Sideburns

Sideburns was a 1977 punk fanzine created by Tony Moon in January 1977 and ran for some 4 issues and featured the legendary ‘Here’s 3 Chords’ drawing.

Tony was from South East London and worked in a record shop. Having walked out of Led Zeppelin’s gig at Earls Court having been barely able to see or hear the band he had become enthused by the pub rock scene of Ian Dury and particularly Dr Feelgood. As a regular gig goer, a chance visit to the Nashville with friends to see The Vibrators saw him catch main band The Stranglers and like for a lot of us that was it. They were his band.

Again like for so many others, Mark Perry’s Sniffin’ Glue was the impetus and a desire to do something and be part of the emerging scene.

When we first saw ‘Sniffin’ Glue’ …we thought ‘we can do that’. I’d always liked writing things so we decided to do a fanzine too. We did interviews with the bands and that’s how we first met The Stranglers. We phoned up Albion and went down to the management’s offices in Putney Bridge Road and I interviewed Jet. It gave us a lot of confidence and it felt great. We put them on the cover, we actually gave them their first ever front cover!

When the printers delivered the first issue to my house, we thought ‘what do we do now?’ On my day off, I would go around all the London record shops like Rock On & Rough Trade and they would all take some copies to sell.

We also sold them outside gigs. One night, outside The Nashville, we were selling the first issue and JJ came along on his way back from TW (Studios). He hadn’t seen the fanzine and he was there on the cover. That made us feel like we were doing the right thing. It was really exciting. Stranglers Official Site

The issues followed Moon’s twin passions of The Stranglers (5 page interview in the first issue!) and pub rock like Dr Feelgood and Lew Lewis. In issue 1 his editorial exhorted people to jump on board the new wave and be creative. In the same issue, with a need to fill up a page and a dash of pure inspiration, Moon drew an iconic image that sums up the spirit of punk and is the perfect fanzine page. The image is often wrongly attributed to Sniffin’ Glue. Speaking in May 2000 to The Independent newspaper in an article about Punk, Mark P of fanzine ‘Sniffin’ Glue’ said of the three-chord diagram

..that wasn’t in ‘Sniffin’ Glue’. It’s so mythical now, but it never was. I’ve had to put so many people right. I’ve had people tell me that I’m wrong, saying ‘course you did it. Don’t you remember?’ I wish I had. It’s a great idea. It was perfect.

Three more issues followed. What makes Sideburns stand out is the in-depth interviews combined with the usual fanzine aesthetic of cut-and-paste graphics and cartoons, photos, and mix of typewriter and freehand text. Later issues would see an almost total absence of white space on pages as they were covered in text, images and patterns.

In late March Moon was approached by The Stranglers management Dai Davies to see if he would run their fanzine Strangled which had been set up as a press release. Moon obviously said yes but rather than it be just Stranglers focussed, it was basically Sideburns under a different name and with him in full editorial control. The first fruit of that would be Strangled #2 in April 1977.

Check out the first issue of Sideburns at the excellent Still Unusual blogspot.

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