The Cramps – Fanzine Hemorrhage

Here’s another issue of this 1980 English fanzine – I talked about Issue #4 here. “Marts” and “Tim” are the editors, and it looks like this is a Summer 1980 thing, which means the short interview with Joy Division and Ian Curtis was done mere weeks before he killed himself in May 1980, and this was printed before they had a chance to acknowledge it. Ironically, Curtis asks here, rhetorically, “Why does everyone say our music is gloomy and doomy?”. Poor fella.

You have to imagine that Tim and Marts were excellent at slapping backs and greasing palms, given the access they were provided to “bigger names” for their small regional fanzine The Story So Far #3. For instance, The Clash have just come back from the US, and London Calling has just come out. I certainly appreciate the band providing this much attention to a small fanzine; however, what came out of their mouths was often just narcissistic BS and it totally soured me on the band from an early age. This happened to be late, late in their run, but man – I remember listening to San Francisco’s commercial “rock of the 80s” new wave station The Quake around 1984 or so, and a drunken Joe Strummer either called in or stumbled into the studio, I can’t remember which. He proceeded to give an over-the-top master class in unbridled self-admiration, conceit and ego, ranting about how he was takin’ The Clash back to their roots, how his music was incredibly important for the kids, and how the new album he was working on – it would be Cut The Crap – was going to be a major, major work. It was highly entertaining, to be fair.

So are these Mick Jones quotes from the Clash interview in The Story So Far #3:

“America is dying for the sort of music we play. Dying for it. Going berserk, right…We’re probably one of the last hopes you’ve got, really”.

Better still: “I personally asked Gary Numan, who must be a quite a simple chap really, to explain what the fuck he’s on about. Because we can stick two roadies in fuckin silly pyramids and make them dance around the stage, and we can get a load of fuckin big lights at the back to make us look better….explain what you’re on about, my man. It’s your time to do it…be plain, the kids can’t understand you. They only buy your records because ours ain’t out, but when they are out, you can go to fuckin hell”.

Mick Jones, ladies and gentlemen. The guy who’d be in Big Audio Dynamite a few years later.

Gary Numan kinda takes it on the chin across the entire issue. There’s an interview with Daniel Miller from Mute Records, who’s just come off being “The Normal” but hasn’t quite hit paydirt by signing Depeche Mode yet. In it. one of the editors hand-scrawls something about how Gary Numan’s Tubeway Army has “ripped off Daniel Miller”. Perhaps. Now these guys love The Cramps; it appears to have been total mania at their recent shows in the UK, and the editors see them as the personification of everything great about America, as do I. As should we all.

Finally, there’s an “unedited” interview with The Mo-Dettes. I’ve read interviews with them before and they were pretty loopy, “taking the piss” sorts of talks. They adored going after other bands in a way that no one does any longer. Here’s a feisty quote from Jane in the band: “Rough Trade’s a bunch of hippies. They’re a load of stupid intellectuals with too many ‘isms’. It’s all these feminists. I’d include The Raincoats in the feminist bag…I think their music stinks”. Apparently there’s a Mo-Dettes flexidisc included in this issue, but mine’s just two blank pieces of orange tape on the inside front cover, sort of like what a gallery wall looks like after an art heist. Not that I’m comparing the two, mind ya.

We’re back here at Fanzine Hemorrhage after a several-month break. That break was what enabled us to complete a film-focused fanzine called Film Hemorrhage #1, which has just come out and is available here. Now on with the program.

Music fanzine culture in the early 80s UK was more robust and fertile than anywhere else on the planet, I think it’s fair to say. The Story So Far #4 is highly representative of an excitable and ear-to-the-ground subculture of music freaks there, just allowing an onslaught of underground music to wash over them in 1980 and trying to document as much as possible before it drifts away. This in turn engenders new brain-jolting discoveries from the 1960s and 1970s, a particular new obsession of this fanzine, which has tribute pieces on The Raspberries and The Trashmen.

The editors were “Tim” and “Marts”, and according to the masthead, Nikki Sudden is a contributor in here somewhere. “This issue is full of yanks, which is unintentional but just turned out that way”, says one of them. If only they knew just how problematic that would sometimes feel for certain anglophilic American publications who went the other way. Key among the yanks in The Story So Far #4 are cover stars The Cramps, who really took hold of England during the early 80s and who were actually introduced to me back by English publications that I was buying in the USA (as well as by college radio). Even in 1980 we’ve got an ad in here for Lindsay Hutton’s Cramps fan club, as well as a Cramps interview and original photos from recent gigs. Lux is highly complementary of The Barracudas, a band highly visible in UK fanzines at the time but who don’t seem to me to be particularly well-remembered now.

I’m a little baffled by the letter to the editor from Vermilion Sands, a woman who became one of my retroactive 70s punk rock crushes once I saw her photo in Hardcore California a couple years after this. She’s at this point a former San Francisco punk and Search and Destroy contributor now based in England, making what sounds like some abysmal biker rock. It sounds as though she’s encouraging bands to sell out and join a major label, but she could just as well be arguing the exact opposite in her clipped, elliptical, punk rock-inspired typing. I’m really unsure, but it merited a full page in The Story So Far #4. In other news, Joan Jett has just released her first solo record and talks a bunch about the LA glitter and Rodney’s English Disco scene; Tim gives a full-page rave to the new Mo-Dettes album, and Marts tries to do the same for some new Generation X piece of vinyl, clearly his favorite bands two years ago but you can just tell the guy’s heart isn’t in it any longer.

I wonder what became of Tim and Marts seven years later. Were they nodding off at Spacemen 3 gigs? Were they pigfuckers deeply into Big Black, Killdozer and the Butthole Surfers? Did they go through an intense “jangle” interlude? Fellas, write us here at Fanzine Hemorrhage as we’d love to get to understand the cut of your 1980s jib!