On Thursday, when The Haunted had finished, I got offered a copy of Crypt magazine. This has happened a few times before, but normally, I'm in too much of hurry to avoid spending the night in Victoria coach station to consider purchasing one. This time, though, ample minutes permitted.
I wasn't really sure I wanted one. Firstly, it's rock journallism and I get enough of that already. I don't spend a great deal of time reading: I do it on the fifteen-minute bus journey to Canterbury (but not the way back, because my stop's less noticeable), sometimes on trains and occasionally before I go to sleep. I enjoy it, but I enjoy writing and socialising more. I have monthly subscriptions to Metal Hammer and Terrorizer, which I read cover-to-cover, which takes me about ten hours in total.
This is rewarding. Apart from learning about enticing gigs and records, while I'm not interested in all the bands they profile, getting to read about anyone's life, mindset and creative process appeals to me as a writer. But is it as enjoyable and useful as reading books? Probably not. I'll keep my subscriptions, because I don't want to miss anything good (and the free CDs that come with them are usually worth more than the cover price alone), but I resist the temptation to buy other magazines.
Secondly, Crypt magazine is (fittingly) an underground publication. On the one hand, I thoroughly approve of making stuff and unleashing it on the unsuspecting world yourself, without letting big business dictate what you can and can't say or do. I fully intend to do it myself. On the other, what am I to believe about the quality of the first issue of a magazine distributed without any sort of stamp of approval? Do I really want to spend nearly as much on it as I do on Terrorizer, especially when the latter has twice as many pages, a free CD and colour printing?
Of course, if I'd left buying it until the next day, I'd have received this month's Terrorizer and seen a review of Crypt in it. But I thought I'd get it anyway, since I've never bought a zine before, and anyway, colour isn't BLACK METAL!
And good God. I'm so glad I did, because the Terrorizer review really didn't do justice to its sheer brilliance.
Metal Hammer can be endearingly stupid and Terrorizer can be endearing pretentious, but I prefer the down-to-earth middle ground Crypt treads. It's the directions the articles take and the portrayal of their subjects that really make it special though. If there's one thing that annoys me about Metal Hammer and Terrorizer, it's that the articles are so streamlined and cover such predictable ground that I sometimes forget which band I'm reading about. It takes a particularly interesting or erudite character to make an article stick in my mind.
Not so here. Metal Hammer in particular hacks away at controversial issues, whereas in Crypt, the conversations flow naturally into the realms of questions as banal as "Would you shag Pamela Anderson?" But this is exactly what I want to read! MH, Terrorizer and most rock biographies spend a lot of time dwelling on problems with record labels and the like, but it's the personalities behind the music I want to know about. There also seemed to be a lot more information in the Crypt articles, due to them leaving out all the "this band is really special because" hyperbole other publications deem necessary.
Better still, the speech patterns and accents of the interviewees were retained on paper: everyone seemed like a real, distinct person, unlike the identikit mid-Atlantic-twanged half-stoner half-hardcore kids (plus the occasional total misanthropist) other magazines would have you believe the heavy metal universe is populated by.
Crypt also contained an article about The Horse Hospital (where an exhibition of photographs of black metal musicians has been on display), the likes of which you don't see in most rock publications, as well as reviews of other zines which I'd never heard of. A lot of UK bands were interviewed, all of them agreeing that there was no real scene here. I'm glad it's not just me, then. Melbourne decidedly had the beginnings of one, which was nice, because people were still getting to know each other, so I was as welcome as anyone. But the bands would help each other and their fans. Whether the lack of a parallel here is just due to geography - London and its magnetic field is too big and there's not enough interest anywhere else? - I don't know, but gah anyway. Obviously, Canterbury has a solid collection of rock night goers, but bands were a mysterious and separate entity when I was a student here, though it seems to be getting better now us clubbers are increasingly making music ourselves. (I will too, as soon as I get my guitar and synth, which are still at my parents' house.)
Anyway. Hurrah.
