As mentioned in a previous post, my friend Daniel and I have recently been reflecting on the Fire Raisers magazine that we were involved in creating some two decades ago. The first part of our four part recollections and analysis is on Dan’s ‘A Jumped Up Pantry Boy’ blog, whilst the second follows here. If you are interested in actually seeing what we are wittering on about, we’ve unearthed a few copies that you can buy here. Or alternatively, you can download the lovingly scanned issues as PDF’s here:
Daniel: We had a tag line or slogan: 'Take a risk'. Do you think the content we published lived up to that incitement? Did we take enough risks ourselves, or was this just a canny but slightly vacuous piece of marketing on our parts?
Alistair: In hindsight I almost wish we’d used a different tag line. Something like ‘be bloody awkward’ would have been more apposite I think. Was the content risky? Perhaps not in the avant-garde ‘different for different’s sake’ sense, or confrontationally risqué (although perhaps some of Chris Jones’ could be seen as such), but I think in the sense of it being outside of the typical box of fanzine writing we had been involved in producing up to then, well, I think it probably was.
Again though, I think it would have been much more of a risk if we had made an attempt to play the mainstream game and work with our own tastes and interests within that context. In the context of the ‘underground’ press I’m not sure we were really taking much of a risk at all.
D: Bit of a leading question, that one! I agree with what you say, particularly about the underground press at the time. We weren’t exactly Vague, or Stewart Home, whose writing from the same time was probably the most extreme I’ve ever read.
‘Take a peek’ might have worked better. Pleading rather than goading.
D: We would probably be most critical of our own contributions, given our natural inclinations and how our writing styles have developed since, but how do you think the content stands up now? Which of the pieces we published is your favourite and why?
A: I flicked back through the issues recently, and read quite a bit of the content. From a personal point of view I’m actually quite happy with what is in there. For the most part the ‘Big Flame’ extracts hold up, I think. Certainly I feel there are flecks of interest in them, though others may have a different view of course. My New Orleans piece remains of interest too, and though it now feels slightly naïve and overly knowing, I do still like it. I remember getting a note from Richey Edwards about that – he really loved that piece and had sent a copy to Nicky Wire’s brother who was at that time, I think, in Chicago or somewhere similar. In the same letter Richey also said how much he hated ‘Snowboots’ (sorry Carrie!)… Of the other writing, well, as I say, some of it still retains an interest. Some feels very much of its age (and of the age of the writers) and I admit that I struggle with Fiona’s feminist diatribe for example. I also couldn’t read the Christine’s Baby story. Kevin’s pieces are marvelously engaging still, and reading the Shena Mackay piece in FR 1 has made me want to dig out all those old novels and short stories. Similarly, your piece on Mark Eitzel / American Music Club from FR 3 has me scurrying back to listen again, though it does also remind me of how terribly earnest we could be when writing about music in those days! But then, what was I saying about the age of the writers? In hindsight it should not really have been any different.
For me, Fiona’s rant tapped into the inescapable anger of the age we were just as much as mine fell prey to solemnity. Neither the rage nor earnestness does our respective cause or subjects any great favours, but they are understandable, and as you say, it’s better to have captured that in the fashion we did than for it to have vanished forever into the ether.
I liked Marie Inkpen’s ‘Christine’s baby’ story on re-reading it – she certainly took some imaginative risks, writing from the perspective of a mother whose baby is born without fingers. Subtly illustrated by us with a photograph of ballet dancers with up- and outstretched hands! I also like Helen Kelly’s pieces, particularly the looping, repetitive and comic ‘The Helsinki’, which manages (a) to reference Orange Juice, and (b) anticipate Geoff Dyer. I’m quite pleased to be reminded that it wasn’t a boys’ own annual – the male-female split in terms of contributors is almost exactly 50-50. Indeed – if you’ll forgive the generalisation – because the female contributions tended to be quieter, less showy, much of it reads the better for that now.
D: What I liked about the design was that it didn't really look like anything else at the time - nor did it quite look like something you would have done on your own. How do you see the artwork now, and do you look back on the graft of cut and paste with affection or horror?
A: I was aware at the time of actually being able to put into practice an aesthetic that I felt quite close to and comfortable with. I think the shelved Imaginaction fanzine hinted at the design of Fire Raisers actually, with more considered use of white space and a sharper edge etc. The column layout in Fire Raisers was a conscious effort to move away from the traditional ‘zine layout, and was an attempt to align Fire Raisers more in the magazine sector. Of course a column/grid layout also works better in an A4 format… Was the A5 flap on the first and last page your idea Dan? I seem to think it was, and I still like that a lot. Particularly the ‘London has a future’ image in issue 3. Where did that come from? I also really liked the two Tintin images on the flaps of issue 1. I remember tracing the Hergé image in black ink so it would look good once it was printed.
As for the cut and paste, well, it is easy to get nostalgic and dewy eyed about it, but the truth is that it was a pain in the ass! I suppose it did make for good application of functional skills math, working out the space available for a picture and then calculating the percentage of reduction / enlargement needed on the photocopier. I remember trips to the library photocopier with post-it notes attached to the original images with all the different percentage numbers scribbled on. Making changes to text was a nightmare as well – manually retyping sentences or paragraphs, then going to the library to reduce the size on the copier before gluing the new text over the old… Gah! At least I got very handy with scalpel skills.
I’m also aware that I run the risk of sounding like some old fart now (even more so that normal, I mean), but I do think that doing physical page layouts is good practice. I don’t think it’s as easy to understand the physical form of the page if it is always just on screen. But maybe that’s because I was self taught and was going more on gut instinct than anything else!
I don’t recall where ‘London has a future’ came from – since neither of us can remember, it must have been at the suggestion of one of the contributors. I still like the ‘Romantic hero (obsolete)’ and Political heroes (Rightist on the left, Leftist on the right’ images, which you sourced – were they from Donald Barthelme’s books?
I do recall that the lettering which formed the cover of issue one was intended to be a nod to the Peter Savile / Factory aesthetic. I think we were hoping that if someone recognised that while browsing in a shop, they would instantly feel compelled to buy it! Didn’t work on that guy in Compendium though.
A: Yes, I do recall being very influenced by notions of anonymity as an aesthetic direction. That would partly be informed by the Factory look of course, but also by that whole idea of keeping the mystery caged. It’s certainly a design approach that has stayed with me. ‘Less is more’; although that’s become a phrase so overused as to become almost asinine, perhaps.
And the Romantic and Political heroes images were terrific, weren’t they? They were by Norman Rubington from his The Hero Maker book that was published alongside his classic Fuzz Against Junk by Olympia Press. My friend found a copy in a charity shop in Oban, of all places, and very kindly passed it on to me. It’s been one of my most treasured possessions ever since, and I wrote about it for Plan B when I was editing the comics section several years ago.
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