Two hundred copies. One photocopier, used at night, usually without asking. That was a national music press.
Nobody planned it that way. The music press that existed would not touch this stuff, so people who could not write, could not draw and could not afford stamps went ahead and did it anyway, and inside five years they had built the most reliable information network extreme music has ever had. It ran on postal orders. It ran on coins taped to letters. It ran on a bloke's dad's office machine.
What the thing actually was
An A4 sheet, folded, stapled twice down the spine. Typewritten copy, sometimes handwritten, occasionally an actual typeset headline if somebody had access to a machine that could do it. Photographs reproduced badly enough that all four members of a band became one grey shape.
Print runs of one hundred to five hundred. Cover price a pound, or a couple of dollars, or a blank tape, or nothing at all if you wrote a nice enough letter. Contents fixed by convention: interviews conducted by post, demo reviews, a scene report, a label advert traded for free copies, and the addresses page.
The addresses page was the routing table of a continent, and it was typed with two fingers.
The addresses page was the routing table of a continent, and it was typed with two fingers.
Take it out and the whole network collapses. Every other page could be replaced by somebody else's opinion. That page could not be replaced by anything.
The ones that mattered
Three titles carry most of the weight, and none of them started with any money.
Slayer Mag came out of Sarpsborg in Norway from 1985, edited from the first issue to the twentieth by Jon Kristiansen, who signed himself Metalion, and it ran until 2010. Twenty five years of one man, one title. It championed unsigned death metal bands nobody else would print a word about, then found itself sitting inside the Norwegian black metal scene as that turned into an international news story, at which point it was the only publication anybody in it trusted. Bazillion Points eventually put out a 744 page book reproducing over 600 pages of the run, which tells you what the original print quality was worth to collectors.
Kick Ass Monthly came earlier, from New Jersey, founded in 1981 by Bob Muldowney and John Erigo, and it grew out of the photocopier and into something that looked almost professional. Muldowney reviewed records the way a man reviews a used car he has been overcharged for. He died in 2007, and back issues now change hands for more than most of the albums he was writing about.
Metal Forces started in Stevenage in August 1983 under Bernard Doe, ran a standing feature on unsigned bands, and got to most of the important American bands while every one of them was still a bad bet. Seventy two issues, then nothing after February 1993.
Underneath those sat hundreds of titles that printed a hundred copies, managed four issues and folded, and their disappearance is a genuine hole in the record rather than a romantic detail.
Zine, then distro, then label
Here is the part that turns this from nostalgia into economics. The pipeline went zine, then mail order list, then label, and it went that way because each stage was the obvious next use of the same address book.
Matthew Jacobson published a fanzine called Horrendified. He used the contacts from it to start Relapse Records in August 1990, out of his parents' basement in Aurora, Colorado, with two seven inch singles by bands nobody has thought about since. Then he signed Deceased, Suffocation and Incantation, and the label stopped being a hobby in about eighteen months. Bill Yurkiewicz came in with his own roster. They moved to Millersville, Pennsylvania in 1991.
Luck of the Corpse arrived in December 1991 and Onward to Golgotha followed on 5 May 1992, cut at Trax East in South River, New Jersey between September and November 1991 with Steve Evetts engineering, and the executive producer credits on the second one read Matthew Jacobson and Bill Yurkiewicz. Two zine editors, on the back of a record that people still cite as the blueprint for a whole style of death metal.
Then it went professional, and then it died
Terrorizer put out its first issue in October 1993, with Sepultura on the cover, priced at one pound ninety five. Better paper, real distribution, actual pay for contributors. It did the same job the photocopied titles had done, printing demo reviews of bands nobody had heard of, and it kept covering black metal at a point when most of the press had decided the subject was untouchable.
It lasted almost twenty five years. Circulation was a shade over ten thousand in 2012. The final issue was number 287, in June 2018, the publisher was dissolved in January 2019, and subscribers found out the magazine had stopped by noticing that it had stopped arriving, some of them while still being charged for it.
That is the whole arc in one paragraph. A photocopier is unkillable because it costs nothing. A magazine with a circulation of ten thousand and a payroll is extremely killable.
| Title | Who and where | Ran | What it did |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kick Ass Monthly | Bob Muldowney and John Erigo, New Jersey | From 1981 | Made honest reviewing a house style |
| Metal Forces | Bernard Doe, Stevenage | 1983 to 1993, 72 issues | Covered unsigned bands before the labels did |
| Slayer Mag | Jon Kristiansen, Sarpsborg | 1985 to 2010, 20 issues | The record of two scenes, written from inside one of them |
| Terrorizer | Dark Arts, United Kingdom | 1993 to 2018, 287 issues | Took the fanzine method onto newsagents' shelves |
The postal interview, and why half of it was already wrong
Worth explaining, because it is why these magazines read the way they do.
You typed your questions. You posted them, with a stamped envelope inside if you had any manners. Six weeks later something came back written in biro, with three of the answers responding to questions the band had plainly misread and one of them answering a question you had not asked. You typed it up as it stood. By the time the issue was stapled, the drummer had left and the label had gone under.
Everyone knew the information was stale. Nobody minded, because the alternative was no information at all. A Brazilian demo could be reviewed in a British zine four months after the band had already split, and the review still did its job, which was to tell two hundred people that the tape existed and was worth writing off for.
That job never went away, it just moved. Terrorizer went on printing demo reviews on proper paper for a quarter of a century and turned up Behemoth and Amon Amarth in them long before anybody outside the underground had heard either name. Same method, better ink.
What was actually lost
Two things, and only one of them is sentimental.
The sentimental loss is the writing. A demo review in a hundred copy zine was written by somebody with no advertising to protect and no relationship to preserve, and it shows. Those pieces are harder, funnier and more useful than most of what the paid press produced in the same years, and I have never once seen a hedged verdict in one.
The real loss is archival. Whole label rosters, pressing runs and demo discographies from the late nineteen eighties exist now only inside stapled magazines that nobody catalogued, in boxes, in lofts, and every year a few more of them go into a skip. Reconstructing 1988 is closer to archaeology than to journalism, and the reason is that the primary sources were printed on a machine in a solicitor's office at two in the morning and were never meant to survive the month.
What replaced all this is faster, free and searchable, and it is not the same thing, because the thing that made a zine work was that somebody had to physically post it to you. That is also what made the rooms full, which is the next part of the story: the Death Metal Festivals That Shaped the Genre. The wider economy the zines belonged to, tapes and artwork and the rest of it, is laid out in the culture chapter.
