Cast your mind back to the glory zine days of the late 1990s when pretty much everyone in the UK wrote a zine. You probably wrote one too, or at least stuck some pound coins in a SAE and posted it to some random stranger in the hope they’d send you back something awesome. Of course, diskant grew out of this zine scene – I first met all of the original diskanteers through zine-related shenanigans.

And it’s not just rose-tinted nostalgia speaking here – those zines were AWESOME. I still have 3 boxes of the things which I re-read on occasion and every so often I get a little sad about all the zines I never owned or knew about at the time. Sometimes people like Al Burian or Cometbus get a book compilation of their zines but, for the most part, these zines are only available to the handful of people who bought them at the time. This is a sad state of affairs.

Luckily, enterprising folks like Roger Simian still exist. Roger was in weirdo-mentalist band Dawn of the Replicants and also co-ran the much-missed Scottish magazine Sun Zoom Spark as well as writing his own zine dumb/SULK trigg-er. He now runs his own label Shark Batter while playing in new band The Stark Palace and has just put out a compilation of the best bits of his zines and writings. This is great news for me, as my sister was the one who bought all the original zines, so I haven’t read them in ten years.

It’s still all good stuff – long interviews with Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth, Lisa Carver and Traci Lords, fiction, a letters page featuring half the UK zine scene (and our own JGRAM)  and one of my favourite articles ever, where Roger goes to a Prolapse gig in Glasgow and hassles every minor lo-fi scenester of the time with a dictaphone. Nostalgia ahoy. You also get a tiny minizine and a free mixtape CD featuring The Stark Palace and their favourite songs.

I have no idea how much Roger wants for this but I’m sure it’s a bargain. Hit him up on sharkbatter AT googlemail  DOT com and tell him diskant sent you!

And if everyone else who ever wrote a zine could do a compilation of the best bits and send it to me, that would be great, thanks.

Posted: 08|24|09 at 12:12 pm. Filed under: books, zines, etc..
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