I was a quiet dejected child, growing up through the cracks in the pavement in the suburbs.
Record shops were a haven but I couldn’t afford to buy anything‌ except for these things on the counter called fanzines!
Zines were my friends‌ and zine writers were too! They would write back to me, and meet me, and we would drink cider together.
I didn’t think I was good enough to write a fanzine myself. But then I heard the call - the DIY mantra: “It’s easy, it‘s cheap, anyone can do it!” I gave my zines to friends in the college canteen and guess what? They read them!
I watched five pairs of eyes intently scanning those pages, and at that moment I understood that my words could have power - if I put them in print. Resolving to take advantage of this curious piece of good fortune, I marched right back to the college office and requested 30 more copies. After that I made lots of zines, and through them I met loads of amazing people. There was a network of zines and bands across the UK and I became a part of that.
Not everyone was positive about my work, however. I was in Manchester and it was the eighties, so I tried to interview the decade’s most important band, the Smiths‌ but Morrissey only got upset with me.
The Happy Mondays were not very happy when I interviewed them. They looked at the floor and didn’t say much. But then again it was only teatime and they probably hadn’t had their drugs yet. The Stone Roses gave me an interview but then Ian Brown fell out with me when I said I didn’t like their poppy new sound.
Stroppy popstars didn’t get me down though. There were so many amazing bands to discover and write about. The fanzine got bigger and bigger. Each issue I printed more copies till in the end I was printing 5000 and it was selling across the UK, Europe and the States. People loved it and we received loads of letters. One of those letters was from Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth. I’d criticised his band and it had really bothered them, so he sent out a fax to a few influential friends in the music industry to say what a bad person I was.
I answered him back in a fanzine, which he read and wrote back to apologise, but it had a lasting effect. The next time I sat down to write my head was full of critical American voices telling me that what I was writing was stupid. My life changed at that point anyway, I became ill for a long long time‌
When I got better I tried to work as a freelance copywriter but no-one wanted to know. I went on Facebook and people always wanted to talk about the zine. Gradually it dawned on me that I had all these experiences and lots of material that music fanatics would love to see. I decided to put them all into a book. It took me three years, but it finally came together. I decided to publish it myself, as I’d had so much fun doing that before. It’s hard work, but now I am a published author and am running a publishing company! Lots of people love the book and It’s being written about by the Independent, Vice magazine, NME
So the moral of the story is that if you want to do it, then do it! Do it!
Do it yourself!