Thursday, January 21, 2010

WHEN THE SUN SHINES - A NEW OPTIMISM FOR THE 80's



Jamming! was edited by Anthony Fletcher from Crystal Palace when zine categories mashed into DIY publication after punk. Back in the day before Helen, Olly and Martin the Sound Man made SE19 postcode of comedy podcast with Answer Me This! Cate Blanchett-have-you-ever-tried to-be-like-Bob Dylan-1966-John Cooper Clarke-grandchild-of-albion stands up reading poems. He could be mistaken for a stand-up comic. That's modern comedy. That's poetry. That's 1980s, 1990s, n00ughties popular frontism.

Also back in the day N10 zinester Cyril Simsa generously provided Jamming! with cute strapline 'A new optimism for the '80's'. His duplicated radical artzine Amanita conflated zoology, science-fiction, music, poetry, anarchy and social theory.



Jamming! attracted a poetry scene in London, Leeds and Birmingham.



It got folks making poems public, through homemade books as much as performance, including myself and Peter Butler. Some of it was shit but some of it wasn't.

Among dozens of flyers circulating on the scene I passed this one on to Peter Butler when he moved to Denmark.



from beat generation ballads sequence

Next post I'll scan Patrick Ballin's graphic A Bakuninist Tao from back cover Cyril Simsa's New Church zine. It's cool.

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