The Offense Newsletter #59

We’re getting to the point in this Fanzine Hemorrhage endeavor where certain publications are coming around two, three, sometimes four times now. Which makes it easy for me to spare you the backstories of some of them, like The Offense / The Offense Newsletter – you can just check out previous explanatory posts on that one in particular here, here and here, if that’s something you’d be interested in doing. This allows me to skip the set-up for The Offense Newsletter #59, which wasn’t just from 1985, and wasn’t just from July 1985, but was from July 19th, 1985. 

Cocteau Fever is almost here! In only two months the Cocteau Twins will play one of five dates they’d play on their first-ever US tour in Columbus, OH – totally shafting Chicago – and it was all thanks to Tim Anstaett and his 4AD-besotted, typewriter-cranked Offense Newsletter. Your Fanzine Hemorrhage editor saw one of those five shows, which took place the week before I left home and moved to Santa Barbara for college. There’s not really a ton about it in here – just some acknowledgement that it’s for real and it’s happening. There are also some ‘85 Columbus show listings for the weeks ahead that are super 1985: Black Flag, The Chameleons, Sonic Youth/Die Kreuzen, New Order/A Certain Ratio, Gang Green, Meat Puppets, 7 Seconds. 

As with other issues I’ve read, the letters section sorta rules the roost and in fact takes up six of the twelve overall pages in this one. To read The Offense Newsletter, it seems, was to enter into conversant dialog with The Offense Newsletter. It offered a chance for readers around the country and indeed the world to pop off with scene reports (Gerard Cosloy does so from Boston); to slag and/or praise Tim for his tastes; to broker offense with others who’d written previous letters for their tastes; to complain about Husker Du; to clarify whether or not Tim hates your fanzine (Barbara Rice of Truly Needy); and even, in the case of Great Plains’ Mark Wyatt, to pen an unsolicited, show-by-show mini-tour diary. You’ll get more true pulse on the actual contours of Underground America here than you probably will anywhere else.

Of course I’m probably most drawn in by what comprises another 1/3rd of the pages here – an interview with Craig Scanlon and Simon Rogers from The Fall, accompanied by some spectacular live photographs of the band (and I’ve fallen in love with 1985 Brix Smith all over again, just like I did that year). They’d been touring on The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall, and were just gearing up to release their last truly fantastic record, This Nation’s Saving Grace. Scalon tells Tim aka TKA that Room To Live was “the worst LP we’ve ever released”, and I suppose a case can be made – but can you imagine being super-ashamed of a record that contains “Solicitor in Studio”, “Marquis Cha Cha” and the title track? Not me. Embarrassment of riches up until 1985.

Finally, there’s a small live review section at the end. Don Howland at that point was sometimes writing as “Chet Howland”, and he took on the 6/4/85 Black Flag / DC3 / Twisted Roots show in Lafayette, Louisiana. It’s another gem from Howland, one of my all-timers for music writing. He takes ‘Flag bassist Kira Roessler to task for morphing her look to fit in with the skeezy horndogs she’s playing with, and bemoans the fact that he’s really there to hear them play the ‘79-’81 stuff: “…But when they did an oldie like ‘Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie’ I was just reminded how much this band used to matter to me. But that’s just ole Chet…poor ole Chet. Poor poor poor Chet”. It wasn’t just ole Chet – it was almost every punker who showed up at a Black Flag show from 1983-86 and got a shirtless man in dolphin shorts grinding & sweating all over them to turgid, plodding dirge-metal, and a band totally stoned out of their gourds. Then they’d do “Six Pack” or something, and the crowd would go apeshit. Run the tapes!