Press

HAMPSTEAD ACHIEVED Alex Pollard and Neil Mulholland on the art of Fanzines

Dear Paganini, I thank you for your letter but why should i? You didn’t thank me for mine. And please don’t call me Steve, it reminds me of the Bionic man, to whom I bear little resemblance. Robert Mackay, Words by Morrisey, October 22nd 1980.

It is Thursday and time for you to sign on, but first make sure your descent! Trevor Lever and Peter Jones, Hampstead, Melbourne House, 1984

‘Hampstead Achieved’, yielding scores on 15scales, met basic requirements of accuracy, neatness and effective mentoring. Held at the K Jackson School of Pigeon English, this locus of intense pseudo-discussion and radical networked oligarchy represented the culmination of three long weeks of effort to provide a comprehensive zine use plan that supports Los Angeles painter Edgar Bryan’s mission and strategic planning for the next ten years. Deceptual artists Alex Pollard and Iain Hetherington, abstract water colourist Mark Blackley, and contraceptual singer/song writer Anna Neale had been involved in Zine use master planning since the mid 1990’s. Since the publication of Mainstream in 1998, two addenda had been published. Pollard and Hetherington’s post(al) – group Radical Vans and Carriages presented significant updates along with additional topics that had not been addressed earlier. Believing the everyday to be dull, Pollard and Hetherington damned elitist brain surgeons in North Lanarkshire. Extracts from these texts were printed on forks in the unstable domain of the canteen in their H.Q. in Glasgow, refusing to re-enforce a false bourgeois cultural inheritance (books privilege writing over the spoken word). Members of this group sent shite-a-lights to surgeons flats in the city centre because ‘the work they were doing at the hospital alienated the everyday person. The Radical Vans and Carriages project to educate their public with pamphlets and other epherma gathered from the start of their activity in 1997 left the viewer confident that it is possible to substitute poetry with a large amount of befuddling research material. The Church of Scotland gave this brave display of slave ethics monies and sponsor ship, supporting its prevailingly bureaucratic principles of accesssability, respect for the environment, circulation, compatibility, and flexibility.

Realising that green is the colour of nature, Gregor Wright’s drawing experiments in Eatserhaus provided somewhat of a respite from this cutlyrical detournment. Wright organised drawing sessions in which truth drugs were taken whilst reading a dictionary of Palare. The resulting drawings, flowcharts, instructions, and matrices used were devoid of Dionysian baggage, allowing the viewer direct access to the truth, proving without a doubt that any viewer can enter the rhizome of rationalism and fact, as long as it’s at the expense of the imagination. Timber Maniacs by Wright and RadovanKaradzic is the result of their mammoth playstaion role-playing session on Final Fantasy. After completing the game, Karadzic went back to every room he had not yet visited. His futile search was greeted with you have found a copy of Timber Maniacs. Karadzic was spellbound and stated, ‘I am reminded of Le Corbusier and the Plan Voison to a certain extent where transport organisation is imposed on mature towns.’ The exciting synergy inspired Wright immediately to head to the all night garage to buy a copy. Disappointed, he ended up publishing his own Terra Form, conveying the excellence of lyrics by the symphonic death metal band Bal-Sagoth to the worlds community of pseudos. This in turn inspired Larry Elliot’s casual attitude zine Realisations (Book of Triggers). After consuming a bottle of Pineapple Destruction, Elliot becomes interested in a dialogue. Arising from the mist-shrouded realms of legend, a black moon broods over Elliot as he discourses with dwarves I satanic non-places. Rather than spring it on you next month when you pick up your copy, Elliot regrets to inform that the price of Realisations (Book of Triggers) is 85p. the reason for this is not that he has increased the amount of colour or improved the quality of the paper overall, but because the price of paper is going up generally.

Words by Morrissey is an assumed dialogue between Glaswegian Robert Mackie and Mancunian Steven Patrick Morrissey. This Hitler diary of zines suffers from untidy diagrams, shoddy English and spelling and, in some cases, failure to read the question carefully enough. Harry Pye’s Frank Magazine began after a short stay near the sae. Personally Pye is interested in how British rubbish is perceived and not British rubbish as an abstract quality, but our own voracious British rubbish as an accumulation of Vauxhall Tavern moments. Regular bizzie lizzie ZX Spectrum programming wizards the Shaw brothers of Royston, Barnsley started Sick Happy Idle ( www.sickhappyidle.com ) in 1993, an ill-judged assortment of blues, muse, clues and new soft shoes. Ay up. Mr Marshark had the great original idea as he was about to be shafted by a certain Mr Hockney; he ran very hard and a car had to swerve on the dual carriageway. To mark his near death experience he fixed up a sign on a lamp post and decide to have some sort of pamphlet made in commemoration. There was no party or grand opening or celebration, which was a great disappointment to Mr Marshak, as he so loves parties especially those of the street variety. ‘Make me a hat’ he would often cry ‘make me a big fat hat!’ He told me that the words came to him in a dream, then he told me that the words came to him on the breeze through the trees and down the stairs passing first Graham Shaw, who was too busy checking Ceefax to notice, then drifting past the nose of David Shaw who was too busy thinking about the canned lager in the next door’s shed, and finally came through the vomit filled nostrils of Adrian Shaw. Three simple words thus came unto us: ‘SICK HAPPY IDLE’, states Tate Britain’s singing warder Adrian. ‘Graham can be relied upon to produce work of a good standard, perhaps the only fault being that it lacks imagination’ was the verdict of Graham’s English teacher at Meadstead Primary School in 1974.

Subtle power robbing is the name of the game at the One O’clock Gun, the long running socially emasculated glossy edited in the bold interpersonal style of Edinburgh’s Craig Gibson and Keith Farquhar. Illuminated by flashes of lightning, breaking his shins over his own wit, Gibson’s epistolary petulance is legendary at the Top Slot Club where in he pioneered the business of accessorising masculinity in the letters pages of the local rag. His style is chaos, reducing his ,living enemies to shadows, and their Afghan hounds to the shadows of the shades. As well as outlining the steps for competitively bench marking the ethereal gleam of the horned moon, Milk, a Reykjavik zine devoted to Karlotta and Anne Neale’s fashionable Icelandic band of the same name, noted that Gibsonian gender bias is the silent problem in the world of zines. Overt bias is not obvious, as professional women report less than10% of gender related incidents. Yet many women face ridicule or are dismissed as harmless or hyper sensitive. The ‘Hampstead Achieved’ inquiry noted 75% of surveyed female zine producers believe that harassment is a problem in their bed sits. The wealth and prestige of the profession are still monopolised by perpetually adolescent men. Using racist and sexist language, Milk is a valuable strategic intervention that will make the difference between satisfying failure and an unbalanced life. The only other innocuous major international dissenting voice to patriarchal hegemony and metro sexuality came from County teaser Ben Wallers, whose deviant designs for Mr Blobby inspire hatred and confusion amongst the (dis)articulated, the converted and the blacked up alike. What Hampstead really reveals to us is rabid bigoted partisanship’s lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition. The aim of the game thus, is to attain Hampstead, not just to reach it, allowing the possibility of allowing possibility to become possible.