DO OR DIY

DO OR DIY

LETTER FROM BRITAIN

by Penny Valentine

An article in HOTV (Hot On The Visuals) put out by the alternative Pink Flamingo Music Ltd. from a flat in W. 9, and one of the very few alternatives that actually boasts a “staff,” has a nicely out of focus picture just recognizable as Nick Logan moving sideways while sitting at his desk.

Logan was once editor of the NME at a crucial period, when it made the transition from mere rock weekly to Something Important. He gave it a voice of its own (supposedly reflecting street ethos from the early punk upsurge in London). He neatly managed to translate that into both a reflection of what was happening and an invitation to imitate/join it to the mass of NME readers scattered round the rest of the country (some hundreds of thousands), Reading NME under Logan stopped being just a way to keep tabs on releases and have endless diatribes from the “rough at the top” rock millionaires. It became a credential. A copy of the NME under your arm and you were part of whatever it was that was going down. Its personality became the readers’ identity, and if it didn’t reflect their lifestyle then it certainly gave them one to emulate. The NME remains Logan’s heritage.

When he finally quit (having achieved his goal he got bored) to go to first Smash Hits (a paper based round lyric sheets of current records) and then to start up The Face many people thought he was just pure crazy. Yet in the past year his orte-man operation (with a contributors list so long it nearly needs a magazine to itself) has merely confirmed Logan’s knack of picking up on a hidden audience and repeating the NME pattern of giving the magazine an identity which starts off by picking up on an underground movement early enough and then pulling in a readership who identify with it or copy it.

Of all the alternatives (and because of Logan’s history as an “establishment” journalist The Face is in the gap between the rock weeklies and the amateur broadsheets) The Face is the most overtly successful but most quickly moving towards establishment. A monthly, it’s dropped its “Effortlessly Modish issue” line to a tenth issue tongue in cheek challenge: “Rock’s Final Frontier.” But The Face is modish, about mode. Logan’s objective, he tells a refreshingly nervous and sweating Chris Burkham in HOTV, was initially to do a photo-based magazine that wasn’t crowded with ads (the tenth issue has only three pages of advertising in its 64-page issue): “Most of the stuff (the pictures) I use is first time, exclusive material...a couple of pictures which I’ve seen in the NME but I feel they’ve thrown away a bit. I’ve carried them and been quite surprised at the number of people who have reacted to them as if it’s the first time they’ve been shown—as if some things in the NME can just get lost. I don’t think they’ve ever acknowledged the importance of that area.”

With the emphasis on visuals (five pages of New Romantics fashion, words are there but take unusual secondary importance) Logan has constructed a new environment for messages. Yet The Face has a regular column by Julie Burchill (the perverse shock-em-in-the-aisles succunct NME journalesse), and other NME part-timers contribute in this free zone apparently outside.record company reliance. It lists contents of other independents out around the time of its own issue, presents cartoonist Lowrys’ anarchistic single reviews (“Since I last wrote on this subject, putting people’s eyes out with bike spokes and pouring acid into the sockets has taken over from grinding jackboots into people’s faces forever...”) The Face is a touch of John Heartfield meets Vogue on very smooth expensive paper indeed—and is distrubuted nationally.

Since the DIY cut-up papers of punk that made a frontal assault on the establishment (and the established media) the alternative has, ironically, now found a market of its own. With a steady thousand or so readership practically ready-made, but localized, not distributed but placed in the odd bookshop and corner store. No doubt about it punk offered up the whole idea of an alternative, shaking up the power base and making so many spaces that DIY magazine alternatives were seen as a possibility by anyone who wanted to put words on paper, cut up headlines, set things as they wanted to. It gave a voice to anyone with a bit of savvy and energy. So it’s not surprising that there are so many around at the moment, and with a change in the way music is made so many surviving week after week. A random selection here includes, among a mass of British (mainly London)-based mags, one specifically from Scotland The Next Big Thing and Ireland Hot Press (the latter closer in looks to the weekly trades).

The main thing about the alternatives is not simply that they never carry interviews with established artists (and aren’t on the record company rota for such audiences when the Main Man turns up in town), but that the way they are written de-mystifies the whole process of the “interview” (the battles with tape recorders, the way the interviewer feels, etc.), and breaks down the established relationship between the outfit, the musician/the music, and the consumer: the audience.

Often, on close inspection, the alternative started its life as a fanzine: The Next Big Thing for instance has strong ties with local group The Cramps, sharing the same minute office space in Stirlingshire. Also, like many of the others, it’s pretty irregular (there’s been a three-month gap between publication at times).

Harsh Reality has just hit its 11th issue, put together by Laurence in Ipswich with “sort-of” interviews, but mainly reviews of local bands and visiting groups. Laurence is the kind of guy with a lot of energy and a headful of facts (when Addicts played he reminded them that Wire’s “12XU” was a number they stopped playing nearly two years ago). Chainsaw (“the punk rock bugle”) has the odd article on anarchy amongst its cartoon strips, bits cut from newspaper articles and interviews with bands like the low-frequency Australian outfit: Surgical Penis Klinik.

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In The City, Alternative Sounds and Jamming all come up on more expensive glossy paper. The first has two editors, three contributing writers and some office personnel on the mail order and design side, most of their current issue taken up with Poison Girls and a diatribe against The Face for approaching them with an idea of doing a feature on them (which they found politically unacceptable): “We oppose the music business and the way it works...we are not pushing ourselves or our own personalities...after all who are we writing about, US or the music?.. .if people want to know what we’re about and why we do what we do they can always write to us!”

Alternative Sounds is based in Coventry and may soon finish because Martin wants to start his own band and may restrict his output to monthly newsheets only; Jamming from South London uses different color washes on their pages and hit their 11th issue with articles on Dead Kennedys, Zeitgeist as well as the more established Beat.

Fashion Magazine is exactly that: “every issue includes a report from your open-air catwalk, the street. We snap and chat to you, the Model.” Fashion is: “the way you walk, talk, dance and prance.” Style: “isn’t what but how you wear clothes.” Stunning design too, as is the most stylish of the lot The Impossible Dream. Impossible to find out who puts it out, but it’s highly esoteric and beautifully printed. In a way it works on a level the others do not: as a style sheet for the stylists; like a visual wallchart equivalent to Joy Division. As the people who put together With Direction say: “this fanzine is with direction—the direction you choose to take from it,”

From the tiny quarterly anti-consumerism cartoon strips of Biff to the new investigations into sado-masochism; from the animal liberation based The Beast to Crass’s International Anthem the alternatives are enjoying, perversely, a boom of their own. Some sell as many as 10,000 copies an issue, and as Charlie Chainsaw says: “I think its about time that everyone started thinking of fanzines as THE music press rather than an alternative.”