Ripped, torn and cut

Pop, politics and punk fanzines from 1976

The Subcultures Network The Subcultures Network

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526120618
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica punk

Ripped, torn and cut offers a collection of original essays exploring the motivations behind – and the politics within – the multitude of fanzines that emerged in the wake of British punk from 1976.

II
Communiqués and Sellotape: constructing cultures

5
‘Pam ponders Paul Morley's cat’: City Fun and the politics of post-punk

David Wilkinson

Manchester's City Fun (1978–83) bears all the hallmarks of punk fanzine media. Early issues in particular feature impulsive anti-authoritarian rants alongside reviews and ruminations on the meaning of punk. City Fun's often striking covers varied in style, though Dada-indebted collages by Linder Sterling and Jon Savage captured a distinctively post-punk structure of feeling; one riven by the crisis of the political conjuncture, which nevertheless offered glimpses of utopia through the joins. It is worth asking how the zine captured the conflicted and evolving politics of the British counterculture as it mutated, fragmented and fed into punk, post-punk and beyond against a backdrop of collapsing post-war welfare-capitalism and the rise of Thatcherite neoliberalism.

Why examine such a development? As I have argued elsewhere, post-punk offers extensive insight into ideological battles fought out in the late 1970s and 1980s over what it might mean to live a liberated and fulfilled life; battles with urgent contemporary relevance. The association of certain strands of post-punk with the post-war libertarian left meant that it often carried through the utopianism of 1960s radicalism into the early days of Thatcherism. This utopianism took muted but nevertheless vital forms during a moment usually characterised by left historiography as bleak, hopeless and even apocalyptic. Post-punk, then, may act as a resource of hope in specifically neoliberal, crisis-ridden conditions. Yet post-punk also marked the incorporation of the counterculture in various ways – not least the aspirational postmodern turn of the ‘new pop’ – thus teaching harder lessons about the limitations, as well as the possibilities, of countercultural revolt.¹

Studying City Fun reveals that a number of the preoccupations and tensions of post-punk made themselves felt not just in the music but also in its grassroots media. The zine's sustained run, its collective editorial team and its practical function as a nerve centre for the Manchester scene, with eventual national distribution and a relatively high circulation for a publication of its kind, make it an especially significant example of post-punk media through which to examine these issues.²

This chapter considers four distinct but interrelated themes. Firstly, debates over the viability of independent, oppositional media production, which in many respects mirrored those taking place in the music weeklies over independent labels. Secondly, debates over the aesthetics and politics of post-punk, which are focused here through two examples: City Fun's sometimes fractious relationship with Factory Records, the dominant centre of Manchester's post-punk scene; and the zine's equally fractious attitudes to the London-centric drift of post-punk following the initial regionalist promise of the latter. Both examples disinterred tensions of class and education that were familiar enough given the varied backgrounds of those who participated in post-punk, yet which took quite specific forms here.³

In less obvious ways, such tensions animate the third theme, which is the idiosyncratic attitude of City Fun toward the sexual and gender politics so captivatingly brought to the fore by post-punk. This attitude was determined in no small part by the central involvement of Liz Naylor and Cath Carroll; a pair who had grown up on the working-class fringes of the Greater Manchester conurbation and who were still teenagers when they began their brilliantly camp, warped and incisive contributions to the zine.

Finally, class also mediated the fourth theme of this chapter: City Fun's take on politics with a big ‘p’, especially the nascent fragmentation of the left into identity-based struggles. These overlapped with post-punk via its countercultural and libertarian left inheritance. More or less self-consciously, the zine associated such politics with a particular fraction of the middle class and ruthlessly satirised them on this basis. Yet, as we will see, it did so without thereby becoming either reactionary or unequivocally pessimistic.

‘Keeping control’: cultural production

As with many strands of punk and post-punk, the origins of City Fun can be traced to the counterculture and the post-war libertarian left. Bob Dickinson, who wrote for the zine between 1980 and 1982, refers to its co-founder Andy Zero as a ‘short haired punk hippie’. Dickinson notes of a photo of Zero's friend and fellow co-founder Martin X: ‘As you can see, he's not that young … I asked him once what his favourite gig was and he said [German beat/psychedelic band] The Rattles at the Twisted Wheel in 1968’.⁴

This lineage was as true of the zine's infrastructure as its founders. For most of its existence City Fun used Rochdale Alternative Press as its printer. RAP was a co-operative that began life as the Moss Side Press in 1970, which in turn grew out of a local housing activist group. As well as hippie underground papers Grass Eye and Mole Express, Moss Side Press/RAP printed a large network of community publications including Tameside Eye, Bury Metro and Salford Champion.⁵ The focus of such titles on the neglected concerns of working-class locales alongside critiques of local authorities and businesses reflected libertarian left preoccupations with anti-statism, mutual aid and direct democracy characteristic of the period. One of the last issues of Mole Express even featured a symbolic, baton-passing feature on punk.⁶ Liz Naylor has called Mole Express ‘the greatest magazine ever’.⁷ The relish with which it engaged in scurrilous dirt-digging was steadfastly maintained by City Fun in the continuation of ‘gossip’ and ‘nasty rumours’ columns from the earlier paper.

Out of this foment emerged a deeply idealistic endeavour. The first volume of City Fun (1978–80) attempted to make good on the democratising, DIY promise of punk. Hierarchy was frowned upon. ‘We don't edit’, Andy Zero noted in an interview with the New Manchester Review, the city's equivalent of Time Out. ‘We don't cut out anything’.⁸ By this Zero meant not simply specific content but also the vast majority of contributions they were sent, as he noted in a pedantic response to accusations of cronyism: ‘There are less than six contributions that we have never used.’⁹ Few articles featured bylines and those that did were often written under pseudonyms, aiming to discourage egotism and to highlight the zine's collectivist ethos. Just as punk and post-punk bands demystified the recording process by listing costs and ‘how to’ guides on record sleeves, so City Fun featured articles like ‘How To Produce A Fanzine’ and made some attempt to publicly account for its finances.¹⁰

This devotion to grass-roots inclusivity did not come without its problems. Early in City Fun's existence, the zine published a number of critical letters noting its uneven quality, including one that began ‘Dear Shitty Fun’.¹¹ While the tone of these letters was petty, their criticisms were often accurate. Print was sometimes blotted or trailed off the edges of pages, which themselv...