Biff! Bang! Pow! #1

Lisa Fancher was a highly precocious Southern California teenager who got very much involved with the Hollywood glam, proto-punk, power pop and straight-up punk scenes well before she hit her 20th birthday. As she put it in an interview down the line: “no hippie shit”.  She’d go on to run Frontier Records in the 1980s, and wrote a ton for various publications. I’ve noted her contributions on this site here, here and here. What you perhaps didn’t know – because I didn’t, until I found this – was that she also put out a series of her own fanzines: Academy in Peril, Street Life, and two issues of Biff! Bang! Pow! in 1978.

And it’s funny, because Biff! Bang! Pow! #1 really reads to me as Fancher making a very overt move to not document and hype up the Masque/Dangerhouse LA punk scene. While it’s referred to here in passing, it’s almost as through she was doing everything in her power to stay as far away from what Slash, Lobotomy and Flipside were championing as possible. So instead of The Bags, Germs, Screamers and Weirdos, there’s The Dickies – the funnypunk band whom many of the “original 100 Hollywood punks” relegated to the sidelines pretty quickly, particularly when they were the ones to sign to A&M. There’s the Rich Kids – lots of Rich Kids. She loves this UK band w/ Glen Matlock, a combo who wouldn’t even be together any longer by the end of ‘78. If I’ve heard them, I cannot remember having doing so.

The linchpin for Fancher seems to be Midge Ure. Now me, I remember this guy as a mustachioed synth-pop singer of Ultravox. We had MTV from day one in 1981, and my sister and I spent that summer watching it from sunup to sundown. Only a handful of bands had made videos at that point, so MTV just ran stuff like Ultravox, The Pretenders, REO Speedwagon, The Shoes and Blotto over and over again. Biff! Bang! Pow! #1 not only hypes up his Rich Kids, but also has a piece on his mid-70s band Slik. “Midge Ure is a star. It’s as simple as that. Some guys have it, other guys haven’t”. 

The Dickies interview actually has the band somewhat taken aback at their turn of fortune, and it seems like they really still see themselves as part of the ground-level LA punk scene, despite not really caring so much about “labels”. There’s also an interview and ego-stroking of famed producer and early Sparks member Earl Mankey, and a doubling back onto lots of talk about The Dickies in his piece, since he ended up producing that first record of theirs.

The only real overlap I see in the reviews section with what I’m used to seeing in punk-era LA fanzines are reviews of Pere Ubu’s and The Buzzcocks’ debut LPs. Otherwise, the focus is more on Squeeze, Tom Robinson Band, Nick Lowe, Elvis Costello and the pre-Midge Ure Ultravox. English shit, pretty much, not that there’s anything wrong with that, or even with some of these records – although Fancher was willing to totally savage the Lowe record, which is pretty fun. And in case you might have thought that the fanzine’s title was some 60s “Batman” reference, she helpfully photocopies her original Creation 45, not the Raw Records 1977 thing that would be my first exposure to the band, and puts it on the back cover. All told, a true ink-blooded fanzine in every sense you might imagine.