I believe we’ve established previously in these pages that Zigzag fanzine, published continuously in the UK throughout the 70s and into the 80s, was a first-rate repository for the musical attitudes, obsessions and posturing of its times. This is particularly true if you were a record collector or fanatical show-goer in the United Kingdom during these years. It’s one of my favorites, and you can check out previous issues I’ve talked about here, here and here.

Zigzag #85 is from July 1978, and the big-deal band of the moment – a band editor Kris Needs & his crew are especially excited about because they’re “unsigned!!” – is Siouxsie and the Banshees. Careful readers of this blog may know, while others may be surprised to learn, that Siouxsie and the Banshees happen to be one of my all-time favorite bands. I’m talking The Scream up through Juju, and all the singles therein, though if you made a case for their run ending at A Kiss In The Dreamhouse, I could get on board with that. I certainly own the record! My friend Brian and I were Banshees and Cramps obsessives in high school, and when I got too cool for them in the late 80s, I sold all the records, then later proceeded to buy them all back when being cool became as foreign to me as being foreign. 

Of course, reading opinionated chatterbox “Siouxsie Sioux” prattle on in this well-done interview with the full band isn’t always illuminating, but she was certainly no dum-dum and it’s great that Zigzag #86 catches them as a time before their first 45 is out, when the band’s already getting voted in as “the best” in several categories in Zigzag’s reader’s poll. When they tour the country outside of their native London, Siouxsie says, they get a bunch of territorial crap: “…in Durham, ‘round Newcastle and that, I just despise it so much when up north – and even in London – there’s a sort of patriotism with a plot of land. It’s like a lot of people went there just to say ‘Piss off you old slag, Newcastle punk rules!’”. There are also spot-on comparisons with how they’re being perceived:

Kenny Morris (drummer): Some people have often said things like “How come you’ve had all this trouble and a band like Devo hasn’t?”. The fact is Devo are such a comfortable package. It’s all there, all there strangeness…it’s all dead comfortable.
Zigzag: Sounds put you in their “New Music Supplement” with Devo and all them…
Siouxsie: Oh, it’s always with Wire and XTC. XTC are a joke band. They’re comedians, and I don’t like comedians. 

This is followed by a Clash report – clearly an important band to both the staff and their readers. We learn that the band are gearing up to record a second album, and we get a sneak peak of the new song titles like “Guns on the Roof” and “Operation Julie”. In the excellent Television interview, Tom Verlaine just does not want to play the game, and spends most of his time politely denying rumors and assertions from writer John Tobler, as well as any sort of affinity to any scene or other band, except for. brief moment when he cops to loving The Doors and Love. Tobler backhandedly tries to diss the pre-release copy of Adventure he’s heard, and Verlaine, to his credit, takes him both literally and seriously. He does a fine job of explaining himself and his vision for the band, while certainly brooking no dissent with being called “the band leader” by Tobler. 

We then travel to America to talk about and with The Quick, a piece unfortunately written and readied for publication before writer Teri Morris finds out that, whoops, they’ve just broken up. Zigzag publishes it anyway. “The Quick watched LA go punk crazy without ever taking a step in that direction”. Morris talks to guitarist and songwriter Steven Hufsteter, who tells her “We could have easily punked out, it wouldn’t have presented any problem. We probably could have gotten a record contract, a lousy one…..We want to be a packaged item. We want to be a product on the market. It’s not what we want to be so much as what we have to be”. Again, note the emphasis on being “signed” vs. “unsigned”. Also, note your confusion when you consider the record contracts that The Bags, Weirdos, Screamers, Germs and X did not have at this point, and in some cases, never received at all. (The Dickies did – they easily punked out).

There’s an Only Ones interview (they’ve signed to CBS!!), and a bunch of Flamin’ Groovies overhype, talking about some of the same English touring dates and the “real rock and roll revival” they spurred in the UK that a recent Ugly Things piece picked apart. Kris Needs talks about their “frantic, no-holds-barred, euphoric energy” and their absolutely MONSTROUS version of “Paint It Black”. I’ve never really understood it, but that’s me. 

I do like “An Expensive Beginner’s Guide to Rockabilly”, which is a very Who Put The Bomp-like overview of the genre, mostly of the Sun guys and many of the reissues that were starting to come out on Charly Records in the mid/late 70s. And in the reviews you get two great put-down slaggings of both Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town and Alternative TV’s The Image Has Cracked. These reviews, regardless of their enthusiasm or lack thereof, are a nice proxy for where the heads of Zigzag’s staff were at the time: raised and succored on what we later called mainstream AOR, or album-oriented rock, then spun sideways by punk rock and its assault on the senses. They wrote intelligently and curiously about both, and I’m happy to pull in as many copies of the 70s version of this fanzine as I can still afford.