Tony Fletcher reunites with musician/composer Jim ‘JG’ Thirlwell, DJ Wendy May, and Dimple Records boss Brian O’Neill, all of whom he first met in the late 1970s when they bought copies of Jamming! off him while they were working behind the counter at the Virgin shops in Oxford Walk, Notting Hill Gate, and Marble Arch respectively. During that thriving post-punk period the entire Virgin chain served as a needed middle ground between the pioneering independents like Rough Trade, Probe and...

Chris Heath is a writer for The Atlantic, GQ and Vanity Fair, and author of several books. Russell Young is a visual artist with a background in music photography, sleeve design and video directing. Both got their professional start with Jamming! in the early 1980s. Thirty-five years after its demise, Russell and Chris joined Jamming!’s former publisher/editor Tony Fletcher in New York City, where all three have lived at one time or another, for a long-overdue reunion. The trio sat down with...

This episode is a co-production with the Fifty Years of Fun podcast. In Jamming! 13, published in the spring of 1982, a 17-yr old Tony Fletcher wrote an editorial called ‘A Statement.’ Among those to read it was Alan McGee, new to London from Glasgow at the time, who was inspired to start a fanzine and a club night and a label all of his own. That label was Creation Records, home to The Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, Primal Scream and Oasis, to name but four. Along the way Alan...

Tony Fletcher hosts a conversation with three fellow former fanzine editors and Jamming! contributors, Tim Kelly (Revolutionary Suicide/Fanzine of Noise), Janine Booth (Blaze) and Richard Edwards (Cool Notes). Janine and Richard were also active in the 'Ranting Poetry' scene of the 1980s, while Tim toured with D.I.R.T., and played in Flux of Pink Indians and was part of the One Little Indian label that emerged from that band. Their discussion about 1980s alternative culture, conducted across...

Between 1976-82, Joly MacFie printed some 40,000,000 badges (pins, in the USA) related to music culture. Along the way his company Better Badges grew from one-man garage operation to a sizeable small business that also printed and distributed dozens of fanzines. That connection started in spring of 1979 when Tony Fletcher stopped hoping for an ad for the 7th issue of Jamming. Joly, having just acquired a brand new table-top litho machine, offered to print Jamming at cost as 'guinea pig'....

For this episode, we spin back to 1979, for a lively and laughter-filled conversation with two famous bass players and a drummer: Mark ‘Bedders’ Bedford of Madness, Guy Pratt (then of Speedball) and Brett ‘Buddy’ Ascott (then of The Chords). Together they discuss: the fashion forces that inspired that year’s mod and skinhead revivals;why the former musical movement fizzled out but the latter one gave us the lasting music of 2-Tone Recordsthe influence of punk and the freedom it inspiredwhy...

For the first Episode of the Jamming! Fanzine podcast, Tony Fletcher connects with three old friends who all played an important part in the Jamming! school days, and each of whom wrote an introductory piece for The Best of Jamming! book. They are Richard Heard, Jeni de Haart and John Matthews, and over the course of a lively group call, they discuss the onset of punk,the birth of Jamming and why John Matthews declined a rolefirst gigs at The Marquee on Wardour Streeta shared love of The...

Welcome to the Jamming! Fanzine podcast, with yours truly, Tony Fletcher. In late 1977, as a schoolkid in South London inspired by the DIY culture of punk, I started a music ‘zine. I had no long-term plan, and certainly no idea that over the next decade, Jamming! would grow to become a national, even international, monthly magazine. And I certainly couldn’t have imagined that in 2021, there would be a full colour book collecting together what we have called ‘The Best of Jamming!: Selections...