournement in The Medium is the Massage [sic. – and apparently a typesetter’s error that proved too delicious to emend], his 1967 collaboration with illustrator Quentin Fiore.) Flipping through these pages, poring over them, one can only marvel at the ingenuity on display. The sampled covers and spreads are as loud and abrasive as the most ferocious punk songs of the period, screaming with fury, alienation, and gallows humour.
But reproduction also flattens into image what ought to be experienced as object — as found object at that — haptically and illicitly. Museumification has been a disaster for the different incarnations of modernism, and ‘history of zines’ is exactly the risk this book runs throughout its presentation. Worley hugs his heap of primary material so closely that over eight densely reported chapters the accumulated zines of more than a decade smudge into one inky mess. For all that the book gestures at the emergence of riot grrrl and its panoply of zines in the nineties, it doesn’t argue for its subject’s having any living presence or enduring legacy beyond the documentary. Nor does it confront the decline and loss of that material culture, of that entire mode of fandom.
Worley is so firmly committed to providing his readers with a synoptic view of the zine scene that he ends up being modest or even downright evasive about the amount of pavement-pounding gumshoe work that went into his book. Since zines were ‘distributed in relatively small numbers, their existence fleeting and barely acknowledged beyond limited coteries of friends, acquaintances and correspondents,’ gathering his primary materials must have been one hell of a task. There’s another story to be told here, and I would love to know more about the cast of characters Worley sought out and persuaded to open up their storage crates. This book was built upon their combing and hoarding of counter-cultural jetsam. That they held onto their zines is evidence of a culture that had felt dynamic, inspiring, and alive.
Worley’s most poignant passage is an aside, buried in the acknowledgements. Turning to his colleagues and friends at Reading University, he writes: ‘thanks for keeping my spirits up amid the disintegration of British higher education.’ All reservations notwithstanding, this is a vital piece of work, a project of generous and selfless obsession. Historicisation is both necessary and ambivalent, but we can only quibble Worley’s methods because an institution of humanistic learning gave him the time and the space to take this headlong dive into a vanished countercultural practice. That may not sound punk, but it’s some kind of civilisation.
For the hardcore, those three chords were both means and end. Or, to the more progressively-inclined, they could be stepping stones, leading backwards through the provocations of Situationism and Dada and onwards into newer sonic expanses. Punk cannot be reduced to a capsule definition: its heterogeneous and frequently antipathetic membership spans the degraded psychedelia of Industrial and the thrash of Oi! This polyphony of antisocial racket is more than merely reflected by the zine culture that it rocked into existence.
More than simply reporting the scene, fanzines (as opposed to the prozines, the massively influential music press that only slowly came around to punk) were the scene. They were cheaply made in squats and bedrooms on haphazard schedules. Photocopied by whoever’s friend or parent had access to a Xerox machine at the local printshop or council offices, distributed at gigs or sometimes sold at sympathetic record stores, they amounted to a people’s history of punk.
While punk music and its offshoots were, to no small extent, a product of Britain’s art schools, zine culture was a working-class phenomenon. While The Sex Pistols disappointed fans of the early singles by releasing something as predictable as a slickly-produced album, the kids who picked up scissors, decals, and staplers were fully committed to walking the DIY walk. Their zines’ wonky layouts, torturous cacography, and reappropriated pop imagery are as constitutive of punk as the grand visions of Malcolm McLaren and Tony Wilson.
With all their stunts and ambitions of orchestrating music, fashion, and visual art, these businessmen remained in fundamental hock to the commodity form and the profit motive. It was through gift of the gab and post-'68 posturing that they spun commercial fiasco into myths of bloody-minded integrity. And for punk kids in Leeds, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Grimsby and Sheffield — to whom the King’s Road and the Lesser Free Trade Hall must have seemed impossibly remote — zines were a way of getting in on the action. And most were sold for amounts verging on the nominal.
Matthew Worley’s Zerox Machine: Punk, Post-Punk and Fanzines in Britain, 1976-88 is about those who were inspired not by Moon’s message of three chords but by the medium: busted typewriters, felt-tip pens, stencils, and Letraset; off-set lithographic printing; cut-and-paste blackmail text and photographs ripped from the music mags. On the evidence of this book, their number was legion. By my rough count of the index, nearly 900 zines are covered. Worley has skimped on nothing, has sought out everything, and has skimmed nothing. He honestly seems to have tracked down and read all four issues of Industrial News, all seven of Gun Rubber, all five of New Pose, all fourteen of Temporary Hoarding, all 12 of Sniffin’ Glue. I could go on. Worley certainly does.
By any measure this was a work of scholastic fanaticism, a delirious yet methodical plunge into the rag and bone shop of culture. It reminded me of All of the Marvels, Douglas Wolk’s account of reading and somehow digesting all 27,000 Marvel superhero comics. Call them crazy, but such undertakings have their value. That either man was able to summarise his findings in less than 350 pages constitutes an act of no little service: they’ve done the primary reading so we don’t have to. The resulting books are uncannily sane compendia of mass culture, bursting at the seams with smashed pulp. I wouldn’t want go without either.
Worley’s argument is that while ‘fanzines might seem little more than cultural detritus,’ they actually ‘afford a rich source of social insight,’ ‘a welcome collapsing of what Raymond Williams considered to be the problematic relationship between documentary and social culture; that is, fanzines blur the lines that entangle across life expressed “not only in art” but in “ordinary behaviour.” If youth-based cultures such as punk revolved around creativity, be it in terms of style, music, performance, language or art, then they further served to realise shared modes of belief, understanding, experience, and identity.’ So we’re not being offered ‘the history of zines’ but ‘zines as history.’
This is an excellent production by Reaktion Books. The text is laid out in unjustified double columns, paying homage to the crooked typographies and meandering scrawls that made so many zines barely legible. The backflap boasts of the 113 illustrations contained within, and rightly so. Zines were evidently a visual culture at least as much as a delivery system for information and attitude, and you don’t have to be a fully paid-up follower of Marshall McLuhan to appreciate how the means of production presupposed a suite of (anti)political and aesthetic stances. (The Canadian media theorist himself toyed with zine-like collage and détournement in The Medium is the Massage [sic. – and apparently a typesetter’s error that proved too delicious to emend], his 1967 collaboration with illustrator Quentin Fiore.) Flipping through these pages, poring over them, one can only marvel at the ingenuity on display. The sampled covers and spreads are as loud and abrasive as the most ferocious punk songs of the period, screaming with fury, alienation, and gallows humour.
But reproduction also flattens into image what ought to be experienced as object — as found object at that — haptically and illicitly. Museumification has been a disaster for the different incarnations of modernism, and ‘history of zines’ is exactly the risk this book runs throughout its presentation. Worley hugs his heap of primary material so closely that over eight densely reported chapters the accumulated zines of more than a decade smudge into one inky mess. For all that the book gestures at the emergence of riot grrrl and its panoply of zines in the nineties, it doesn’t argue for its subject’s having any living presence or enduring legacy beyond the documentary. Nor does it confront the decline and loss of that material culture, of that entire mode of fandom.
Worley is so firmly committed to providing his readers with a synoptic view of the zine scene that he ends up being modest or even downright evasive about the amount of pavement-pounding gumshoe work that went into his book. Since zines were ‘distributed in relatively small numbers, their existence fleeting and barely acknowledged beyond limited coteries of friends, acquaintances and correspondents,’ gathering his primary materials must have been one hell of a task. There’s another story to be told here, and I would love to know more about the cast of characters Worley sought out and persuaded to open up their storage crates. This book was built upon their combing and hoarding of counter-cultural jetsam. That they held onto their zines is evidence of a culture that had felt dynamic, inspiring, and alive.
Worley’s most poignant passage is an aside, buried in the acknowledgements. Turning to his colleagues and friends at Reading University, he writes: ‘thanks for keeping my spirits up amid the disintegration of British higher education.’ All reservations notwithstanding, this is a vital piece of work, a project of generous and selfless obsession. Historicisation is both necessary and ambivalent, but we can only quibble Worley’s methods because an institution of humanistic learning gave him the time and the space to take this headlong dive into a vanished countercultural practice. That may not sound punk, but it’s some kind of civilisation.