Kill Your Pet Puppy and other pop culture habits
A new Fanzine Podcast, plus Snapped Ankles, Sinéad O’Connor, Slade, and the Sinti.
KILL YOUR PET PUPPY
Episode 34 of The Fanzine Podcast is out today on which I discuss Kill Your Pet Puppy with Tony D. The home page is here, it’s also on any podcast app of your choice, and the link below is only because Spotify offers a workable embedding code:
The background: In early 1979, Tony D(rayton) ceased publication of his trailblazing punk fanzine Ripped & Torn, having experienced a seismic shift in his values by the emergence of anarcho-punks Crass on the scene. After nine months traversing Europe and rethinking his “decadence,” he came back to London and started a new fanzine, Kill Your Pet Puppy. Like its predecessor, KYPP proved highly influential, and at times equally controversial, gradually moving away from music coverage over the course of its six issues to become something more…
On this, his second appearance on The Fanzine Podcast (check Episode 13 for the Ripped & Torn story), Tony D. talks about his conversion to the Crass way of living, his sojourns in Europe, falling out with Adam Ant, falling in with a new squat scene, why Kill Your Pet Puppy initially had a far more shocking title (and what it was!), gaining the printing patronage of Joly MacFie at Better Badges, testing the boundaries of what a punk zine could achieve and represent, the attraction of the new ‘Positive Punk’ groups like Alien Sex Fiend, Southern Death Cult and Sex Gang Children, why he launched KYPP with an attack on Jamming! (see second image below) and why he eventually ran off to join the circus. Literally. The full KYPP archives are here.
Early in our conversation, I asked Tony to briefly talk about that nine-month sojourn. It turned into fifteen minutes in which I seemed unable to speed him up! I edited that section out of the official podcast because it’s a Fanzine Podcast, but I do appreciate that there will be some people deeply interested in the London squat scene and the minutia of European vagabonding during 1979. For them - you? - the edited section (but not my narrative outro) is included in the file below. Have at it.
HYPERBOLE
On the most recent episode of my other podcast, Crossed Channels,
and I discussed Slade, with a focus on their 1975 film Slade In Flame. Dan liked it, I did not. But while both of us highly rate the soundtrack studio album, neither of us would suggest that, even with a newly remastered edition that may render the images somewhat brighter than a coal mine when the lights go out, it is the “Citizen Kane of rock movies,” a singular quote by one film critic duly reported in Daryl Easlea’s straightforward but thorough biography Whatever Happened To Slade? and now upped to the headline of a Guardian article about the film’s making.In the meantime, I loved doing this episode of Crossed Channels, not least because it sent me down a wonderfully delightful rabbit hole listening to Slade from the beginning on through the 1970s, a journey I had never taken chronologically before. The full episode sits behind our paywalls, but believe me, it’s another good reason to support this site.
Slade Inflamed
Welcome to the 15th episode of the CROSSED CHANNELS podcast — a.k.a. the podcast in which music journalists/obsessives Dan Epstein (the Yank) and Tony Fletcher (the Brit) clash and connect over music from either side of the pond.
This is your Midweek Post from Tony Fletcher, Wordsmith. Typically, these are more chatty than the longer single-subject weekend reads. This Substack survives on reader subscriptions. A full sub gets you all the archives, all my interview manuscripts (Part 2 of Clem Burke coming this weekend) and the Crossed Channels podcast. Full subs are $6 a month/$60 a year, about £5/£50. Free subs are of course, also available and appreciated.
DROWNED IN SOUND
In other podcast news, any discussion that contains someone saying, “The mushroom is not a vocalist, the mushroom is an instrumentalist,” especially when they are not talking about tripping on them, just has to be worth hearing. With recognition that this Saturday is Earth Day and that we need to do more than pay lip service to the planet, then I implore you to listen to this new episode of Sean Adams’ Drowned In Sound, taken from a panel discussion at Tallinn Music Week, in which the main attraction is not Martyn Ware of Heaven 17/BEF/Human League sadly but eloquently talking about the last sounds of dying species, but Joey Dean discussing his ‘Natural Symphony,’ in which he taps (and transmits) the musical vibrations of plants and learns so much more about their interactions with humans in the process. Dean is all the more fascinating for the fact that he’s a city kid who barely took notice of trees until he set off on this nature-embracing sonic adventure. I was transfixed.
ALBUM
SNAPPED ANKLES: HARD TIME FURIOUS DANCING
Sticking with the forest people, I was clearly living under a rock in my own one of music given that London’s Snapped Ankles have only crossed my path with this, their fifth album (albeit their first full-length in four years).
The forest connection? Well, Snapped Ankles are a group of earth punks, performing as trees, recording for The Leaf Label (their last album was entitled Forest Of Your Problems and a previous release was wittingly entitled Four to the Forest Floor), and singing about the environment and other aspects of our ongoing Hard Times while, per the new album title, getting up – or down – to some Furious Dancing along the way. (That album title, coincidentally or otherwise, harks back to an early Robert Elms piece in The Face, the London exhibit of which I covered last week, suggesting that the more things change…) Falling somewhere in-between the politics of IDLES and the grooves of early LCD Soundsystem, not a far-fetched comparison given that those two bands are already firm friends, the standout track for me is “Personal Responsibilities” which attacks corporations who don’t have any and
“Lead us to impending calamity
Whilst they encourage us to
Eat eat eat eat eat eat unhealthily
And kill animals unnaturally.”
“Personal Responsibilities” is far from the only killer track on Hard Times, Furious Dancing, if you will pardon the use of that language. The whole album is a riveting exhibition of effervescently abrasively indie dance grooves and people-friendly politics. They are touring the UK in May, and if Palace make it to the FA Cup Final – a big IF after the last two results! – Fabric on May 15 is on my calendar.
And for those who don’t want to go Furious Dancing or be reminded of their Hard Times right now, their back catalogue – there’s a lot of it – includes The Parasite Sessions, am ambient reworking of Forest Of Your Problems and an equally valid musical release in its own right. Or left.
DOCUMENTARY
I use my airplane journeys from east to west (i.e. daytime flight from UK to USA) to watch movies for free, and I guess it’s my default personality and geographical background that had me choosing Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths over all the box office bonanzas I could have viewed for free on my recent United Airlines journey back “home.” But that’s not the film I want to talk about. I also went for the documentary on Sinéad O’Connor, Nothing Compares, which was listed as a new release though it in fact came out in 2022, a year before her tragic passing. Somehow, like Snapped Ankles, it passed me by at the time, and if it’s done the same with you, and you have even half an inkling of love for Sinéad’s voice or a single second of empathy for what she went through in her life, I strongly recommend taking some time out, ponying up the pay-per-view price and sitting down to watch.
I consider myself more than a passing fan, but someone who thinks O’Connor had singularly the most emotive, beautiful and at times pained voice of any white female singer I’ve ever fallen for, and as someone who bought her albums and saw her perform live into what turned out to be the musical swansong of her turbulent career. But Nothing Compares filled so many gaps in my knowledge base, and while some of those gaps were unpleasant (and as much about Catholic Ireland’s historical brutality towards women as about O’Connor’s personal suffering of its generational trauma), others were just delightful, including clips of a young Sinéad– mid-teens Sinéad – getting her feet wet in the music scene. If any of this is ringing bells about another emotionally moving musical documentary on a British Isles singer of recent decades whose life took aa tragic turn, then let me quote Neil McCormack, a journalist who knows his Irish music even if he is writing for The Telegraph, who rightly called it "the most potent film about the travails of a woman in the pop industry since Asif Kapadia's 2016 Oscar-winning Amy". No argument from me on that score.
PS: Prince’s Estate refused permission to include any use of the song that gives the documentary its title, but that’s okay, because I can offer…
HISTORY LESSON
I am winding up my Degree this next couple of weeks, in part with a personal project on Indian Roma Influence on Flamenco and Modern Guitar. Among the many many many videos that pertain to this subject - vaguely, tangentially, or legitimately – I came across this “Forgotten History” lesson from the Odd Compass channel.
I am generally someone who thinks twice about allowing snazzy graphics to replace written cited sources, but there is a professionalism and expertise to this presentation. Everything in it that I had prior knowledge of pans out, and therefore, much like the Sinéad documentary, it serves to fill in the gaps for me, and does so in an informed, empathetic manner, and yet not without a light touch. I recommend it for anyone who doesn’t know the history of the Romani – or the Sinti. Digging deeper, I see that the Odd Compass channel is largely devoted to the history of the Indian subcontinent, and when I’m through with my studies, I hope I can find time to sit down from the beginning.
THE SONG IS OVER?
I will leave you with a picture to save a thousand more words: The Who’s great drummers, Zak Starkey with “Uncle” Keith Moon. You know where to put the cork.
Tony, I do love your titles :)