Back to index of Nerve 22 - Summer 2013

SO, you want to be...
a writer, a designer, an artist,
want to get stuff out, on your terms,
join the ZINE SCENE buddy

By Rob Harrison

Sunday afternoon 4 November, I find myself in Leeds at a zine fair, amidst a flurry of activity. It could be described as fitting in somewhere between a craft fair and political boot camp. All around you can witness the fruits of various people's labour, cases decorated with different colours housing equally elegantly decorated zines. Looking around me I see a plethora of different types of items on sale; feminist papers, band stuff, socio-political mags and the product of the slightly unhinged.

The fair is hosted by Footprints Printing, a co-operative set up with the help of Radical Roots. I much prefer this zine fair to the one recently held in Liverpool, in the now defunct Wolstenholme Space. There they seemed to want be more involved with dodgy corporate music labels, than be a base for an alternative publishing collective.

And that was exactly what drew me to starting a zine. I run a record label based in Liverpool and have had a limited amount of success. All my friends were impressed that I managed to get my stuff into the shops mostly around the North-West region. But once in the shops it just sort of remained there, the shops didn't really promote the record and some just stuck it in the back. Unless someone would specifically ask for it there it would stay.

The demise of the record shop has now been long lamented. But my personal experience of them is that they are mostly run by lazy, self-absorbed, useless people who enjoyed running them at a time when they had a monopoly and the cache of being trendy. But not being able to innovate and change, they have been left behind by the digital revolution. One of the good things about itunes is you can actually listen to the stuff before you buy, something which I think stopped in the 70s. Friends would tell me stories of people sitting on bean bags completely stoned listening to music in Virgin records in Liverpool. Also the pick and mix aspect of itunes seems to appeal to people.

Of course the music industry needs to be more creative, but there is no incentive for it to do so as it basically controls everything: magazine space, Youtube time and chart space. It seeks to create a moribund state, and through that situation it can best control what product comes out to the public.

If we passively sit back and let others create the product for us, we lose out on a democratic artistic experience. We must own the means to production and create these products ourselves.

As a writer as well as a musician (are lyrics writing?) the idea of a zine quite appealed to me. I could write and also put out my music in tape form; a DIY kind of thing, I could market the tapes alongside the zine.

So, the idea of the tape/zine was born at the fair and it was a remarkable success; selling tapes and zines and also some cds. Basically a one to one experience talking to the people and generally having a good time.

So to quote Lenin: "What is to be done?"

We must empower ourselves to be able to produce and sell our own stuff.

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