With over 200 pages and featuring a wealth of interviews and dozens of beautifully reproduced full-page covers and original artwork, this book by Graham Burnett is both a history and a celebration of Southend’s often forgotten ‘alternative’ and DIY culture, as told through the pages of the fanzines, people’s papers and community magazines made in the town between 1971 and 2021.
Mention Southend on Sea in casual conversation to anybody that doesn’t live here and it’s not unlikely that the response will be a condescending snigger about Kiss-Me-Quick hats or else some quip about Essex Girls, White Van Man or reality TV show The Only Way Is Essex. But there’s always been more to Southend than the often grotesque caricatures of diamond geezers, wannabe gangsters, fake tans, white stilettos and tacky seafront nightclubs and boozers.
With interviews and oral histories covering seminal titles from the last 50 years such as Alive and Kicking, Alternative Estuary, Amon*Spek, Arse Oats, Avant, Bang, Cheesy, Flowers and Beads, Grrrl in Print, Hard As Nails, The Heckler, Iliad, Level 4, Managed Retreat, Mushroom, Naked Tongue, Necrology, New Clear Product, New Crimes, Noisy!, Precinct Press, The Scene, The SLAB, Strangehaven and Trawler, to name but a few, and reproducing a wealth of covers, artwork and photographs throughout, Southend on Zine is both a history and a celebration of ‘alternative’ Southend, as told in their own words by those who were (and in many cases still are!) there; the self-publishers, counterculturalists, community organisers, activists, agitators, punks, sussed skins, young folk rebels, independent promoters, street artists, jester minstrels, anarchists, feminists, avant garde festival organisers, graphic novelists, indie entrepreneurs, poets, film makers, mental health activists, MCs, free-jazzers, allotmenteers, Essex Girl Liberationists, bioregional explorers, riot grrrls, psychedelic dream makers and all the other change agents who have in one way or another been involved with Southend’s ‘peoples press’, and have contributed to the story that makes this town buzzing, diverse, innovative, radical and amazing…