Aural Aggravation

Earth Island Books – 7th December 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

The blurb is a list of things that exist on the peripheries of my knowledge: bands I’ve heard of but barely heard, like Demented are Go, Long Tall Texans, and bands ‘’ve heard a bit but never paid much attention to: The Meteors (whose album with Screaming Lord Sutch hung on the wall of the secondhand record shop I worked at weekends, with a hefty price tag), and King Kurt (a guy in my school year was a massive fan and, at fifteen, was developing his quiff), and the legendary Klub Foot, which I was aware of from reading the music press (and seeing adverts in the back pages) from the mid-80s to the early 90s.

These were such different times. It’s likely hard to convince for those born post-1990 what a pre-internet world was like. The music press was the primary gateway and existed in printed tabloid format, but only touched the fringes of so many scenes. And so it was that no-budget fanzines not only existed but thrived. These weren’t slick efforts – usually one guy using cut-‘n’ paste and a wonky typewriter, stapling the Xeroxed pages together in a bedroom or basement or at work during a lunch break. They didn’t look they way they did in some attempt to look punk and adhere to some DIOY aesthetic: they were punk and DIY out of necessity, tossed together and banged out, typos and all because there was no other means of producing and circulating these things.

For better or worse, The Resurrection of The Crazed doesn’t replicate the original publications visually, but contains a typeset version of the text only, with a substantial selection of photographs and flyers, posters, tickets, and sketches, as well as the cover art from each issue. It may not have the same visual impact, but is no doubt easier on the eye, particularly with its generous font size which people of an age to have been there will likely appreciate.

For those who weren’t, it was The Meteors who are credited with being the progenitors of Psychobilly, with their amalgamation of punk and rockabilly, and, as Wikipedia notes, ‘fans of the Meteors, known as “the Crazies”, (a reference to the band’s 1981 single ‘The Crazed) are often attributed with inventing the style of slam dancing known as “wrecking”, which became synonymous with the psychobilly. And as such, the inspiration for the title, The Crazed. Fanzines tended not to stray too far from the obvious.

The Crazed may have only run for four issues, but like so many short-lived DIY publications, is fondly remembered and considered vital to the scene it represented, and this offers a neat alternative to scouring eBay to pay through the nose for dog-eared original copies – although I suspect many who will buy this book have already done that, and will be pleased to be able to put those into storage along with their various other tatty ticket stubs and the like.

What this compendium gives as an added bonus is a bunch of more recent interviews, and the benefit of hindsight. In addition to snippets of commentary, this comes in the form of a reflective piece which sits between the original zine material and the new, previously unpublished stuff, which Wainwright proffers essentially makes the fifth issue that never was. In it, he reflects on how the fourth issue was a slender tome with as little in terms of design as content, as well as being the smallest run. He writes, ‘I was still happy with the content of it, but no longer wanted to produce it as the initial enthusiasm I had when I started the fanzine had dissipated just like the Psychobilly scene that I had so loved. Looking back, it was a mistake as quite a few of the bands continued and some great records were to be released the scene where I left had virtually gone people had moved or were no longer into it.’

Enthusiasm is the essence of fanzines. Paul Wainright’s prose is not high literature: in fact, some of the writing is rough, amateurish – because that’s precisely the nature of such publications: by fans, for fans. But what Wainright published was a zine with original interviews, some of which are noteworthy for their stabs at greater depth, asking the kind of questions only a fan would ask – bringing knowledge and insight music journalists, notorious for going into interviews with either the most superficial of research, or otherwise proving themselves to be pretentious wankers – with the results often being vibrant exchanges, although this isn’t always the case, with some of the interviews, particularly the earlier ones, being fairly stilted and standard Q&As.

But for all the fandom, Wainright wasn’t entirely uncritical – slamming Demented Are Go’s performance at Dendermonde Psycho Festival in 1987 as a shambles. Although perhaps putting the ‘psycho’ into Psychobilly probably wasn’t the worst they could have done.

For Wainright, at least at the time, the story ended with the end of Klub Foot, and while this proved not to be the case in the longer term, it’s easy to relate to how it must have felt as the end of an era, akin to the closure of The Hacienda, or Stoke’s classic Northern Soul venue The Golden Torch – because every scene has its hub. And people grow up, move on, move out. But as The Resurrection of The Crazed shows us, nostalgia has significant currency, and what goes around comes around. Sure, most of those who were there are approaching retirement now, but that means they have time to reminisce at last, but also to spread the seed to younger generations, and The Resurrection of The Crazed captures the essence and energy of its time.

(Click image to go to Earth Island Books site)