Kvatch

I started my fanzine, Kvatch, in the summer of 1984 just after my ‘O’ Levels. I’d never heard of fanzines until Kid Jensen did an extended piece on them on Radio 1 one evening early that summer, but I loved writing and I loved music so I decided to write one. It never occurred to me that being sixteen, living in Harrogate, and never having seen a fanzine would be any sort of barrier.

I wrote off for some fanzines, mostly other Yorkshire ones, studied what they did and tried to copy it. James Brown from Attack On Bzag (later Loaded) met me in Leeds and spent an afternoon showing me how to make paste-ups and, with my mum’s typewriter, I was good to go. Both John Peel and Kid Jensen plugged Kvatch 1 so the orders started to arrive. Starting 6th Form meant friends with driving licences, and the chance to sell fanzines at gigs, and I discovered independent record shops like Jumbo in Leeds would stock them too. Over the next two years I produced a fanzine around every six months, and my Saturday job in the library meant I grew the circulation to about 1,500.

Looking back they’re both horribly embarrassing – I was just a kid – and a really eclectic mix. I didn’t really know what I liked; I was exploring music and the world, and becoming politically aware, through writing. Kvatch doesn’t do anything inventive or new, and other people were certainly producing better fanzines at the time, but it does (accidentally) capture being a teenager quite well.

Clare