The Flourishing World of Litzines
The new Fanzine Podcast features the editors of Razur Cuts and Spinners
If you’re new here, the Fanzine Podcast is a show I (try and) host monthly, and which features me talking primarily to fanzine editors young and old, about fanzines old and new, most of them based around music but not always so. For Episode 29, my guests are Roual Galloway of Spinners, and Derek Steel of Razur Cuts, two of the more prominent among the many Litzines currently flourishing in the UK (and beyond).
Litzines – independent zines of literature from outside the mainstream – are surely among the oldest of all forms of fanzines. Depending on your historical perspective, you could even argue that they predate the concept of the fanzine itself, which as noted back on Episode 20, was a word first knowingly used in 1940.
Certainly, self-published zines of prose and poetry writing were an important part of the Beat culture on both US coasts through the 1950s and 1960s, have an anchor in the current vibrant world of perzines, and have been especially strong in the UK ever since the emergence of a new generation of poets in the early 1980s. These were people encouraged by the examples of cross-over artists like John Cooper Clarke and Linton Kwesi Johnson, and they took to the pubs and small theaters of the UK to reclaim the form “for the people.” Dedicated zines soon followed, as you can see from my collection of publications below.
In the UK, the medium, in prose and short story form too, has also always had a close connection to the football terraces and other aspects of pop culture, and recent issues of Razur Cuts and Spinners, each weighing in at about 80 pages, readily demonstrate as much.
In our hour-long chat, Derek zooms in from Falkirk in Scotland, and Roual – who has lived in multiple parts of the UK – from his home in the Kent coastal town of Margate. They talk about how and why their respective zines came into being, how they receive submissions, guiding editorial principles and the general nature of the written word in British zine culture. You can listen to it on Spotify or Apple as below, from the podcast’s home page, from a host of other podcast platforms as linked here, and you are also welcome to listen along on this page and/or download the file at the top of this post.
Various other litzines and fanzines mentioned on this episode include Cripes, Bicycle Pump, Oi! Division, A Way of Life, Faith, Rebel Inc., Tangled Lines, Paper and Ink, and Ripped & Torn.
Some of the poets, writers and authors who get namechecked for being part of this movement include Irvine Welsh, Atilla the Stockbroker, Benjamin Zephaniah, Joe England, Elaine Cusack, Stephen Wells, Laura Miller, Patrick Fitzgerald, Dave Waller, Anne Clark, Jason Williamson, Ian Rankin, Dean Cavanagh, and Chip Hamer, whose recent poem “Ice Age” was published in a special post here on Wordsmith.
Spinners can be ordered from https://5767.co.uk/product/spinners-issue-5/. Roual’s podcast Spinners of Yarns can be found on major podcast platforms, and he’s on IG here.
Razur Cuts can be purchased from https://razurcuts.com/shop, as can the books that they have recently started publishing as an expansion of their small press. They are on FB here.
And given that Razur Cuts was named for the last two words on the Buzzcocks classic “Love You More,” I’m going to engage in shameless self-promotion and, allowing for the number of new people constantly signing up this page, re-introduce the cover version of that song I mention in the podcast, which was the launch release for my partnership musical project Hudson Palace.
The Fanzine Podcast theme is by Noel Fletcher.
The logo is by Greg Morton at Omnibus Press, which published a compendium of my own zine. UK customers can get the book from here and US customers from here.
Prior fanzine editor guests on this show include Miki Berenyi, James Brown, Bobby Bluebell,
, Mark Perry, Ira Robbins, Jack Rabid, Alan McGee, Janine Booth, , Ed Piller and Mark Hodkinson. You can listen to all episodes and subscribe via your preferred podcast platform from the home page here.