Punk, Politics and British (Fan)Zines (1976–1984)

Abstract

Based on an article previously published in History Workshop, this chapter recovers and contextualizes the politics of British punk fanzines produced in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It argues that fanzines—and youth cultures more generally—serve to provide a contested cultural space in which young people can express their ideas, opinions and anxieties. Simultaneously, it maintains that punk fanzines offer the historian a portal into a period of significant socio-economic, political and cultural change. As well as presenting alternative cultural narratives to the formulaic accounts of punk and popular music now common in the mainstream media, fanzines allow us a glimpse of the often radical ideas held by a youthful milieu rarely given expression in the political arena.