This week (on 11th May) British fanzine publisher, writer and musician Mark Perry will be in conversation with designer, artist, punk historian and archivist, Toby Mott, at London's ICA. The talk will revolve around DIY punk publications and Sniffin' Glue, the seminal monthly punk zine started by Perry in July 1976. The ICA event will also include a performance by Mark Perry accompanied by Alternative TV members Lee McFadden and Dave Morgan.
Inspired by The Ramones' track "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue", the zine became incredibly popular, chronicling the early days of punk through reviews, interviews and assorted features printed in its iconic typewritten or felt tip (including misspellings and crossings out…) cut and paste graphics in photocopied black and white tones. Sniffin' Glue ran through August 1977, when Perry focused his energies on his band Alternative TV.
Punk (turning 40 this year…) went on to inspire many other creative minds throughout the years, among them musicians, fashion designers and artists; in the meantime, the power of early zines has been transported to the digital world, with the Internet providing a wider platform for experimenting with images, texts, videos and sounds, share your thoughts and start sites and blogs or interact on social platforms.
Yet you could argue that not everything is healthy in the digital world: Perry created Sniffin' Glue as a reaction to mainstream music publications, while nowadays you may start a blog as an independent and passionate individual and then you may end up being co-opted by the system through presents, invitations and collaborations (see what happened to the most successful fashion blogs…).
Perry used his own writing and his own broken typing machine to create the 'zine, but now it is easy to go online and automatically filter your slogan through a punk typeset, so we're not really inventing anything extremely innovative at the moment, but we're reusing and recycling old ideas in new ways (in the same way the tropes of punk fashion have been adopted, chewed and re-vomited by many, from expensive designer brands to High Street stores). Besides, while we do have more power nowadays thanks to social media platforms, we don't really use it to send out strong political messages. So the ICA talk will be very interesting as it will allow people to hear Perry's story from him, while making also a few comparisons with modern publishing.
Ahead of Perry's talk at the ICA, I'm republishing in this post a review of a Sniffin' Glue collection published in 2000. The review came out on an early digital publication based in the States entitled Pop Culure Detox and edited by the mighty Cindy Wong. Enjoy!
Book Review: Sniffin' Glue: The Essential Punk Accessory (Sanctuary Publishing), Pop Culture Detox, October 2000, by Anna Battista
Once I was chatting with a friend of mine about music and punk, when, at some point, he said he had to show me something he really cared for. At first I thought it might have been some rare 7" by some obscure band. Instead he came up with a small pile of photocopied sheets of paper.
"These are just fanzines," I profanely told him. "This is not a 'fanzine,'" he retorted. Then he added, "This was THE fanzine and this is also the story of punk." I nodded not wanting to disagree with him and quietly gave a look to the photocopies. That was when I lost my Sniffin' Glue virginity and was introduced to some great writing.
More than 20 years after the first issue of that fanzine came out and a few years after I first saw the photocopied mags, Sniffin' Glue comes back, this time not in a photocopied format but collected in a massive tome.
Sniffin' Glue: The Essential Punk Accessory (Sanctuary Publishing) is divided into two parts – one featuring Mark Perry and Danny Baker's story, plus glossy pictures most of them by Jill Furmanovsky and Harry T. Murlowski, and a second section collecting the anastatic reprints of the 12 issues of the 'zine, plus a few rambling special issues.
Inspired by The Ramones's track "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue" Mark P started his fanzine in 1976. Drenched in DIY ethics, the 'zine became from just a couple of sheets a proper magazine, running up to 2,000 issues in November 1976 and featured record reviews, live reviews and exclusive interviews with the bands of the time from the Sex Pistols to The Clash, from the Subway Sect to The Ramones, Buzzococks, The Damned and X-Ray Spex, but to name a few of them.
Sniffin' Glue, the first and most important punk 'zine, became so famous that Paul Weller even burnt on stage a copy of it because he didn't like what they had written about him.
Mark P went on to start an indie label, Step Forward Records, and a band, Alternative TV, and finally decided to let the fanzine die on its 12th issue, when the scene had suddenly saturated with punky wannabe 'zines and punks had been bought by the majors.
If you are looking for a proper history of punk, you've just found it: there's no better way than reading from the pages written by those who were there.
As Mark P says in this volume, Sniffin' Glue represented "a catalogue of chaos. My own and punk's. It's like a personal journey." With a foreword by John Cooper Clarke, this tome is dedicated to those who were there and to those who simply weren't, but are genuinely interested in the scene. Yati-Yati-Yati!
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