Panache
Panache was the longest running punk fanzine (with stop starts) which was edited by Mick Mercer and ran from 1976 into the nineties. Choosing to focus on the smaller bands that were bubbling around on the scene that the music weeklies would ignore or occasionally feature, it carved out a readership and made it akin to Tony D’s Ripped & Torn. Mick would end up writing for those music weeklies and then take over Zigzag for its excellent goth era. Panache ran in parallel. He continues writing today (mainly goth) and does excellent picture books from goth to punk to indie.
Read Panache #5 here
Thinking back to 1976 takes some doing. Trying to remember why myself and a couple of friends chose to do a fanzine, when we knew virtually nothing about either the music scene of the time, or how to go about anything like this, is almost mind-boggling.
All we had in common was a love of music and a distinct awareness that there was nothing around that we liked. It was me, Neil and Jonathon, and we were all working together in a shite office – all reading the music papers and grunting away dismissively each week when we realised there was nothing to go and see. All we had noticed in the papers were occasional bands who might be visible on the Old Grey Whistle Test, like Dr Feelgood, or Kursaal & The Flyers. Even Deaf School. Pub Rock, but with integrity. It was boring. The only gigs I enjoyed were mainly courtesy of a friend Paul, who knew someone who could get us in cheapo, or free, at the Marquee and we would sometimes see some excellent funk bands.
Then the papers covered a Punk festival in France, and we noticed that Sounds had a little thing developing, of interest in The Damned, and Melody Maker wasn’t exactly averse to XTC. The coverage of the Pistols was largely inadequate rather than incendiary…but then another bloke in the office, Graham, who looked like a rockabilly baseball fan, started telling us what Punk gigs were like, as he’d been to a few, and was devoted to The Damned.
He produced a copy of Sniffin’ Glue and THAT was the catalyst for us.
We hated it.
I’m serious. We recognised why it was essential and why it was different, we just also noticed that the photos were great and the writing was dire. We didn’t dislike it for that, we enjoyed the spirit and the ideas. We just wanted to do something different.
We worked out we could do it between us, in case we lost money and as long as we didn’t go over fifteen one-sided pages (doing double-sided would really cost). Then we went printer-hunting.
Remember, this was before you had Prontaprint or Kallkwik printers in the high streets. You had to find an actual printer that wouldn’t mind doing small runs. Similarly this was pre-walkman, or autofocus compact cameras. We were constantly up against crap technology. Or the lack of it.
We did our first issue and avoided The Damned, Sex Pistols et al. We concentrated on Iggy, Patti Smith and The Runaways. Then we went to a few gigs to sell copies. This was the weirdest part because it never occurred to us that people wouldn’t want a copy, so we just kept brow-beating people until they agreed. My first sale was to a fifty-something Orthodox Jew who listened to me in a fairly genial manner as I actually pursued him for fifty yards up Wardour Street until he finally agreed.
Then I spotted some sleaze leaving a dodgy club with a woman on each arm, and convinced him to take three copies. Perhaps more strangely we got an old hippy in a sex shop to buy some. The next time we popped back to see if he’d sold any he had a copy up on the wall in a sealed plastic bag, going for a fiver!
Different times.
What we put in didn’t matter. To us, it was what we had to say. It was usually critical, and we didn’t see the point of going for interviews with obvious bands because the papers had picked up on it all. We didn’t want to do what they were doing. We also didn’t even like what they were doing. The majority of the journalists were still the same who had been reviewing dreary bands pre-punk, and they simply kept their jobs, as you’d expect, but were trying to enthuse about a new style.
It wasn’t even until I saw The Adverts for the first time and realised that TV Smith was the sort of person I’d seriously want to write about, that I took the writing seriously. I was more interested in how we could get variety into each issue so people didn’t get bored and might get into some of the newer bands we liked. Gloria Mundi was one of the first…which is probably why I liked Goth so much later (and to this day).
Being the three of us we had no real central focus, and we involved friends around the country to do gig reviews, as there still weren’t that many venues who accepted Punk bands. But people get bored.
The fanzine always sold but we got bored with the selling. We wanted to improve the content, but that’s Catch-22. If you don’t sell what’s the point of doing it? But do you keep on selling endlessly just for the sake of it? We could have done a couple of thousand a month easily, but we decided to just print up 400 each time and sell until they were gone.
Later Panache used to sell a few thousand each time. The Ants Special is reckoned to have done six thousand.
The music press was still shite, but they all covered the Punk bands, big or small, so there was no point pretending you were doing anything that different, unless you CHOSE to make your fanzine different, which we did, putting in a surreal sense of humour. Other fanzines adapted and tried to be intentionally serious, as though they could become part of the press.
I wasn’t bothered about that, although I wanted to write for the papers. Write for them, and still keep Panache separate and different, which is what I did, hopefully, right up until the early 90’s.
Just because journalists on the papers didn’t understand Punk initially, it would be childish to think that most of them didn’t get the point. Most of them actually found they preferred both the music and the characters involved far preferable to the boring dross they’d been covering before.
The music press respected fanzines but viewed them logically. A lot of fanzines were spirited, but when you look at them now you realise they were skimpy, and often one-dimensional. Ripped & Torn was classic fare, and made Sniffin’ Glue look ultra-dreary. Kris Needs revolutionised ZigZag magazine, which was halfway between Press and Fanzine territories.
After a while (maybe by mid-77) did people have any great need for fanzines? Possibly not, unless they understood the lifestyle options someone like Tony D expounded upon in Ripped & Torn (and, later, with the seminal Kill Your Pet Puppy), as did Tom Vague later, in Vague.
To indicate what journalists were genuinely like, I wrote an angry letter to one writer at the mainly pop Record Mirror newspaper, who had dismissed The Adverts in an article, without giving them a fair hearing, as far as I was concerned. The writer in question said I should have a go, perhaps? I sent a copy of Panache and she reiterated that I should definitely try some reviews, and she’d shown my stuff to the Editor, who agreed. I met up with him (Alf Martin – who later published Punk LIves), and that’s how I started. later I wrote to ZigZag a few times and ended up working there and eventually editing it.
People were open to ideas, provided you could write.
I probably didn’t have the right attitude or devotion as far as traditional press went. (Ever.) I still preferred my fanzine, while a lot of fanzine people (and this continued through the 80’s) simply used their fanzines as springboards to what they saw as Greater Things, in securing an editorial position on a music paper, which was fair enough. And did I have the right attitude for doing a fanzine? I hardly chased interviews. We went to gigs, shoved down the front and went mad, and usually ended up realising we hadn’t bothered taking any photos, and had got too pissed to bother interviewing people, even when they offered, and usually we got into fights with each other.
It was total chaos The fact issues kept coming out seems almost bizarre.
Then we met Joly, a well-meaning hippy bloke at Better Badges, and the fanzine revolution really took off in the late 70’s. Remember the stalls at big gigs like the Lyceum and Electric Ballroom, where you could buy fanzines and badges? You didn’t really get much money off Joly. That wasn’t the point. He printed them and kept the money from sales, but you could buy copies (to sell personally) from him at virtually nothing compared to what your old printer charged. So you could leave the selling to them, and still make a few quid if you wanted.
Then Betta Badges went belly up and we continued selling a few hundred of each one. Nothing stopped us, until people drifted away. Jonathan disappeared and Neil went off to university, and things changed. I kept it going myself for another ten years, but by the start of the 90’s I had lost the urge.
Looking back I think I didn’t so much lose the urge as lost a respect for writing about music because so many publishers had ripped me off. I was more interested in seeing how the Net developed. In early 1992 I was trying to get publishers interested in a magazine about the Internet but nobody knew what I was talking about.
Websites are like fanzines were, except better. You can do what you want, when you want, with endless support and advice and free downloads to assist your dreams. A fanzine in the old days was a valiant struggle, to do something to the best of your ability, on limited means.
I still have a great fondness for those creations, but they don’t necessarily stand up to well to endless scrutiny. Most fanzines were pretty poor. By the early eighties most of them were agit-punk, in the wake of Crass and did finally serve a purpose, because virtually none of the anarcho bands were going to get much coverage in the music press, so fanzines became their lifeline to fans, and vice versa.
Punk fanzines circa 76/77 were novelties which either struck an accord with the people who bought them or not. We usually found people remembered previous issues and bought immediately or they said they never wanted to see another copy so long as they lived. Bastards.
Bands remained helpful throughout, as I recall. They used fanzines initially to get coverage, but after a few encounters with the music press they either preferred fanzines because they were usually dealing with fans who gave them an easy ride, or they understood that the fanzines were genuinely interested in them. This didn’t change through the years. You could still get fanzine interviews just by apporoaching the bands or their press officers. I never found one instance of anyone blocking access. I would imagine it’s still the same today.
Above the best selling Panache fanzine featuring Adam & The Ants right at the point they became massive and the point they were dropped by fanzines, their hardcore fans and sales of their badges at Better Badges dropped off a cliff!
The effect of fanzines however, was probably minimal, in affecting Punk or Music Generally. How could they affect anything to any great, sustainable depth? They made some journalists sharpen up their act, but that’s about all, unless you consider that this was what brought through a lot of new writers who then dominated the music press in the Eighties. The alternative would have been that people writing in the seventies would maintain a stranglehold on the papers throughout the 80’s too, and that didn’t happen.
It was fun. It was useful. It was instructive. To me. I just hope people enjoyed them.
They didn’t change much, but they were a PERFECT example of the Punk ethos, in that you knew you could do anything, so why not do precisely that. We did, and I did. It led to me concentrating on being a writer. It brought out of me what I wanted to do, and the reason I wanted to do it so instantly was because that’s what I was meant to do.
That’s the great thing about fanzines. You didn’t usually find any that were half-hearted. For that alone they deserve to be loved.
Check out Mick Mercer’s great selection of books of his photos from Punk to Goth and beyond here
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