About K.Y.P.P.
Kill Your Pet Puppy was started by Tony D, founder of iconic punk fanzine Ripped And Torn (1976-1979).
Shortly after Thatcher was elected as prime minister in May 1979, Tony moved to Europe and lived a bohemian lifestyle. Upon his return Tony started work on a more extreme and uncompromising fanzine, initially as a reaction to the way the original punk movement had been sucked into the hated Record Industry establishment: something Tony had seen and experienced first hand.
Kill Your Pet Puppy also reflected punk life as it was under the newly-elected Thatcher cosh: squatting, skinhead N.F and British Movement attacks, drugs like speed being replaced by Tunial and scraping a rainbow life from the hell of reality.
Kill Your Pet Puppy was at the forefront of a cultural landscape and an alternative world of squats, squatted venues and self-sufficiency that became known later as ‘anarcho-punk’.
These were liberating times.
Getting the new fanzine out onto the streets proved a problem until Joly of Better Badges agreed to print the new publication (then title unknown) in as many crazy colours as Tony wanted. Both wanted to experiment.
A name was born in the collective hell of one room squatted by eight people with no bathroom or running water.
Kill Your Pet Puppy was the chosen moniker.
The first issue was finished in time for the Adam And The Ants new years eve concert at the Electric Ballroom Dec 1979 – Jan 1980.
Five hundred copies were finished and taken to the event.
Five hundred copies were sold that night.
Nothing was to be the same again.
Kill Your Pet Puppy was alive…
Read further details of the creation of the first issue of the fanzine, along with an audio download link of the Adam And The Ants Electric Ballroom performance that night on this Kill Your Pet Puppy post HERE
Kill Your Pet Puppy – the website – was started in October 2007 as a way to document the fanzine and also the culture of the time.
This was because we could hear cultural archaeologists beginning to restrict this history to a mere musical framework.
This website has developed through many people’s photos, scans of printed material, downloadable music and written contributions into a communication point for those who were there, those who wish to know more about the time and as something that is as culturally significant today as it was then.
Use the menus above that head up this post to delve deeper into the Kill Your Puppy Archives.
We hope that you, the browsers, find the Kill Your Pet Puppy posts interesting, and if any of the posts do interest you then please feel free to leave comments on any of those posts.
LET ONE THING BE CLARIFIED…
The words ‘Kill Your Pet Puppy’ are not about harming animals, they are about stripping away false and externally imposed responsibilities in order to see through the illusion of society’s conformist ‘real life’ that pins down, stifles and suffocates us.
The ‘Puppy’ is symbolic of implements of the state forced upon young children, the puppy being often the first in a long line of instruments designed to teach dependence on worthless objects, enslaving the kid into a lifetime of obedience to an outside agent that demands sacrifice of independence to serve. The puppy’s cute helplessness forces an emotional responsibility that subverts our natural nurturing instincts as the kid’s parents use the puppy to force the kid’s experiences of the world into a state-prescribed conformist view of the ‘family’.
‘Kill’ means moving beyond enslavement and experiencing life at first hand; experiencing the explosive euphoria, which follows.
Kill Your Pet Puppy is the name of a fanzine that run for six issues from 1979 to 1983.
