Defiant Pose fanzine

I love a nice surprise and today I get home to find Defiant Pose fanzine volume 8 on my doorstep out of the blue. Included within the package a beautiful 7″ record by Rema Rema. A 7″ record on the heaviest vinyl I have had the pleasure of holding! Been on the record player over and over since the opening. There are ten pages on Rema Rema alone inside the fanzine, three pages on The Stench (from 1976), eight pages on The Heretics and three pages on Blood And Roses. That’s my reading material sorted out for the next couple of days! Thanks to Mike Clarke (Defiant Pose head honcho and also the guitarist from Decadent Few) for sending me this wonderful fanzine and record… Every like minded soul should get a copy of this package. Please browse and order this or other volumes of Defiant Pose from Mike Clarkes website HERE.

Limited edition sleeve artwork (thirty copies world wide)

Normal sleeve artwork

I started a fanzine in 1978 called Love And Romance, we planned to interview the Slits, Subway Sect and Siouxsie, but it fell apart in the planning stage. The singer of They Must Be Russians found out Siouxsie’s real surname and rang her mum’s phone number in Chislehurst, Kent and kept ringing it. I think Siouxsie herself was having her Sunday dinner there one day and gave him a mouthful when he called for the umpteenth time. I managed to almost interview Tessa from the Slits down the Portobello Road but we drank too much and smoked too many of the joints piled inside her handbag and both gradually lost the ability to form sentences. The other guy helping me met the Subway Sect at their rehearsal place, but they just stared at him catatonically whilst picking at their Oxfam jumpers and he forgot to turn the cassette recorder on, so that was that.

I got Defiant Pose going in 1980, did 3 scrappy issues by 1981, nothing important; a mate used to print them at his work after everyone went home. We would sell them to people in the street, deliberately not always to punks. The only positive thing was I moaned how nothing was happening locally and a month later two new fanzines started in Slough and sent me copies so it does work sometimes!

The fanzine came back in 2001 because I’d written a lot of stuff in the intervening years so had some friends, and suddenly we had the time to do it again. We thought most fanzines were stuck in the same dull blueprint they’d followed since the mid-80’s and lost that attitude. It’s also a conscious alternative to the interminable array of UK `zines that simply follow the US format of columns/reviews. After X amount of years of doing a label we rarely got an order based on a good `zine review, especially compared to the impact of seeing a band live. People have called Defiant Pose nostalgic, but we wrote so much stuff that it’ll take a few issues to get up to date with it all!

Mike Defiant Pose

Defiant Pose fanzine volume 7 – Mike compiled two issues of the same fanzine in two formats A4 (44 pages) and A5 (80 pages) respectively.
Both versions of this volume features UK fanzines 1976-84 from early punk through to Better Badges, post-punk / hardcore. All the fanzines featured and the history of, exhaustively written about by Mike himself, cover London, Manchester, Sheffield, Ireland and Scotland.
Ripped & Torn, Kill Your Pet Puppy, Crass and anarcho punk are featured. Interviews, graphics and some reprints.
Only 100 are available on both print runs I believe. The A4 version has the same text as the A5 version but different layout and graphics.
I been lucky enough to have been sent a copy several weeks ago now and if you enjoy the history of the punk fanzine culture you’ll be glad to own this absorbing artefact.

Defiant Pose – London Gig Flyers 1977 – 1997 – A limited print run of 100 copies for this fanzine that has dozens of quality scans of rare punk flyers from Mikes own collection! Well worth getting if the print run has not already sold out…

1 comment
  1. Chris
    Chris
    April 22, 2014 at 8:34 pm

    Really cannot recommend ALL the issues of Defiant Pose highly enough. Probably Thee most ‘essential’ publications available which documents the punk/fanzine movement, full stop.

    Also so nice to have them in proper, hard-copy ‘zine format too.

    Once again: Essential.

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