DEAR SMASH HITS, WE’RE FROM SCOTLAND! – An Alternative History of Zines & DIY Music Culture (1975-2025) Book (by Alastair MacDonald Jackson)
DEAR SMASH HITS, WE’RE FROM SCOTLAND! – An Alternative History of Zines & DIY Music Culture (1975-2025) Book (by Alastair MacDonald Jackson)
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ALASTAIR MACDONALD JACKSON: “Dear Smash Hits, We’re from Scotland! An Alternative History of Zines and DIY Music Culture (1975-2025)” (Earth Island)
First things first: this is exactly the sort of book Moonbuilding wanted to be writing about back when we were just a few scribbles of an idea in a notebook. This title! Take my money. Get ready, I’m about to go in.
As with most books that land at Moonbuilding HQ, I start with a quick flick through. I opened this one at the back and spent a good part of the afternoon reading the extensive appendix… but not before flicking through the adverts for other Earth Island publications.
I’m not familiar with this publisher yet. The East Sussex based imprint “operates with a punk rock ethic that has led to a varied catalogue of wonderful titles on alternative subjects.” In the same package as this book, they kindly tucked in Christian Späth’s “This Is My Everything” (thank you!), another new title that delves into life in a band in the DIY hardcore scene of the late 90s/early 00s. A world I don’t know much about yet, but I will soon.
“Dear Smash Hits, We’re from Scotland!” covers the world of DIY zines and music culture from 1975 to the year 2025 – exhilarating reading! It centres on the formative years of the author, Alastair Macdonald Jackson, on the Hebridean island of Skye in the 80s and how he managed to plug into the alternative culture despite his remote location, which, while not directly around him, was at least happening in the same country.
His introduction sets the scene perfectly. He says pop stars often used to complain about growing up in the suburbs. He says Siouxsie Sioux was constantly “banging on about how awful it was growing up in Chislehurst, 14 miles from London city centre”. “They should try living 390 miles from London”, he adds. He himself drove 46 miles to and from school every day, 126 miles and a ferry trip to the nearest record shop, and didn’t even know where the nearest music venue was.
So “Dear Smash Hits, We’re from Scotland!” is something of a survival guide mixed with a comprehensive history, guiding us through the myriad zines that brought news of punk, new wave, indie and more to the switched-on north of the border. It kicks off with Brian Hogg’s groundbreaking “Bam Balam”, first published in 1975, which served as an inspiration for Mark Perry’s “Sniffin’ Glue”. There’s “Ripped & Torn” from the late 70s, whose contributors included a certain Edwyn Collins, and there’s the story of Sex Pistols designer Jamie Reid, who sold his magazine “Suburban Press” in 1975 and moved to the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, where he wrote a music column for the left-wing, Skye-based newspaper “The West Highland Free Press” until his old mate Malcolm McLaren invited him to work on a new project he had going.
And all this, and we’re barely 20 pages into this fascinating title. There are chapters on the crucial role of women in the development of Scottish independent music, the impact of the legendary NME compilation “C86”, the rise of cassette labels, and the enduring popularity and continued rise of DIY. The book features a wealth of new interviews with the who’s who of Scottish indie bands (The Rezillos, The Pastels, Shop Assistants, The Bluebells, BMX Bandits, Soup Dragons, The Vaselines and more) as well as many names behind the labels and zines that supported it all.
I love that Alastair considered NME, Melody Maker and Sounds too mainstream when he decided to become a music journalist in the early 90s. “I never paid much attention to the dorks toiling for NME, Sounds or Melody Maker”, he writes. “The music journalists from the inkies always seemed like old bores who couldn’t just enjoy music without applying a bit of Barthes or Gramsci to give the impression of their intrinsic and great intellectualism.” He clearly never read Melody Maker during my time there. Anyway, he set up his own zine called Hype to cover the growing club scene in the Highlands, complete with a free cassette.
The aforementioned appendix is gold, serving as a directory of zines, complete with illustrations, as well as a sizeable bibliography of academic papers, blogs and podcasts that he drew upon. This book couldn’t be more Moonbuilding if it tried. If you like what we do here, you’ll love it. Discuss amongst yourselves, I’ll be enjoying this for quite some time yet.
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