Sniffin' Cow Gum and Other DIY Publishing Habits
A short digression on punk rock and DIY publishing
This thing won’t write itself.
I’ve been staring at the start, trying to understand.
It’s punk rock again. The corpse has been dead for so long that it’s almost jazz. I can’t seem to bury it.
Where to start? In the middle, obviously. I went to the Rock’n’Roll Book Club in Walthamstow to hear Mark Perry. That’s his full name. I tend to think of him as Mark P. That’s what he was known as when he edited Sniffin’ Glue. I always thought Mark P was his DHSS name. It turns out he had a job in a bank.
I have a couple of copies of the Glue, late issues bought at Bruce’s in Edinburgh. And now I have a Glue omnibus (published by Omnibus), complete with a fine art print. (The print is an artless sketch of Johnny Rotten).
Sniffin’ Glue becomes something else when you bind all the copies together and add 47 years. It is a bridge between two distant cities, History and Nostalgia. The cities are on opposite banks of that fast-moving river, Irrelevance.
It’s quite the view, and context changes everything. If I take out my yellowing copy of Sniffin’ Glue 10, from June 1977, I’m back in my teenage bedroom, dreaming of somewhere else. As the pre-eminent fanzine of the punk era, the Glue has everything you’d expect. It set the style - those felt-pen headlines, the single staple, the sense of urgency.
There’s a bit of professionalism there, heavily disguised. There are adverts. The back page has Jamie Reid’s artwork of the Queen with a safety pin lip, an ad for the Sex Pistols. There’s a hand-drawn ad for Television at the Hammersmith Odeon (28/29 May). There are even two small ads. (“Weymouth guitarist wants bassist/drummer/vocals etc; Tony on 71397, early July” and “Drummer and lead guitar wanted by Simon - 300 0890.”)
It’s intimate. It’s a bit of a club. The front cover has a photo of Perry glaring out, flanked by co-conspirators Danny Baker and Harry T Murlowksi. The internet suggests that Murlowksi is the subject of Sham 69’s popular atrocity Hurry Up Harry (a number 10 hit in 1978). Danny Baker, we all know about. He is the face of Daz, the king of the sausage sandwich, the man who interviewed Michael Jackson for the NME, was a national disgrace, mythologised himself in several autobiographies, and much more. I’ve interviewed him twice. Once, at the apex of his career and mine, when he was presenting STV’s afternoon quiz show Win, Lose or Draw in front of a busload of pensioners on Leith Walk. And again, in the dressing room at the Ed Sullivan Theater when Jonathan Ross’s talk show was beaming in from New York. On both occasions, and on every occasion I have heard him speak, Baker was like a fruit machine of anecdote, a jackpot of gossip and wit. In Sniffin’ Glue 10, he has the swagger, but not the sophistication. He writes in cockney. Of the Ramones’ Sheena Is A Punk Rocker, Baker says: “If the Beach Boys were alive today they would have done records like this. Nobody needs tellin’ about Ramones records, do they. They take all the bovva to put out a 12” disc and finish about inch and half into the plate! Makes a lot of the records here sound naff.” (Baker is selling his record collection on 4 June. Perhaps Sheena will be there.)
That’s enough Danny Baker. In Walthamstow, Perry seemed anxious that the old Sausage Sandwich shouldn’t get the credit for everything, which is fair, as the Glue was Perry’s thing, and while Baker (and Jonathan Ross) represent the vainglorious Opportunity Knocks strand of punk, Perry is a less public character who celebrated the London bit of the punk explosion during its firework phase, then settled down into something less easily categorised. He is, if you look from the right angle, one of the architects of the great non-category, post-punk. In 1977, singing with Alternative TV, he was already bored of the tribal thing: “How much longer,” he sang, “will people wear/Nazi armbands and dye their hair?/Safety pins and spray your clothes/Talk about anarchy, fascism and boredom.”
We’re getting ahead of ourselves. If the end is the beginning, what happened at the start?
Here’s where the lines dissolve. Perry told the Walthamstow book club crowd he had been working a bank since 1974, and was an avid reader of the music press. He liked Lynyrd Skynyrd, Neil Young. And then, and then … “Nick Kent reviewed the Ramones first album in the NME. And it sounded so exciting, you just couldn’t wait to hear it.”
Perry got the Ramones album from an import shop off Charing Cross Road, sometime in late June 1976. There was something about the Ramones, he said. “You didn’t know you wanted it until you heard it.” Perry used to buy records from Stan Brennan and Phil Gaston at the Rock On stall in Soho. They sold magazines too. They sold Punk, a New York mag edited by John Holmstrom. They sold Who Put The Bomp, edited by Greg Shaw. They were writing about underground, left-field music, the roots of a scene that didn’t yet have a name. “And there was a guy called Brian Hogg,” Perry said. “He was my biggest UK influence. He used to do a fanzine called Bam Balam. It was a terrific thing full of enthusiasm, a lot of stuff about the Flaming Groovies, Sixties stuff. So I knew the format. I knew what it should look like.”
Perry asked the guys at Rock On whether they had a magazine covering the UK scene. Phil said “No, you should start one yourself.” So Perry did. He bashed at a few pages, using the typewriter he got for his 12th birthday. His girlfriend Louise had a job in the City with access to a photocopier and knocked out 20 or so copies. Rock On took them all and asked for more. “I still considered myself a kid at that time,” Perry said. “Although I was working, at 19, you still felt the energy of that. And there must have been loads of kids like me that were asking the same question. Where do I find out more about this scene?”
It was Perry’s great good fortune to be living in London at the time of the punk explosion. That initial wave was quite small. In the summer of 1976, he went with journalist Caroline Coon to see the Sex Pistols at the 100 Club. He had long hair, and was wearing a brown satin jacket and purple loon pants. There was what Perry euphemistically calls “a melee”. Perry’s brown satin jacket was ripped to shreds. A few days later, he bought some hair-cutting scissors from Woolworths on Deptford High Street. “I went in the bathroom. Me mum said ‘what you doing in there Mark? You’ve been in there a long time.’ My dad, said ‘leave him alone, he’s a teenage boy.’ I came out, my hair, you can imagine the state of it. It was all over the place. That was me turning into a punk.”
The influence of Sniffin’ Glue is captured in Matthew Worley’s new book, Zerox Machine: Punk, Post-Punk And Fanzine in Britain, 1976-88. Of the Glue itself, Worley notes how its 12 issues were like an extended diary, stitching from inspiration to disillusionment: “It sought a cultural revolution, then all but debunked it.” Worley’s book is amazing, even if you know some of this stuff. It’s academic in tone, but accessible. It’s a bit of a butterfly collection, documenting the hundreds of self-published fanzines in all their chaotic, contradictory glory and trying to form a coherent picture from all of those scatological xeroxed smudges, from Ripped & Torn and Kill Your Pet Puppy to Hanging Around and The Next Big Thing to Printed Noises and Vague and Debris. Some fanzines graduated to broader prominence. Jamming!, led with indefatigable optimism by Tony Fletcher, became a proper magazine, a post-punk answer to Zigzag seeking direction in the fog.
But an encyclopaedic approach also risks mis-stating the influence of fanzines which, by their nature, were local, amateur, shambolic, irregular, messy and untethered by the limitations of professionalism or even legibility. Collecting fanzines was not a scientific process. You bought them when you saw them, and that was an entirely random process. I still have a few of the fanzines I acquired, and they don’t get any less precious. Jungleland, Juniper Beri-Beri, blast!, Stand And Deliver, Ten Commandments, Allied Propaganda, Granite City, Slow Dazzle, Attack on Bzag!, Blam, Rapid Eye Movement, Rorschach Testing, Fun ’n’Frenzy, Explicit, New Youth, Adventures in Anarchy; all them messy, all of them beautiful. Where did they come from? No idea. They’re time capsules now, but their intensity remains. Fanzines were a way of making order from the chaos, chaos from the order. The glue, if you took it seriously enough, was cow gum. It was a way of finding your voice and making it stick. As Ant Paterson remarked on Grange Hill, studying a copy of Alternatives To Valium: “This is brilliant!”
Fantastic article. A wonderful snapshot of a heady, glorious time to be around music.