Peace Or Annihilation

Fanzines—more than anything else I learned at the academy—were my school of learning. In the early 1980s, we were inundated with piles of stenciled or photocopied printed matter on all sorts of subjects: music, politics, and who-knows-what, everywhere. Fanzines were the personification of the so-called DIY approach: literally, anything you could do yourself. You wrote them on an old typewriter, cut and pasted them with Pritt glue, had them printed, and distributed them yourself. Fanzines were easy and cheap to duplicate. The print runs were small, and the threshold was low, so mistakes didn't matter too much. Cut and paste. Try. And try again. As a bonus, I was regularly sent the coolest new records for free for the review section.

'Peace Or Annihilation' fanzine ran between 1984 and 1998. From my bedroom, 11 editions appeared. 50 copies of the first were made. When I accidentally swapped the cover and back cover for issue 11, I decided to quit. This final issue had been printed in 1,500 copies... Fanzines were fun though. I would make another one in a minute. Onno.