Heart of a Punk Soul of a Rasta

Two very happy and contented geezers, until one day a loud mouthed tosser burst unannounced into geezer No.1's life and told him how much better fresh peaches were compared to tinned. (These loud mouthed tosser's are usually called music journalists). For some reason geezer No. 1 was momentarily duped by the hype of the tosser and raced up to his local Spar where he bought a hard out of season "so called" fresh peach. He bit into the peach, and what did he find? Yes you're right; he found that it tasted like shit!

Meanwhile the loud mouth tosser went and battered on the door of geezer No.2 and told him how much better tinned peaches were. Geezer no. 2 put down his Grecian handmaiden for a moment and listened carefully to the words of the tosser. But geezer No.2 knew his own mind and his musical TASTE only too well and was not duped by the tosser's hype. Quickly geezer No.2 grabbed hold of a tin opener and stabbed that loud mouthed tosser to death in a frenzy red juice and lacerated pulp.

And so both geezer No.1 and geezer No.2 lived happily ever after, but especially geezer no.2.

Anyway you get the idea. TASTE should always be individual, open to change, fraught with danger and hopefully refined by bitter experience. We have all been duped by hype and at times have made mistakes all by ourselves. I still own most of mine, I've still got "Sheep Farming in Barnet" by Toyah and if that was the worst of it I wouldn't be mentioning it. To conclude then, we must love and cherish whichever variety of peach we prefer and ignore anyone who tells us we're wrong. We must stay clear of the disinterested, and turn a deaf ear to the tossers. If you know it, feel it.
John and I constantly have impolite disagreements about music. Bones of contention usually centre on, Crass and REM - I'll let you decided where the battle lines are drawn - but we are both from an age when music was more defined by grouping, music was more of a bond, mod, punk, dread, rocker, new waver etc - Sundown Records in Wolverhampton was where you bought your records from never bloody HMV - You had to listen to all the bands that came out on certain labels especially Stiff - and you only bought the music paper (NME, Melody Maker and Sounds) that sided with your musical taste not the other way round. ……Nowadays things are less defined…………..

"Did you see the Mercury prize last night John". "Yes I f*ckin did, it was enough to make a clean cat piss on its own kittens".


8th September
The Mercury Music Prize
"It's enough to make a clean cat piss on its own kittens!" John

In the past as far as the fanzine is concerned we've tried to ignore The Mercury Prize choosing simply to roll around laughing at it in the privacy of our own padded cells. But this year we've decided to verbally stick the boot in hard in a vain glorious attempt to get the world to listen, and join in. Then with one swift mass assault perhaps The Mercury Prize would finally croak.

The only good thing about the Mercury Prize is that it shows the general public how many fuckin liggers there are in the music business! John