Posted by slobodan burgher on August 27, 2008, 4:08 pm
1) Greetings Tony! Well that you have agreed to communicate to me. Tell to us about itself.
Yeah, I am a occasional blogger who does a blog called Only In It For The Music which kind of is very random stuff about music I like, and I also started a fanzine blog called Punks Is Hippies which was not intended to be a blog but kind of turned into one because of time restraints. I also do a fanzine called Distort Hackney but to date I have not really managed to print any of the three issues for 2008 but I am working on it ha ha ha.
2) How you have appeared involved in punk-culture? What for you punk?
The first week of school my friend gave me a mix tape that he had got from his older brother who was a punk rocker. It had Black Flag, Discharge, Asta Kask, Cortex, Broken Bones, Rövsvett and some others on it. It was 1987 and I was 7 years old. I have been a fan of punk and all that comes with it ever since. Not being very musically gifted I did fanzines instead, perhaps the only one worth mentioning is Jävel Mag that had 2 issues in 1993-1994. The idea of the zine was to A) annoy the bands interviewed to provoke angry answers and B) have as many bands interviewed as possible (like 50-100 per issue), and C) all bands interviewed had to be Dis-core / D-beat style bands. We were very young then, but I think we were right ha ha ha.
Punk for me is a lot of different things. I don't really dress punk, nor do I live in a squat or whatever. Mostly it's the music I guess. The community aspect of punk is also very important but only as long as it does not become introspective and closed to outsiders or isolated. Out of my close social circle, today as well as 10 years ago, or 20 years ago, I am the only one who listens to punk and noise music. So keeping in touch with others through tape trading or zines or blogs is obviously a way for me to hang out with likeminded. But punk is not an excuse for me to feel that I belong in some community or whatever. Punk is part of who I am.
3) At you very big collection zine.Как you have started to collect the collection? With what you are connected that so take a great interest punk-zine?
Actually, this is not true. I don't have a great collection of fanzines. I used to collect zines when I was younger, back in the tape trading times. But it seems my mother threw all my fanzines out after I moved out about 15 years ago. I shall never forget her…ha ha ha. I guess one subconscious reason for me coming up with the idea of Punks Is Hippies was to recoup zines lost, or something like that.
The starting point for Punks Is Hippies was to be a source of information for fans of music where they could find out more about bands. There's tons of "history of punk" books being written which is great but from what I gather fanzines are not really treated as sources such as historical documents. I mean, punk fanzines should not be treated as pieces of art but sources of information. I was perhaps hoping Punks Is Hippies could step in and offer some of that. I for one love to read old interviews with Disorder, Discharge, Anti-Cimex, Terveet Kadet, Amebix etc.
But apart from simply being a source of information fanzines offers something else. For example, recently I read a bunch of Swedish zines that are quite good: Skitliv! (made by Warvictims guys) and Cow Mag. These made me remember that reading zines is a special thing because the writing is by definition subjective and personal as oppose to virtually all other "published texts". I mean, this is all very obvious and should not come as a surprise. But reading a fanzine is like reading someone's letter to a friend talking candidly about his or hers favourite record. The benefit of this is that the text will have none of the crap stylistic or editorial restraints of much journalism, but obviously it all succeeds or falls on the matter of quality control –which brings me to the charm of amateurism that is generic to fanzines but I'll talk about that later.
4) Tell to us in detail about the collection, how many all zines at you is, from what countries? Whether there are at you rare things? If there is that tell about them in detail
I don't really have a collection of zines; what's on the website is partly zines that I have scanned myself from my own (limited) collection of zines, partly it is re-posts of zines that were found scattered throughout the internet but not really known about, but mostly it is from other people from all over the world who help out. So lets talk about what's on the website: in total there's more than 250 fanzines, where of about 100 or so are from the UK, another 120 or so are from USA, about 50 or so are from various European countries, finally there's about 10-20 from "rest of the world" which includes for example Venezuela or Japan. There's also some miscellaneous items that includes like booklets from records, inners, oddities.
Fanzines on the website are from all sort of countries from Russia, Finland, Norway, England, Mexico, Venezuela, Germany, Japan, Sweden, France to USA.
I never really think about fanzines as rarities, I guess because they are more idiosyncratically printed and released than for example records. It's easy to reach a point where collectors can agree that the Shit Lickers EP was only released in 300 ex, and all the rest are bootlegs. But when it comes to fanzines such things gets harder, mostly I guess because collecting zines is not as popular as collecting records. That said, I bought some 30 odd mostly-English zines on the internet from someone and almost all of them are what you may say rare and obscure (at least I never saw them before).
5) whether Is at you especially favourite zines? Why they to you like most of all? Whether is at you any special raritets?
My favourites are RIOT from the UK, a great A5 format handwritten zine that looked great and was written very well. Also most of the bands interviewed were ones that were the very iconic of the time when the zine was being made. Made in the early 1990s it had interviews with Extreme Noise Terror, Anti-Cimex, Crazy ####ed Up Daily Life, Nausea and so on.
I also love Sika Apara from Sweden. It was made by the two guys from Finn Records and who played in many famous Swedish bands such as No Security, Dischange, Meanwhile etc. The zine was all about voicing their total Discharge-worship and total apathy with political correct punk. The three Sika Apara zines all read like whos-whos of Swedish d-beat crust scene, from a time when this music was not at all popular as it is today and when perhaps the whole scene in Sweden consisted of perhaps much less that 200 people in total (today that number is probably 5000).
Finally, my third favourite is the Bristol zine made by the boys from Chaos UK and Disorder and related bands, Be Bad Be Glad. This is one of my favourites simply because of it coming from my favourite time and place of punk. Also the humour is right up my street. "Pass the gluetube to the right hand"!
Close follows up would include the likes of the currently rolling Swedish d-beat hysteria fanzine that is Skitliv!. I also love Crust War from Japan, even if I can't read a word of it!
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