The Slits on the colourful cover of Zig Zag magazine for the August â77 issue, in a photo taken by Caroline Coon.
âI used to buy ZIGZAG magazine every month. It was edited by Kris Needs... The cover has a Warholesque photo of The Slits taken by Caroline Coon, and inside are interviews with Blondie, Eddie and The Hot Rods, The Slits, and The Boys.
ZIGZAG was very much like an upmarket fanzine in its lay-out and style of writing. This issue, published in the summer of â77 at the height of punk, features an editorial by Kris Needs that starts with
: 'Here we are in 1977 and there hasnât been a more exciting time for music in years⌠I mean I go to bed every morning and wonder whatâs gonna have happened when I wake up. Thereâs so much good stuff developing and being thrown up.'
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The New York Dolls seen here performing live, November 26, 1973, in London, England, where, incidentally, the Dolls did much of their (women's) clothes shopping.
Then there was Heart Of Glass, the albumâs most audaciously radical statement, a homage to the disco trend that sweept the world in the wake of Saturday Night Fever. The song was given a Giorgio Moroder-style electronic groove twist, born from Chris and Debbieâs love of Donna Summer (initially shown when Blondie played their version of I Feel Love at a New York benefit show that May).
Written in 1975 by Debbie as she waited to park her car, Heart Of Glass was initially influenced by The Hues Corporationâs Rock The Boat but, when Chris and Jimmy returned from one of their 48th Street shopping trips clutching the newly-introduced Roland CR-78 drum machine, they had other plans.
As Chris explained, âWhen we recorded it for Parallel Lines, we were really into Kraftwerk, and we wanted to make it more electronic. We werenât thinking disco as we were doing it; we thought it was more electro-European.â
Chris came up with the title, unaware that it was also the name of a 1976 Werner Herzog movie. âWhen we did it, it wasnât cool in our social set to play disco, but we did it because we wanted to be uncool,â declared Debbie, already aware that such a flagrant act had the potential to shock the factions of the punk/rock community championing the racist, homophobic Disco Sucks campaign.
Zigzag (issue #75)
YEAR: 1977
CREATED BY: Kris Needs, Pete Frame, John Tobler and many others....
LOCATION: London
SIZE: A4
WHAT'S INSIDE....
Back in the pre-punk 1970s ZigZag was one of a few independently produced magazines that provided an alternative to the mainstream music press in the UK. It was founded by Pete Frame in 1969, and his now-famous ârock family treesâ first appeared in ZigZag throughout the next decade....
Frame summarised his reasons for launching ZigZag in a 1999 interview with Beppe Colli: "None of the English music papers wrote about the music I liked. They all concentrated on popular acts, but I was interested in the underground scene. So I decided to start a magazine for people who liked the same kind of music I did. I called it Zigzag after the Captain Beefheart track 'Zigzag Wanderer' and also the cigarette papers which were used for rolling joints. I found out about layout, printing, distribution, all those kind of things and quit my day job. John Tobler, who I had met at the Prudential in 1962, came in too and he was good at getting advertising, so we managed to keep going."
ZigZag kept going under various publishers and editors until 1986 and came out monthly for most of that time, even though it was necessary to mothball and relaunch the magazine several times during its 17 year lifespan.
Frame was the editor from the beginning until February 1973, and again from March 1976 until July 1977, when he handed the reigns to Kris Needs, who focused ZigZag firmly on the punk and post-punk music scene over the next five years ("I felt I was too old to run a contemporary music magazine and handed it over to Kris Needs, who was a punky friend"). ZigZag's final editor was Mick Mercer of Panache fanzine....
Issue #75 was the first with Kris Needs in the editor's chair and he makes it crystal clear on the editorial page that his arrival heralds a seismic shift in ZigZag's direction (as if having The Slits on the front cover wasn't enough of a hint)....
There's an in depth article about the band inside and similarly lengthy features about Blondie and Eddie And The Hot Rods. Adrian Thrills (of 48 Thrills fanzine) contributes a piece about The Boys, which mentions that keyboard player Casino Steel was once a member of the wonderful but highly obscure (Hollywood) Brats.
Former New York Doll Sylvain Sylvain's new band The Criminals also make an appearance - and there's an ad for his former band's newly reissued first album which states that: "before anyone discovered new wave rock, The Dolls were inventing it"....
The only significant nod to the past is the second part of an article about proto-punk band MC5 (whose albums "Kick Out The Jams" and "Back In The USA" were also re-released in 1977), pieced together from letters that former manager John Sinclair wrote to ZigZag from prison in 1969.
Record reviews include a belated (and extremely favourable) appraisal of The Clash's "Capital Radio" EP that was given away via the NME to anyone who sent in the red sticker attached to the first 10000 copies of their debut album (and was already a collector's item). Kris also promises that "one thing you're gonna see more of in ZigZag is reggae" and there's a separate round up of recent reggae releases that includes soon-to-be-classic albums like "Satta Massagana" by The Abyssinians and Culture's "Two Sevens Clash". A year later the latter made it into the ZigZag readers' poll that was published in the July 1978 issue of ZigZag and overwhelmingly confirmed that the readership was aligned with the shift in editorial policy that started in issue #75....
Click on the title above to see scans of all the zine's pages....
my box of 1970s fanzines
flickr
Various Artists â Action Time Vision: A Story of UK Underground Punk 1976-1979
This massive, 111-track collection of late 1970s punk songs from the U.K. skips the big names â no Clash, Pistols, Buzzcocks or X-Ray Specs here â while trawling through the second tier (the Damned, Stiff Little Fingers, Sham69, Adam and the Ants) and below to great effect. A tight three-year frame of reference keeps these four discs eminently listenable as mixes, and a temporal sequencing gives you a sense for the evolution of brash two-chord punk into art punk, new wave and post-punk. Itâs a lot of music, though, best suited for dipping in and out of, rather than plowing through all four discs at once. Â
The set is named after Alternative TVâs 1978 anthem, with its vamping guitar racket and oddly pop, harmonized chorus. Appearing midway through (opening cut, disc three), itâs a good bit slicker than most of the box setâs material. Stiff Little Fingersâ âSuspect Devices,â (second disc, 16th cut)  is more in line with the general tone of things, guitars subsumed in a roar of distortion, drums scrambling to keep up, vocals hoarse with rage and aggression. There is, incidentally, quite a large contingent of punk bands from Belfast, not just SLF, but Victim (with a carousing, whoa-oh-oh chorusing âWhy are Fire Engines Red?â), Outcast represented by a blustery, but nicely sensitive âJust Another Teenage Rebel,â  hearts-on-sleeves Protex with a yelping, crooning, near rockabilly âDonât Ring Me Upâ and a very Clash-like Rudi with âBig Timeâ.
Besides the title cut, the best known track is likely The Damnedâs âNew Roseâ which kicks disc one off (they are in order by date, and itâs the first-ever punk single), but all four discs have at least one iconic late 1970s cut. Thereâs a demo of the Boysâ âNew Leaderâ and that first Stiff Little Fingers single on disc two, Â the Alternative TV cut and Sham69âs âI Donât Wannaâ on disc three and the Cockney Rejects âFlares âN Slippersâ on disc four. Yet, the real pleasure comes in the lesser known and not-yet-arrived artists that fill in between. My favorite cut on disc one is âLove and a Molotov Cocktailâ by the Flys, a band that opened for the Buzzcocks, recorded briefly for EMI but otherwise seems to have left hardly a ripple.âTime Tunnelsâ by the English Subtitles is another good one, a nervy, jittery, burst of art-addled anxiety that hints at the post-punk movement just gathering steam in the off-wings. Â And speaking of post-punk, the set also includes early appearances by bands that would define that genre â the Fall and Joy Division to name two. Â
You can also catch a number of artists on their way to becoming something else. Certainly Adam and the Ants sound a good deal more ragged and razory than they did during their MTV heyday, but also hereâs Patrik Fitzgerald working out the contours of something like anti-folk on âSafety-Pin in My Heart,â Billy Bragg fronting a rip-snorting Riff Raff in âCosmonautâ and future Cure bassist Simon Gallup slashing away at Lockjawâs âRadio Call Sign.â
Action Time Vision doesnât dig as far as the Messthetics series into the various regional sub-scenes of U.K. punk but it does give a pretty broad overview. It is, regrettably, almost entirely male, which seems off in an era when Delta Five, the Slits, X Ray Spex and others were thriving. But as with the Still in a Dream set documenting shoegaze, itâs nicely packaged with terrific detail on all the band, contemporary photos and album art and an essay by Kris Needs, the editor of Zigzag Magazine and an early chronicler (and proponent) of British punk. Zigzagâs Small Labels Catalogue, an annual compendium of UK DIY output, gave early exposure to dozens of the bands included in this set; many are represented by their first-ever single. The last edition of Small Labels Catalogue came out in 1981, by which time, money had changed everything. Â
Says Needs of that final edition, âThe introduction commented how the independent scene was changing âboth for better and for worse⌠some labels born out of the freedom of the mid-70s now act as pale imitators of the corporate monsters they once despised.â This vibrant era was essentially coming to a close as the 80s kicked in but here, in all their ragged glory, are four discs bulging with the fruits of an era when the power was in the hands of the people not rich enough to buy it.â Â
This is wonderful stuff, both as pure entertainment and a document of a vanished era.
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Faces of the early London punk scene: Danny Baker (Sniffin' Glue zine staff writer and later on NME reviewer and BBC radio DJ), Mark Perry (founding editor of Sniffin' Glue & Alternative TV frontman) & Kris Needs (editor of ZigZag magazine, later on journalist and author) filmed at a TV interview in July 1977 at The Vortex in London, while they were letting everyone know what the fuck was going on in â77.
