Music

The history
There was a girl at a Kid Harpoon gig last month handing out copies of her fanzine, bound with coloured clothes pegs. Alongside no-frills collectables like Transparent and Sheffield’s Sandman, self-generated music mags like FACT, Plan B and Stool Pigeon, and special-interest fanzines like Full Moon Empty Sports Bag (poetry), Fly Me to the Moon (Middlesbrough FC) and Smoke: A London Peculiar, she’s part of a proud history – which is experiencing a revival. London’s year zero was with Mark Perry’s punk fanzine Sniffin’ Glue, and in the ’80s ’zine-shaped publications like Time Out, the Face and i-D became part of the mainstream. ‘It’s brilliant that people still want to put unchecked, crazed opinions in print,’ says Robin Turner, editor of the Heavenly Social’s Socialism fanzine. ‘The net’s cool, but it’s good to see people making things you can read on the bus.’

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Why do you want to set one up?
Motivations vary but an obsession and a strong desire to be heard is at the heart of them all. Most are music-related, but there’s a trend towards new fashion and culture titles. Nineteen-year-old Bella Howard makes 100 copies per issue of Bellazine, which she puts together by cutting up old Mandy annuals and interviewing bands. ‘It’s kind of like [blogging website] MySpace but handmade and sweet. It’s like going to get cakes from a little shop instead of going to the supermarket.’

Sahil Varda started photocopy ’n’ staple fanzine Transparent as a reaction to the mainstream press. ‘I was reading lazy, tabloid journalism and nothing about the bands I wanted to read about.’

Dominik Prosser of Super, a self-financing fanzine from the Notting Hill Arts Club, agrees: ‘Fanzines fill a void.’

Getting the staff
It’s easy: find your most energetic friends and tap them up for ideas, photography and words (once issue one is out of the door you’ll find contributors among your readers – Smoke gets more than 100 submissions every issue). Brief everyone, give them a deadline, preferably a false one. It’s an incontrovertible fact that everyone will be at least a week late filing.

It is also a good idea to make sure your creative types don’t get too tired. An early issue of popular and now-defunct magazine Jockey Slut was nearly scuppered when the designer, who had been up for two days, accidentally trashed the wrong file. Fanzines are a hard habit to break: Slut founders are now behind high-end independent mag Dummy.

How to do the ‘do’ in DIY
Once upon a time fanzines were made by cutting and pasting blocks of text and pictures, but computers make the job a lot easier. Quark Xpress and Adobe’s InDesign are the industry-standard desktop publishing packages. There are a number of options for turning your on-screen creation into an actual mag: send your home printer smoking by doing it yourself; use a local copy shop; or find a professional printer by seeing who handles publications you like. You can print 1,000 copies, using one colour and cheap paper, for around £500 – less if you’re printing digitally. Or you can do as Jockey Slut did and cannibalise available resources (in their case, the student magazine offices at Manchester Met). But beware: management noticed high photocopying and phone bills, and they got fined.

Advertising?
Super’s Dominik Prosser is ‘hardcore’: ‘Fanzines are idiosyncratic, 100 per cent honest and not tainted by advertising.’ So don’t get him started on the ‘Trojan horse’ of fanzines created by brands. But if you want ad money, Stool Pigeon, which prints 60,000 copies per issue – around the same as Kerrang! – suggests you ask a friend to help (‘someone with no morals’) or try local record shops at around £100 an ad. Full Moon Empty Sports Bag might have persuaded Pete Doherty to contribute, but they are realistic: ‘You’re never going to attract Nike or Gucci when you publish poetry.’

Get it out there
Rise early, buy a travelcard, traipse around London. Wake and repeat until your holdall is empty. The makers of Smoke and Super spend a week per issue on distribution. ‘Shops in nice middle-class areas tend to be the snottiest,’ reports Smoke. Where you target depends on your subject matter – if it’s culture, try the ICA, if it’s music, a record shop like Selectadisc. Rough Trade’s Sean Forbes advises: ‘Don’t be rude and pushy. Do sale or return. And don’t come in on a Saturday when it’s too mental to deal with some insane fanzine guy.’

Longevity
Fanzines are often transitory and tend to fizzle out if their owners lose heart – or too much money. ‘I’m not sure fanzines should last,’ reckons Prosser. ‘It’s just good to do something for itself rather than for glory or capitalist ends.’