The Fanzine Podcast

Back in 1980, Alan Rider started a fanzine in Coventry called Adventures in Reality . Over in Southend-on-Sea, Graham Burnett started his own fanzine called New Crimes . Forty years later, independently, without knowing each other, Alan and Graham both felt compelled to document their home city's thriving scene zine - Alan, with Tales from the Ghost Town: The Coventry Punk Fanzine Revolution 1979-...

THE JAMMING ! FANZINE PODCAST is back after a year in exile, now as a Podcast for and about all Fanzines, though still hosted by former Jamming! editor/publisher Tony Fletcher . For this first episode of a new series/season, Tony interviews the authors of the excellent new hardbook book, WE PEAKED AT PAPER: AN ORAL HISTORY OF BRITISH ZINES , namely Gavin Hogg and Hamish Ironside . Before, after an...

We close out the first Series/Season of the Jamming! Fanzine Podcast with an interview conducted by James Endeacott , for Soho Radio 's Morning Glory show, with Jamming ! founder Tony Fletcher. The conversation traces the full story of the fanzine that grew up, from schoolboy beginnings to corporate break up. Between them, they discuss The Clash, The Jam, the DIY Records Scene, fanzines, regionali...

In the middle of 1981, Jamming ! expanded from fanzine to record label. Between that summer and the end of 1982, Jamming! Records released five singles, all of them independent chart hits: two from the band Rudi , three from Zeitgeist , and one by Apocalypse . For this episode of the Jamming! Fanzine Podcast , we have one member from each of those groups: Brian Young from Rudi, Peter “Jaffo” Jervi...

Tony Fletcher reunites with Bruce Dessau, Ross Fortune and Paul Davies , each of whom wrote extensively for Jamming! during its commercial heyday, 1984-85, and each of whom went on to further careers in journalism. As much as this is a talk specific to Jamming! magazine, it is very much a conversation about the music and media culture of the time - about how easy it once was to access the artists,...

Tony Fletcher reunites with musician/composer Jim ‘ JG’ Thirlwel l, DJ Wendy May , and Dimple Records boss Brian O’Neill , all of whom he first met in the late 1970s when they bought copies of Jamming! off him while they were working behind the counter at the Virgin shops in Oxford Walk, Notting Hill Gate, and Marble Arch respectively. During that thriving post-punk period the entire Virgin chain...

Chris Heath is a writer for The Atlantic, GQ and Vanity Fair , and author of several books. Russell Young is a visual artist with a background in music photography, sleeve design and video directing. Both got their professional start with Jamming! in the early 1980s. Thirty-five years after its demise, Russell and Chris joined Jamming !’s former publisher/editor Tony Fletcher in New York City, whe...

This episode is a co-production with the Fifty Years of Fun podcast. In Jamming! 13, published in the spring of 1982, a 17-yr old Tony Fletcher wrote an editorial called ‘A Statement.’ Among those to read it was Alan McGee, new to London from Glasgow at the time, who was inspired to start a fanzine and a club night and a label all of his own. That label was Creation Records , home to The Jesus and...

Tony Fletcher hosts a conversation with three fellow former fanzine editors and Jamming ! contributors, Tim Kelly ( Revolutionary Suicide/Fanzine of Noise ), Janine Booth ( Blaze ) and Richard Edwards ( Cool Notes ). Janine and Richard were also active in the 'Ranting Poetry' scene of the 1980s, while Tim toured with D.I.R.T. , and played in Flux of Pink Indians and was part of the One Little Indi...

Between 1976-82, Joly MacFie printed some 40,000,000 badges (pins, in the USA) related to music culture. Along the way his company Better Badges grew from one-man garage operation to a sizeable small business that also printed and distributed dozens of fanzines. That connection started in spring of 1979 when Tony Fletcher stopped hoping for an ad for the 7th issue of Jamming . Joly, having just ac...

For this episode, we spin back to 1979, for a lively and laughter-filled conversation with two famous bass players and a drummer: Mark ‘Bedders’ Bedford of Madness , Guy Pratt (then of Speedball ) and Brett ‘Buddy’ Ascott (then of The Chords ). Together they discuss: the fashion forces that inspired that year’s mod and skinhead revivals; why the former musical movement fizzled out but the latter o...

For this debut episode of The Jamming! Fanzine Podcast, Tony Fletcher connects with three old friends who all played an important part in the Jamming! school days, and each of whom wrote an introductory piece for The Best of Jamming! book. They are Richard Heard, Jeni de Haart and John Matthews, and over the course of a lively group call, they discuss the onset of punk, the birth of Jamming and wh...

Welcome to the Jamming! Fanzine podcast hosted by Tony Fletcher. In late 1977, as a schoolkid in South London inspired by the DIY culture of punk, I started a music ‘zine. I had no long-term plan, and certainly no idea that over the next decade, Jamming ! would grow to become a national, even international, monthly magazine. And I certainly couldn’t have imagined that in 2021, there would be a ful...