#stranglers

Rattus Norvegicus (alternative title The Stranglers IV) is the debut studio album by the Stranglers, released on this day in 1977 includes the singles "(Get A) Grip (On Yourself)" and "Peaches"

Omega Radio for June 6, 2025; #408.

Anti-Social: “Teacher”

Il Y A Volkswagens: “American Dream”

Dickies, The: “Rosemary”

Stiff Little Fingers: “Here We Are Nowhere”

Dils, The: “Mr. Big”

Mission Of Burma: “This Is Not A Photograph”

Alisa: “I Love An Ape”

Specials, The: “Ghost Town”

Mekons, The: “Heart and Soul”

Suburban Lawns: “When In The World”

Wire: “106 Beats That”

Pylon: “Crazy”

Heaven 17: “(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang”

Madness: “Madness”

Undertones, The: “True Confessions”

Annie Anxiety: “Hello Horror”

Jam, The: “Art School”

Castration Squad: “Blind” (live)

Alice Bag & The Bags: “Gluttony”

Stranglers, The: “Burnham Beeches”

 Chicago clubs in July/August 1981, and I only became aware of Chicago’s Coolest Retard fanzine from that era this year, 2024. Thank you Todd N. Once I got the lowdown on it and was allowed to see – and touch! – a couple of copies of the thing, I resolved to track down a copy somehow, and Coolest Retard #15 is the one I chose as “the one to grab”. I mean, that cover, right? 

Somehow the tribute piece to Mark E. Smith as “Retard of the Year” is even better than expected. Grotesque is the newest Fall record at this point, and like Kickboy Face, editor Craig Schmidt totally gets it. (At least I think it’s Schmidt – the piece is uncredited, but it’s the best writing in here, and who else but the fanzine’s editor gets to bestow the honor of coolest retard?). 

One of the great tabloid fanzines of all time, Damage published thirteen issues in San Francisco from 1979 to 1981. I’ve had the pleasure of talking with you in this forum about it before: Damage #6 and Damage #7. Now let’s take a peek at the very first issue, Damage #1 from June 1979, even if it does have Jello Biafra on the cover. Trust me, my copy wasn’t “complimentary”, as you can see stamped along the top here, but it leads me to believe that my copy belonging to a previous owner once was. 

Damage #1 also talks to bands, I assure you. There’s a rare one with The Urge, an all-female band that included Jean Caffeine, who did New Dezezes fanzine (which I wrote about here and here) a year or two before this band, and who, along with her bandmates, went to Washington High in the Richmond (two members are still there at the time of this interview). There’s a talk with No Sisters, a band of brothers, all of whom wear nerd glasses. There are strange utterings from Coum Transmissions, i.e. the Throbbing Gristle folks, a collective very popular with a certain San Francisco archetype of the era, as you may well know. Craig and Alice from The Bags do a perfunctory Q&A, and MX-80 Sound, who’ve just moved to SF from Bloomington, IN, get their own small grilling here.

60s issues of the original Crawdaddy! – “The Magazine of Rock” – and I’m quite aware that it wasn’t a true self-published fanzine, as weren’t the magazines Rock Scene, Teen Screen, Trouser Press, Cheetah, Beetle, Sounds and a few others I’ve bantered about here. It’s a great window into the “rock as culture” movement of the late 60s, in which rock music was dissected as intellectual fodder, the whole “but-what-does-it-all-mean” ethos that was part & parcel of the era’s zeitgeist. It’s still a point of chagrin in my house just how picked-over Bob Dylan’s lyrics were at the time, but I know Bobby Z has his fans, and who am I to say they were wrong to do so.

Puncture #9

 the best San Francisco music fanzine of the second half of the 1980s? I feel like the contenders were probably BravEar, Wiring Dept and Puncture, right? Unless I’m forgetting someone. These three fanzines were the most adventurous in terms of traversing the wider underground and going deep where necessary, and yet all three suffered a bit for their overtly sleeve-wearing left wing politics, and for pandering a bit too heavily to quote-unquote college rock at times. But listen, I did myself at the time, no question. That’s why I still own copies of all these mags that I bought during 1984-87. I think it’s probably a pretty easy call at the end of the day: Wiring Dept, then BravEar, then Puncture. 

Said the guy who’s here to talk about Puncture #9 from Spring 1985! We’re not talking about Forced Exposure or Conflict levels of quality, taste and information here – those east coast zines really set the standard during this period in my unforgiving eyes.

New Zealand’s Alley Oop for years, and so hats off and a big thank you to Brendan, who made it happen. Aside from Garage, which I’ll likely never see an original copy of, it was the NZ mag I’d most seen quotes pulled from and reviews swiped from, and upon the evidence presented here in 1988’s Alley Oop #5, there was ample reason for doing so. 

While no formal editor is presented on any masthead here, at least judging by the amount of content contributed, it looks like Paul McKessar helmed the fanzine or at least was very deeply involved. He apparently got #me-too’ed a few years ago. Right away there’s a very NZ-centric gossip page, with some excited early Xpressway news. Heads-up is provided about the Dead C’s forthcoming The Sun Stabbed EP,

 NY Rocker collection, and I’ve been making good on this important promise (to myself). Yet I’d never, ever seen any ones with this typeface, one of the first four mythical issues, in the wild – that is, until I came upon New York Rocker #4 and struck up a bargain with its seller at the 2025 San Francisco Art Book Fair. This 1975-76 era is one of my favorites for rock music writing due to its anticipatory excitement, with much undefined underground exploration in the air and on the fuckin’ streets, with absurd decadence and drug bottoming-out the norm. Nowhere was this more the case, of course, than in New York City. 

When punk first hit North American consciousness in 1977, I get the picture that unless you were living in New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco, or perhaps Seattle and Cleveland, the records you were coming across in stores and were hearing on late-nite “new wave” radio programs were almost entirely English in nature. This 1977 Montreal fanzine, Twist & Shout #2, certainly aspires to be Anglocentric in the extreme; or, whether it aspires to be or not, it most certainly is. Canada is part of the queen’s commonwealth, of course, but just based on the features and records reviewed here, it feels a lot like a Canadian version of Trouser Press, who were proud Anglophiles, and/or one informed very much by Britain’s own Zigzag. 

 “my cup runneth over” fanzine from 1977. It’s somewhat amazing to even be allowed to look at it. I was not aware of the existence of New Wave #1 until I found a way of procuring a copy on eBay – nor was I aware of the absurdly great bounty within it, save for a drunkenly-written Lester Bangs piece about punk that ended up being sadly uneventful once I actually read it. 

I’m 99% sure that this is the only issue of this San Francisco-based newspaper-style fanzine ever created, and I’m just as assured that a 1-issue run was not at all what the editors had intended when they excitedly put this together in August 1977

we discussed Tim Ellison’s Rock Mag, there really wasn’t a music fanzine quite like it before, and there definitely hasn’t been since. I mean, I’ve subsequently come to have read much of the strange, erudite and serious rock writing of the 60s and 70s, but even that stuff in Crawdaddy or Beetle or Cheetah doesn’t really have the potent mix of over-the-top earnestness and below-the-surface humor of Rock Mag, and of course, none of those mags were tied so utterly to the outlook and informed worldview of one single rock-obsessed man. 

Rock Mag #6 doesn’t call out its time of publication, but I believe just by the records covered that it’s probably late 1996 or early 1997. It starts off with a bang: “Having gotten so far away from what Rock originally (and for the better) meant, this is probably the worst ever period for Rock”. “If I were running a major label I could enquire about signing many artists: VON LMO, maybe Silver Apples and The Godz if they were up for it, The Fall, The Red Krayola, The Dead C, Ghost, Ruins, High Rise, Fushitsusha, Cheater Slicks, The Dirt Bombs and The Inhalants, Run On, Satisfact, Los Cincos, maybe old-timers like Blue Oyster Cult and Voivod

came out in 1998 I was of two minds about these guys, David Dunlap and Giles Palermo (aka Andrew Earles) and their The Cimarron Weekend. I felt perhaps they were getting a little too high on their own supply, going a bit too “gonzo”; writing whilst drunk; over-revering the 70s rock critic aesthetic (Bangs/Meltzer/Saunders et al) and so forth. But they truly did make me laff repeatedly, and I was highly pleased by their off-the-charts snark and snidely dismissive takes on modern indie rock. I busted out The Cimarron Weekend #6 this past week and have come to find that it’s aged far, far better than I’d imagined, and I’m now ready to put it in an upper-tier 1990s fanzine pantheon that exists only in my head.

Forced Exposure from the blessed day in 1986 when I bought Forced Exposure #10 at Rockpile Records in Goleta, CA until they wrapped it all up in 1993, I’ve struggled over the years to procure one of the mag’s “hardcore era” issues and hold it in my trembling hands for any longer than a few minutes. These would be FE issues #1-5 from the early 80s, all of which appear to have been somewhat better-distributed than most punk fanzines, yet still really hard to come by, particularly on the US west coast, where I’m from. These issues had been disavowed, more or less, by editor Jimmy Johnson by the time he’d teamed up with Byron Coley and edged more fully into the deeper rock, psych, noise and experimental underground. Back issues of these five were long said in no uncertain terms to be “thankfully out of print”.

 Coolest Retard #15 earlier this year and promoted my logghorea about it on “Instagram”, it turned out to be the single most popular thing I’d ever posted. That Mark E. Smith cover somehow slipped its way into the algorithm, and all of a sudden I’m right up there with the Kardashians or Britney Spears or whatever it is that’s popular with you kids today. And let me state that I was so smitten with this collectable Chicago fanzine from 1981 that I went right out and collected another one, Coolest Retard #13 from April/May ‘81.

The tattoos I got in Scotland, Glasgow at Memento Mori by the lovely Ryan.

“Mami” is in my moms handwriting

The angel represents my friend who passed away

“Cult classic, not bestseller” in my handwriting

The Rat from the Stranglers’ album ‘Rattus Norvegicus’ but made a little ‘fatter’. Elooongated lol. Love rats 🐀

"STRANGER FROM ANOTHER PLANET, WELCOME TO OUR HOLE..."

PIC INFO: Spotlight on Hugh Cornwell (guitar/vocals) and Jean Jacques Burnel (bass/vocals) of UK punk rock/ post-punk/new wave band, THE STRANGLERS, performing live in London, UK, c. 1981. 📸: Adrian Boot.

"Now I find from week to week the sentence sticking fast Turn the corner, rub my eyes, and hope the world will last Stranger from another planet, welcome to our hole Just strap on your guitar, and we'll play some rock 'n roll."

-- "(Get a) Grip (on Yourself)" (1977) by THE STRANGLERS