THE STATE OF THE FANZINE SCENE IN 1997

I recently went to the Radio 1 Sound City fanzine convention in Oxford. You may not expect the phrases 'Radio 1' and 'fanzine' to be mentioned in the same sentence, but it seems the mainstream media have finally recognised the importance of zines. I expected the place to be packed out with two types of people. Type 1: teenage girls with glittery makeup and feather boas, and their male counterparts, all of whom write zines about bands like bis. Type 2: slightly older (but not much) people who don't centre their zines around bis, but mostly write about other relatively well known stuff. I was right on both counts. Everywhere you went, people were talking about bis, or various members of said band. Everybody seemed to know everybody else - I knew one person and had written to about two others, so as a result, I felt a little out of place. Also, at age 20, I felt kind of old. There were people there who looked older than me, but most seemed younger. It's funny, when I first started getting actively involved with zines and tapes a few years ago, I felt too young to be doing that kinda thing. Now, there's the general idea that if you're older than 18, you're too old to write a fanzine - that's pathetic. People who say that reckon that if you're over 18, you can't get enthusiastic about music any more - that's equally pathetic. And no, I'm not saying this cos I'm bitter about being an 'old woman', ha ha, it's just ageist and downright stupid. (Sorry if you were at the zine convention and are over 18 and do write a real underground zine, I'm just generalising here. The points I've made/am about to make don't just apply to zines written by people who went to the zine convention either, just fanzines in general.)

It was to be expected that the fanzine convention would be packed out with people who specialise in writing about signed bands, after all, it was a mainstream-organised event. But as I've said a million times before, surely the idea of fanzines isn't to come across as a photocopied version of the NME. Something that did surprise me about the fanzine convention was that they were giving out free 25 Records flexis, and there was a stall selling records by bands such as Boyracer. This sort of thing is what zines should be about. But what didn't surprise me was overhearing a girl who didn't know what flexis were, and I'd also be pretty surprised if the record stall sold out of its entire stock at the end of the day, as many zine writers just can't be bothered with bands like Boyracer any more.

Despite its bad points, I don't think going to the fanzine convention was a wasted journey even if I did feel a bit out of place. It's not the kind of thing you get to go to every day, and it was considerably preferable to being stuck at home doing nothing, which is probably what I'd have been doing if I hadn't have gone. Simon of Circle Sky zine was there, and he said he thought that they should have made it more international, as there seems to be better zines going on in other countries, France for example. I haven't seen many zines from other countries for a while, but I remember that the ones I have read tend to dig deeper than many British zines - they write about obscure stuff that they actually like, not famous bands that they think they should like. Even the fanzines which don't feature really famous bands tend to write about all the same bands that are in every other zine. I can forgive some zine writers because they're new to the zine scene and don't know about obscure bands. I've seen numerous zines which start off writing about biggish bands, then after a few issues they've found out that there's better stuff going on in the underground, so they write about lesser known bands instead. But the zines that annoy me are the sort that are written by people who know about the real underground, but dismiss it as untrendy, and only write about bands they think they're allowed to like. Fanzines shouldn't be about fashion-following like that, you get enough of that in the mainstream.

I overheard a conversation at the fanzine convention which, to me, summed up the state of fanzines today. A kid in front of me referred to one of the girls dressed in glittery stuff as 'that weird girl'. That's the sort of remark you'd expect from the closed minded, trendy (in the worst possible sense of the word) people I used to be at school with, not from a fanzine writer. Surely the whole zine thing, as an alternative medium, is meant to be about being individual and not caring about mainstream fashion? That's how I see it anyway, that's how it is for me. Another thing with many zines today is that they confuse the terms 'alternative' and 'underground', saying things like 'we hate mainstream bands, we only like underground bands such as bis'. Sure, bis are alternative, there's no denying that, but I'm not so sure whether they can be classed as underground these days. I mean, bands who've been in the charts are hardly underground. This is more evidence to show how ignored the real underground is - if these people think bis are underground then they obviously can't know about the real underground. We need fanzines to keep people informed about unheard-of music, not for fashion-sheep-ism, celebrity worshipping and the replication of the same old stuff the mainstream music press churn out.

There was a panel of journalists at the fanzine convention, and I remember one of them making a remark which I feel summed up the general ignorance towards the underground that the mainstream music press have. It was something like how horrific a prog rock revival would be. Little did he know, there already is a prog rock revival in the deepest, darkest depths of the underground, and none of the bands sound anywhere near as sad as you may think. Probably if the journos actually heard any of these bands, they'd like them, but would think 'prog rock is unhip, we can't call this prog rock, we'll have to invent a new name for this type of music'. And fanzines seem to be no better as a rule. You see reviews of bands like Sleepy People and it's like this: 'prog rock! eek! oh, it's actually not bad', just showing that many fanzines are as bothered about what's hip as the music press are. The journalist who made the prog rock comment also said that he used to be a fanzine writer but was only doing it so that he could get a job as a music journalist. About right, I thought. A worrying fact is that he's not the only one, and this shouldn't be the point of writing a zine. We as fanzine writers should at least be providing an alternative to the mainstream, and at most be actively opposing them - not using the whole zine thing as a means of joining them. Now there'll probably be someone out there who's thinking who am I to tell people what to write in their zines. Well I'm not trying to tell people what to write at all, just stating my opinions, which aren't meant to be taken personally. I just feel that some people are missing the point of what fanzines should be about - an alternative to the mainstream.

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