Return of the fanzine

I've always been an avid reader of music magazines and still buy three print titles on a regular basis: Classic Rock, Planet Rock and Rock Candy (anyone see a connection?). I've read every copy of the first two publications and in fact have had a subscription to Classic Rock for many years. I discovered Rock Candy around 10 issues in and have now started the process of ordering back issues to fill in the gap. It is a purely retrospective mag but no doubt that's a winning formula as plenty 40 and 50-somethings love looking back to the glory days. Classic Rock and Planet Rock also feature contemporary content so overall I'm exposed to a healthy mix. I've recently added the German periodical Good Times to my stack. Again, it majors on the rock scene from the 60s to the 90s. I picked up a copy on holiday there and now obtain single issues via their website.

The enforced stay-at-home situation during the Covid crisis meant I had plenty of time to catch up on reading and devour new material. Of course, life continues to get in the way and you never quite accomplish everything you've planned. Such as writing this blog, to which I'm returning after creating the intro a while back. Sadly since then, Planet Rock Magazine has ceased publication although the radio station continues to be a success. I listen during my work commute and whenever I happen to be in the car alone. Sometimes I switch to Radio 5 Live or Radio Scotland - but only if something major is happening in the real world. Otherwise it's classic tunes for me behind the wheel. My own private space with my favourite soundtrack. It helps keep you sane! I guess there simply wasn't the demand to sustain Planet Rock Magazine beyond the 20-odd issues that were published. Classic Rock hit a rough patch a few years ago when the new owners gambled heavily on a digital platform that didn't pay off as expected. Thankfully the old publishers bought it back and it continues to roll off the press every month. Lockdown saw me switch to digital format for my train magazines. My iPad is the perfect size for reading and I'm quite happy to use both modern and traditional methods. I also browse the Radio Times on screen. However my rock literature remains steadfastly on paper, hugely befitting of the dinosaur status people often bestow upon my listening habits. I don't keep the old magazines for the simple reason they take up an increasing amount of space and - besides - how often would you actually go back and re-read them? Particularly in the days of the ubiquitous internet. In the late 80s I pored over RAW Magazine and bought it from the first issue. I liked the fact it had a broader focus than Metal Hammer and Kerrang, which were almost exclusively concerned with heavy metal. I stacked my mags in a corner of my bedroom and they were eventually moved to the garage before being thrown out. Mind you, had I kept them I could probably have flogged them as a job lot on eBay. So far I have discussed the professional side of music journalism. There was - as a useful counterpoint - a plethora of fanzines in the 80 and 90s. They ranged from photocopied hand-stapled sheets to glossy brochures. The first such publication I remember reading was the Black Sabbath Appreciation Society.

The Sabs were going through a difficult period with guitarist Tony Iommi the only man left standing from the original line-up. Various musicians drifted through the ranks from 1984 onwards but by the end of the decade the personnel appeared to have solidified. The addition of power house drummer Cozy Powell gave the band a much needed kick up the posterior while Tony Martin was a fine singer. The recruitment of the ever dependable Neil Murray on bass completed the jigsaw and Sabbath were now back in business with serious musical muscle on display. They would have to claw their way back up from the basement however as the public had lost interest, Meanwhile, former frontman Ozzy Osbourne was now a superstar in his own right. The re-jigged outfit released Headless Cross in 1989 to largely positive reviews and hit the promotional trail. I remember listening to an interview on the Radio Forth Rock Show and the group sounded genuinely hopeful. I recall Powell saying he had scratched a few ideas together on a cassette (remember them?) for the initial rehearsals and enquiring whether Iommi had any potential guitar parts. "Oh, you mean riffs?" replied the affable Brummie in his trademark languid drawl, only for the guitarist to pull two sports bags out of his car stuffed with tapes. Iommi is legendary in heavy rock circles for being the heavy riff master. He conjures up these memorable musical phrases, seemingly at the drop of a hat. I did enjoy the album although I felt side two (yes, music used to have a break) meandered a bit. I went with school friends Chris and Paul to see Sabbath perform at the Edinburgh Playhouse. It was my second ever gig, following Iron Maiden the previous year. An excellent show although the theatre was half full at best. The band apparently did sufficient business across Europe to keep the ship afloat and Tyr was released in 1990 (although the USA didn't want to know). The BSAS magazine grew in stature and seemed to have plenty access to the band. In those pre-internet days, management would have utilised the distribution network of the fanzine to give bands exposure. Plus someone else was doing all the typing! Not a bad arrangement. I received a few issues before Sabbath's career took an unexpected turn. Cozy broke his leg in an equine accident and Iommi surprised everyone by reforming the early 80s line-up with Ronnie James Dio at the helm and original bassist Geezer Butler back in the fold. This incarnation split acrimoniously first time around and perhaps the reunion was doomed to exist on borrowed time. The Dehumanizer album was respectable enough and the tour enabled the band make progress in America. It all fell apart after a year or so but in some ways proved to be a springboard to getting back with Ozzy and the associated cash benefits. In between original band outings, Iommi and Butler did actually hook up with Dio once more under the moniker Heaven & Hell - playing songs exclusively from that line-up. The album Better The Devil You Know was excellent and Ronnie sang wonderfully aged 66 on the live date I saw. Tragically the frontman died of stomach cancer during a real resurgence in fortunes. As we all know, the Sabs roped in Ozzy once more (or vice versa) to bow out with the album entitled 13 and a string of massive shows. It's certainly swings and roundabouts in the world of heavy metal! I'm not entirely sure whatever happened to the fanzine. My guess is that it suffered from a lack of material after no longer having the ear of the band's management and record company.

I've long been a big fan of UFO - a classy British hard rock outfit who have been around since 1970. The peak periods were with German guitarist Michael Schenker but the albums with Paul Chapman and Vinnie Moore on axe duties are worthy additions to any collection. Bassist Pete Way was the wild showman on stage but the gaffer of UFO has always been singer Phil Mogg, the only man to appear on every release. Undoubtedly one of the great British hard rock singers, Mogg is also also a clever lyricist, writing - as one magazine put it - tales of loners, gamblers and vagabonds. The band recently called it a day when Phil - now in his 70s - felt it was time to finally retire. Way and Chapman died over the last couple of years, as did rhythm guitarist and keyboard player Paul Raymond. What a legacy they have left behind! As you might expect, UFO had countless ups and downs over a career lasting almost half a century. Back in the mid 90s things were on an upward curve as Schenker had rejoined the band and the resulting album Walk on Water was excellent. Touring now involved theatres and larger clubs but the band were no doubt making a good living - a state of affairs maintained until the end, although - somewhat predictably - Schenker bailed in controversial circumstances at the turn of the century. You often hear people say UFO should have been bigger but they did have a lot of success over the years, including doing rather well in America in the 70s and early 80s where they played with just about every famous group of peers you can name. The fanzine - Misty Green & Blue - was run by a bloke called Mike Pincher from County Durham and the first issue came out around 1994. Nobody aside from a handful of nerds was online at this time and when a 'zine dropped through the letterbox you hungrily consumed the content to find out what your favourite bands were up to. The situation would soon change but for a while Misty Green & Blue was my insight into the world of UFO. I think Mike literally created it in his own bedroom but band members came on board in subsequent issues and willingly gave interviews. Concert reviews were also sent in from around the world. The mag seemed to peter out after a handful of issues, probably because surfing the web was rapidly becoming a mainstream activity and you could suddenly read about a gig from the night before, never mind three months ago. I've never tried to look Mike up on social media. Perhaps I should try and find him to say thank you for the memories.

Another publication I subscribed to in the 90s and 00s was the Free Appreciation Society - brainchild of Dave Clayton from Nottingham. The magazine was first published in 1979 and is still going strong! Free of course are known by every man and his dog for their 1970 smash hit All Right Now. They recorded six albums between 1968 and 1973 and were still teenagers when their professional career began. Initially adopting a blues rock sound, Free quickly matured into a melange of styles. Alongside the chest-beating rockers you had slow and thoughtful numbers. Paul Rodgers was - and still is - one of the best vocalists ever to walk this earth. Bass player Andy Fraser was a virtuoso with strong writing skills and drummer Simon Kirke had an intuitive feel for what a song needed in terms of percussion. Finally on guitar was Paul Kossoff - a gentle but ultimately troubled soul who could wring emotion from his Les Paul. Four very talented guys. Despite international success, the band was over by 1973 (having already broken up once and reformed). Fraser and Kossoff were by this time no longer present. The former due to musical frustration and the latter tragically torn apart from heavy drug use. Kossoff would die just three years later on a transatlantic flight at the shockingly young age of 25. An incredible waste and I had always assumed he succumbed to the temptations available to a wealthy musician. Yet I read a report of how he would regularly get out of his head long before the band were well known. Are some people hardwired to self destruct? The other guys partied hard but learned to reign it back in. The way it should be. It seems Koss was destined never to reach middle age, let alone grow old. How utterly sad. Rodgers and Kirke achieved stadium success with Bad Company while Fraser was in demand as a songwriter. I met Andy after his band played in Kinross around 2012. He was happy to chat to fans at the bar and sign merchandise. When I introduced myself as a fellow clansman, he told me some of his family history which involved slave plantations in British Guyana (he is mixed race). His parting cackle was "yes, the Frasers were a real bunch of dirty fuckers!". The magazine covered all bands with a Free connection in the ranks. Filling pages when not much is happening is a challenge for editors and Dave would sometimes write about separate outfits he admired. I don't recall why I let my subscription lapse. Probably because I was cancelling certain luxuries during a period of belt tightening and I never got around to reordering. The overwhelming amount of data on the internet in many ways rendered fanzines a thing of the past. I also subscribed to the Deep Purple Appreciation Society for a while but it eventually migrated to the web. With the imposition of Corona lockdown in 2020 and all the free (no pun intended) time at home it entailed, I found myself taking an interest in all things postal and I decided to see if the old FAS was still a going concern. I found Dave's blog which he periodically updates with information that didn't fit into the magazine format, as well as relevant media links. The printed issues were readily available and I emailed Dave to ask how much I should send via PayPal for the latest copy. He suggested that a three-magazine package offered better value and I could add a back issue or two to that deal. I decided to start with the current publication which contained a massive retrospective article on the Bad Company albums of the 70s. It duly arrived a few days later and I was back in the fold.

Dave often outlines where the FAS is headed in his two-page editorial and it transpired he was in the process of intricately charting the formation of Free and minutely detailing the bands catalogue, looking at myriad album and single releases across the global sales territories. He also indicated this would definitely be the final trawl through the band's history and thereafter the prospect of winding up the Society would loom on the horizon. He's been at it since 1979 and has written more words about these musicians than any other person on the planet. I was pleased to hear the British Library now file copies of the FAS mag so it will be there for musicologists to study for evermore. It certainly seemed I'd come back on board at an interesting time! The Bad Company themed issue I'd received was just a stop gap while the next instalments of the Free backstory were being compiled. Further magazines arrived a couple of weeks apart. One was full of previously unseen onstage pictures of the band while the other was a bumper sized affair which required extra stamps to be stuck on the envelope! An impressive piece of work and I'm hoping the next volume appears before my Christmas holidays as I'll be looking for things to read over this stay-at-home celebration. I enjoyed the material so much, I decided to take out a couple of back-issue subscriptions to fill in the parts I'd missed. Dave seems to have heard just about every session Free ever recorded in a studio. I believe he previously worked on compilation sets for the band's label, Island Records. As he says, the only true way to discover everything that's out there is to spool through the magnetic tapes. Each and every one. A personal gripe of Dave's is the fact that Free don't have a collector's box set on the market which features embryonic versions of classic songs, rare B-sides, tracks that didn't make the final cut etc. Instead, only standard "best-of" CDs are churned out and he feels this cheapens the legacy. Many other classic rock bands have lavish retrospective packages available for hardcore fans to purchase, but not Free. Such a project was on the cards but it seems the band members themselves put the kibosh on it - asking who would want to hear ten versions of All Right Now? Dave counters by saying the art world would be much poorer if we were deprived of Da Vinci's sketchbooks. True fans know that a demo version is not the finished article but it can be fascinating to hear the stages of development and listen to your favourite musicians at work. A real insight into the creative process. Of course the original albums are still available in their untouched form. Dave questions whether the surviving members of Free truly appreciate what their audience would like to hear. There's also the matter of these elaborate box sets selling for a premium price!

I'm enjoying the old-school method of receiving printed material through the post. I even got my cheque book out for the first time in God knows how long and processed my next subscription by sending off my remittance with a couple of SAEs (that's stamped addressed [to yourself] envelopes for our millennial readers). The subscription fee does actually cover return postage but I like to help out a little by taking that strain. I also discovered the back issues were all listed by Dave on eBay and priced at £4.30, including shipping. Buying them singly would actually work out slightly cheaper than combining three of them in a subscription deal. It also meant I could pick them off at times of my choosing. At the end of the day, if a few quid filters into the FAS coffers in exchange for unsold publications presumably lying in a box, it can only be a good thing, however I do it. I actually found it very interesting to work backwards through the booklets. Obviously a retrospective article on an album or tour from 1972 can slot in anywhere but the FAS very much concerns itself with current updates on the various personnel and any projects in the pipeline, not to mention the constant stream of back catalogue reissues and compilation sets to contend with. Then there's the material on other bands. For instance, I learned there was a planned trilogy of books on UK metal heroes Budgie and - as I write - two are available for purchase. I love a bit of Budgie and among the bludgeoning riffage you have softer numbers like Parents (superb song - check it out!). Tony Bourge is almost a guitar cousin of Black Sabbath's Tony Iommi, constantly coming up with those great heavy guitar parts. His departure left a huge hole but the band did reinvent themselves for the 80s with the excellent John Thomas. A book about Budgie is a bit left field and without the fanzine I might never have heard of its existence. Inevitably I reached the point where the literature covered the death of Andy Fraser. He passed away at the age of 62 and had been battling AIDS for some years and was quite open about this. The news did come as a bit of a surprise as he was clearly active in terms of touring, recording and running his own record label. He also released his autobiography (one of the first books I ever read on my Kindle) and seemed to have finally found his niche in the 21st century. Modern medication seems to give those with HIV a good chance of a normal life span but Andy didn't get his three score and ten. Dave's professional relationship with Andy had been through the mill over the years but the two of them had largely settled their differences. Occurring at roughly the same time was the death of the elderly gentleman Dave had been caring for in a full-time capacity. Issue #134 was therefore dedicated to John Hutton, with Dave writing a wonderfully moving piece about his old buddy. He finished with a quote from polar explorer Robert Falcon Scott, who during his final expedition left a letter to his dear friend, the novelist J.M Barrie. Scott was stranded in the frozen land and knew full well he was going to die. He wrote "I never met a man in my life whom I admired and loved more than you, but I never could show you how much your friendship meant to me, for you had much to give and I, nothing"

The early editions of the fanzine have long since sold out but I'll be able to work back to the point where I signed off first time around. It will be interesting to note how the emergence of the all-pervasive social media is portrayed in the pages. I don't think Dave himself uses any of that except for YouTube and trusty old email. A music historian simply can't ignore YouTube, given the amount of live recordings and rare material on the platform. As previously stated, the FAS does have a presence on the web but the blog is deliberately kept basic. Dave points out there are members who don't surf the net with confidence or don't use it at all. Apparently the only other rock fanzine left standing is "Tight But Loose" - dedicated to Led Zeppelin. I'm sure I ordered a copy or two back in the day and editor Dave Lewis is still bashing them out. He prints a limited amount of each issue and when they're gone, they're gone. Incredibly, I've seen old copies on eBay listed at £60 per mag. Thankfully my delving into the FAS archive is substantially cheaper! Printed matter will be in demand for a long time yet but there obviously isn't the plethora of titles there once was. The FAS offers a publication people actively seek out and each issue is a stand-alone piece of music writing that can be enjoyed by anyone at anytime. Newsletters and updates that were previously posted out have largely gone down the email or PDF route. Completely understandable as a first class stamp costs almost a quid - and that's per member. Anything bigger than A5 and you're entering large letter dimensions with the accompanying price hike. I enjoy sampling media old and new and long may that continue.

Update - The indefatigable Brian Tawn is still bashing out his Hawkwind fanzine.