FULL COLOUR EDITION – SOFTBACK – FRONT COVER
FULL COLOUR EDITION – SOFTBACK – REAR COVER
FULL COLOUR HARDBACK EDITION – OLD SANDY COLOURED FRONT COVER
FULL COLOUR HARDBACK EDITION – NEW GREY COLOURED FRONT COVER
A page photograph for illustration only
The quality of the images are better in the book than my photograph
It has now been ten years since this book was published. This book in its original 2014 black and white edition sold over eight hundred copies. Greg and myself would both like to thank all the buyers of those books. No money has ever been made by either of us during the publishing life of that 2014 book. We were not interested in any payments; we were interested in publishing an excellent book at a cheap price; and we still are!
This revised tenth year anniversary edition of the book has an extra forty two pages of posters, flyers and text to look at and read.
Also within those extra pages are two great new chapters written by Tim Voss and Mick ‘Skinner’ Baker about their respective teenage punk bands, Necro and Virus V1.
Greg and myself hope that you enjoy this revised edition of this book.
Greg and myself would also like to dedicate this anthology of recollections and memories to the heroes of the anarcho-punk movement: the pamphleteers, the flyer and poster artists, the squatters, the young punks who put gigs on in the local village hall, and also the young punks who formed bands that no one ever heard of outside their local scenes. You were all a small part of the movement that inspired so many.
Thank you to all those persons unknown.
A series of recollections, memories, imagined dreams perhaps from the collective memories of those who lived through the punk and anarcho-punk years. Tales recalled of times past and a glorious tribute to the bands and the crowds who made the eighties so special for so many of us.
A page photograph for illustration only
The quality of the images are better in the book than my photograph
“Definitely the best book I’ve seen on the anarcho-punk scene. It was so good to read all those personal memories of gigs, fanzines and friendships forged in an era when we were all so desperate for change. This beautiful book tells part of that story.”
Colin ‘Colsk’ Latter – Flux of Pink Indians
“In the eighties the world was seen in black and white, but this book’s tenth year anniversary edition is presented in full colour and opens a world of possibilities. It brings back all sorts of memories of gigs I was at, but also tinged with sadness for the gigs that I missed!”
Sean Forbes – (ex) All The Madmen Records / Rough Trade shop W11
“I know the book is called “Not Just Bits Of Paper” but there’s a whole lot of bits of paper in here that I had a hand in creating, and I’m extremely glad that Mickey ‘Penguin’ and Greg have gone to so much trouble to hunt the bits of paper down and look after it all. This stuff changed my life and continues to do so. Thanks so much for helping keep it all together”.
Mark Wilson – The Mob
“We have our own words, scrawled on bits of paper smudged with some grimy hope. Angry chords waver out from the broken cassette-players – and every now and again a curious prisoner comes out for a look and never returns.”
Tony Drayton – Ripped & Torn / Kill Your Pet Puppy fanzines
A page photograph for illustration only
The quality of the images are better in the book than my photograph
CONTRIBUTORS
Gregory Bull – Ted Curtis – Alastair ‘Gords’ Gordon – Graham Burnett – Chris Print – Rich Cross – Mathew Worley – Louise Knight – Peck – Paul Platypus – Bob Short – Tony D – Nick Hydra – Chris Butler – Mark Davess – Mickey ‘Penguin’ – Aaron Paul – Sean Smith – Chris Low – Triston ‘Stringy’ Carter – Trevor Speed – Tim Voss – Mick ‘Skinner’ Baker
A page photograph for illustration only
The quality of the images are better in the book than my photograph
A REVIEW: Alan Rider’s Outside Left Culture blog – Thank you Alan
Back in the early to mid-eighties, Britain was a musical melting pot, with independent acts and musical cults of all shades existing not-particularly-peacefully side by side. The charts were a melange of dreadful disco, former punk acts turned pop stars, the latest music press fads, and dinosaur pre-punk acts that refused to die (Queen etc).
Outside of all of that, though, there was a genuine DIY underground, far from the commercial considerations of the music ‘biz’. That split into the electronic and experimental industrial underground headed up by Throbbing Gristle/PTV, and the Anarchist punk underground spearheaded by Crass and Crass Records. There was some overlap at the edges, but these two scenes existed largely discrete from each other, and a million miles from the regular pop and rock worlds, even down to the choice of venues.
The chosen medium was cassette and short run singles and albums with DIY sleeves, promoted by word of mouth and via the myriad of self-produced fanzines and flyers and distributed through a network of small record shops, anarchist and left-wing bookshops, and DIY mail order outlets run by dedicated individuals across the country and internationally. It was the true realisation of the original promise of punk that had been let go of by the record contract chasing first wave of punk, but picked up and embraced by passionately committed and principled individuals operating on shoestring budgets out of squats and back rooms.
There was a thriving alternative gig circuit too. No commercial promoter would touch the likes of Crass, Blood and Roses, The Mob, or Flux of Pink Indians as their scrappily recorded and unconventional noises were not money spinners and both records and gigs often sported ‘pay no more than..’ tags to keep prices low and affordable to the (usually broke) core audience. Venues were sympathetic Student Unions, schools and halls in out of the way places, along with squats and anarchist centres, especially London’s Centro Iberico on the Harrow Road, which served as the de facto epicentre for the movement, along with Crass’s Dial House HQ in Epping.
It is this scene that forms the focus for ‘Bits of Paper’, with those reproduced bits being the plethora of gig posters, flyers and printed statements that gave the scene its distinctive identity.
Although the Anarcho-Punk visual style is often seen as the stencilled lettering beloved of Crass, or the scratchy, apocalyptic, biro drawings that adorned many sleeves and posters, there is a far greater artistic variety on show here. Some posters are reminiscent of the swirly, hippy doodlings of Oz magazine or Hawkwind. Others are skilful collages and line drawings. Yet others are clumsily naïve posters produced by schoolkid punks. The range of bands featured on the posters illustrates a surprising variety of musical styles, from the Goth sounds of the Sex Gang Children and Southern Death Cult, through Blood and Roses, The Apostles, The Mob, Blyth Power and, of course, scene leaders Crass, Poison Girls, and Flux of Pink Indians.
Artwork is frequently adorned with statements; “Ain’t No Freedom In America”, “Smash The System Now – Please” (very polite, that!), “Our Minds Are Strong”. Centro Iberico is also omnipresent as the venue of choice for many. The scene wasn’t solely London based. Bristol, Nottingham, Ipswich, Oldham, and Coventry, all feature. The Mob and Blood and Roses seemed to play absolutely everywhere though.
This tenth anniversary edition is produced in large format full colour and at over 270 pages long, both is fantastic value for money and allows you to appreciate the detail that a smaller monochrome format would lose. Aside from the reproduced artworks, much of which would be lost forever without books like this to capture them, the real gems here are the eyewitness testimony and stories from those involved, telling of gruelling long-distance trips on coaches and trains, bunking the tube and hitching rides where they could in order to get to gigs held in obscure venues.
Those experiences often recalled mindless violence from marauding skinheads, tales of kindness and insanity in equal measure, police harassment, and the lives of schoolboy anarchist punks from across the country. In a pre-internet age, networks were postal, fuelled by rubbing soap bars on postage stamps so that the franking mark could be cleaned off and the stamp re-used over and over (no QR codes then!), and meeting up with like-minded individuals at gigs and squats.
These formative experiences had a far greater impact than the music. As Penny Rimbaud, founder of Crass would later admit, the experience of being a member of Crass was awful, with violence directed at them by local skinheads at gigs, police hostility, constant lack of money, and long trips in rickety vans to the back of beyond to play for kids who would otherwise never be able to see them play live. I myself saw them a few times at Birmingham’s Digbeth Civic Hall and can honestly say that it was one of the most influential events of my life, not because of the music (of which I have the dimmest of recollections), but because it showed me that anyone could do something for themselves
Although self-produced, and very affordable (just £18) in keeping with the DIY ethos, the ultimate irony is that this comes as print-on-demand from corporate giants Amazon. The fact that people can get it is the important thing. In fact, it could be argued that it is subverting the corporate machine using their own channels. Be that as it may, this is an excellent and very readable record of those times that avoids mythologising and presents the grubby and unvarnished reality rather than dons the rose tinted spectacles, as is all too common with such publications.
Essential Information: ‘Not Just Bits Of Paper’ Tenth Anniversary Edition is available from Amazon HERE.
A page photograph for illustration only
The quality of the images are better in the book than my photograph
A REVIEW: John Serpico’s The Art Of Exmouth blog – Thank you John
Some might find it hard to believe and others impossible to comprehend but there was a time when the Internet didn’t exist. A time when there was no Facebook, no X, Instagram or even MySpace. ‘But how did you message anyone?’ all the children ask in wide-eyed wonderment ‘Or did you not message anyone ever and just sit instead around the piano of an evening singing songs?’
‘Well, we had landline telephones and there were these things called ‘pens’ that you could write a letter with and send to people by something called ‘post’.
‘Have you heard of it?’
But by this time the attention of all the children has wandered so you instead open up your copy of Not Just Bits Of Paper and cast your mind back to slightly more interesting times when communication required effort and was a means to an end rather than an end in itself
Not Just Bits Of Paper is a portal into a world now diminished, a world where the importance of specific bits of paper cannot be overstated. Not that these bits of paper had any intrinsic purpose beyond the sole reason they were produced for – that being to advertise and publicise events – though paradoxically, without it ever being stated or even considered they also represented nothing less than a vision.
The bits of paper we’re talking about here are the flyers and posters created to announce upcoming concerts of the more ‘earthy’ punk rock type prevalent throughout much of the 1980s. Black-and-white, made with scissors, glue, pens, Letraset and found images. Utilising the ‘cut’n’paste’ method rather than desk-top publishing, then photocopied, fly-posted, stuck up in record shops, given out by hand and sent out by post enclosed with fanzines and cassette tapes purchased from various mail-order lists.
This was the way we communicated before the advent of the Internet and social media. Slow, time-consuming, sometimes wearisome but effective.
Many of these flyers and posters could be really basic in design and layout whilst others could be veritable mini works of art. All, however, whatever the quality of them were meant to be throwaway. Ephemeral. To serve their one purpose then binned, which is what most people tended to do with them once the publicised event had passed. Very few people thought of saving them and those who did so, saved them essentially for the sake of it. Not for having an eye on one day them being collectible or of any possible future monetary value to anyone. They saved them without thinking and for no reason but saved them – thankfully – they did.
Unlike nowadays, back then hardly anyone took photographs at concerts, so the flyers and posters advertising these events are the only physical evidence of a lot of them ever happening. For sure, they’re held in memories, but memories tend to fade so the flyers and posters compensate, prod and serve to remind. Just as importantly if not more so, however, these flyers and posters – these bits of paper – acted at the time as seeds blown on the wind, as conduits for messages. Weaving gossamer-thin threads between not only friends and neighbours living in the same city, town or even village but between strangers and people of like-mind living in cities throughout the whole country.
It was subliminal. Unspoken. Like tiny beacons being lit on top of hills or flares being shot up into the night sky. These bits of paper acted as signals announcing an alternative to mainstream entertainment, mainstream news and even mainstream values. Announcing a vision. They were the corpuscles in the bloodstream of an underground punk culture that sought legitimacy not through commercial success but through the instigation of consciousness raising, further creativity and political action. Just as fanzines and concerts themselves were deemed to be, these bits of paper were the very lifeblood of that punk culture.
Co-edited by Greg Bull and Mickey ‘Penguin’, Not Just Bits Of Paper collates a wide selection of flyers, posters and handouts from the anarcho punk era of the 1980s and for posterity lays them out and presents them in all their ragged, torn and tattered glory. As to be expected, Crass are heavily represented alongside The Mob, Flux Of Pink Indians, Antisect, Conflict, Poison Girls, Chumbawamba plus many more others.
Thoughts are collected also in essays of various length and size written by some of those who were there at the time. Noticeably and interestingly they’re all written from the audience point of view rather than from any band members and in doing so adds a whole other dimension to the book. Quality-wise these essays differ and again that’s only to be expected but in among them are some very well-written pieces indeed, most noticeably from Ted Curtis, Rich Cross, Tristan ‘Stringy’ Carter and in particular one by Tim Voss.
Not Just Bits Of Paper documents a period in time that is unlikely to be ever repeated again. A period in time that impacted mightily upon a significant number of people to such an extent that their lives were inexorably altered – some say ‘ruined’ – for the better. A period in time that though now long gone still resonates, and that under the noise and technology-driven haste of modern day living still echoes.
A page photograph for illustration only
The quality of the images are better in the book than my photograph
A REVIEW: The Art Of The State blog – Thank you AOTS
I used to have a great big box of paper, full of music magazine cuttings, letter exchanges with bands, fanzines, flyers, it was all in there. But then one day during a house move it made its way to the tip. I miss it all to this day.
Some others were not so careless as me. They kept all these bits of paper, knowing that they are things that unlock memories, that they changed minds that are still changed from the mainstream view even today.
They provide the backbone of this new book in which Greg Bull and Mickey ‘Penguin’ collate these fragments and coupled with testimonies from the time create a view into the personal stories behind punk.
What I love about punk is the way that you can be part of it all and this book perfectly demonstrates this.
Put together by those who had this connection. There are stories, pictures and thoughts that to others could seem trivial, but to those involved were often life changing.
The stories in here explain why.
Pilgrimages to record labels such as All The Madmen, seeing a band like Antisect as your first gig, hand crafted flyers, this book is full of fascinating personal insights that have previously gone unreported and were in danger of being lost.
They provide little triggers in the mind about your own experiences. I even found an advert for a gig for my old band that I’d never seen before. Eighties anarcho-punk was always about much more than the bands themselves.
A page photograph for illustration only
The quality of the images are better in the book than my photograph
Colin Latter ex vocalist of Flux of Pink Indians, a band heavily featured in this book, kindly donated this artwork for us, of which we are very grateful to him for.
Thank you Colin. Flux of Pink Indians will always remain a huge inspiration, going back so many decades to the early eighties.
Colin is now an established and respected artist, with some wonderful original artworks on show on his personal Facebook page (search for Colsk Latter) and also on his Instagram page (search for studio_latter).
Please go and visit both of those pages that Colin moderates. There is some truly remarkable art on show.
A page photograph for illustration only
The quality of the images are better in the book than my photograph
NOT JUST BITS OF PAPER FULL COLOUR SOFTCOVER MAY BE PURCHASED HERE
NOT JUST BITS OF PAPER FULL COLOUR HARDCOVER MAY BE PURCHASED HERE
