Great to see that Alistair MacDonald Jackson's superb 'Dear Smash Hits, We're from Scotland!' made it into Moonbuilding's Top Ten books of the year! This engrossing alternative history of underground fanzines and DIY music in Scotland sits in good company alongside books by Simon Reynolds and Vivienne Goldman.
You can check out the full Top Ten here: https://moonbuilding.substack.com/p/issue-48b-20-december-2024
The Moonbuilding editor, Neil Mason, is an ex-Melody Maker writer, so it's good to see that he thinks so highly of this unique book.
There's also a full review of the book in this earlier edition: https://moonbuilding.substack.com/p/issue-34-13-september-2024
ALASTAIR MACDONALD JACKSON ‘Dear Smash Hits, We’re From Scotland! An Alternative History Of Zines & DIY Music Culture (1975-2025)’ (Earth Island)
First things first, this is the exactly the sort of book Moonbuilding was hoping to be writing about when we were but a few scribbles of an idea in a notebook. That title! Just take my money. Brace yourself, I’m about to bang on.
As with most books that land at Moonbuilding HQ, I start with a flick through the pages. I opened this one at the back and lost a good chunk of an afternoon reading through the extensive Appendix... but not before I’d flicked through the ads for other Earth Island publications.
It’s not a publisher I’ve encountered before. Based in East Sussex, they work with a “punk rock ethic, which has resulted in a varied catalogue of wonderful titles on alternative subjects”. In the same package as this book, they kindly slipped in ‘This Is My Everything’ by Christian Späth (thank you!), another new title that tackles life in a band on the DIY hardcore scene in the late 90s/early 00s. Not a world that I know much about, but I will soon.
‘Dear Smash Hits, We’re From Scotland!’ covers the world of DIY zines and music culture from 1975 right up to 2025, next year, which should be an interesting read! The book centres round author Alastair Macdonald Jackson’s formative years growing up on the Hebridean island of Skye in the 80s and how he managed to mainline the alternative culture springing up not exactly around him, but in the same country at least, despite his own remoteness.
His introduction sets the scene perfectly. He says that it was common to hear pop stars complaining about growing up in the suburbs. He says Siouxsie Sioux was forever “going on about how awful it was to grow up in Chislehurst, a grand total of 14 miles from London city centre”. “You want to have tried living 630 miles from London,” he adds where he travelled 46 miles to school and back every day, 126 miles and a ferry crossing to the nearest record shop and he didn’t even know where his nearest music venue was.
So ‘Dear Smash Hits, We’re From Scotland!’ is kind of survival guide mixed with a comprehensive history and takes us through the the myriad zines that brought news of punk, new wave, indie and beyond to the bright-eyed and bushy tailed north of the border. It kicks off with Brian Hogg’s seminal Bam Balam, which first appeared in 1975 and was the inspiration for Mark Perry’s Sniffin’ Glue, there’s Ripped & Torn from the late 70s that counted one Edwyn Collins among their contributors and there’s the story about Sex Pistols’ designer Jamie Reid selling off his Suburban Press magazine in 1975 and moving to the island of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, writing a music column for left-wing Skye-based newspaper The West Highland Free Press before his old pal Malcolm McLaren invited him to work on a new project he had going on.
All this and we’re barely 20 pages into this fascinating title. There’s chapters on the crucial role of women in the development of Scottish independent music, the ripples caused by NME’s legendary ‘C86’ compilation, the rise of cassette labels and the enduring appeal and continued rise today of all things DIY. The book features an absolute raft of new interviews with a who’s who of Scottish indie acts (The Rezillos, The Pastels, Shop Assistants, The Bluebells, BMX Bandits, Soup Dragons, The Vaselines plus more) as well as with many of the names behind the labels and the zines that got behind the whole thing.
I love that Alastair considered NME, Melody Maker and Sounds too mainstream when he decided in the early 90s that he should probably be a music journalist. “I’d never paid much attention to the bozos who hacking it out for NME, Sounds or Melody Maker,” he writes. “The music journalists of the inkies always seemed like old bores who couldn’t just enjoy music without applying a bit of Bartes or Gramsci to give the impression of their intrinsic and great intellectualism”. He clearly never read Melody Maker during my days there. Anyway, he set up his own zine, Hype, to cover the growing Highland club scene, complete with free cassette.
The previously mentioned Appendix is worth its weight in gold acting as an index of zines, complete with illustrations, as well as a decent bibliography that includes academic papers, blogs and podcasts he has drawn from. This is a book that couldn’t be more Moonbuilding if it tried. If you like what we do here, you’re going to love this. Talk among yourselves, I’m going to be pouring over this for some time to come.
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