Punk fanzines: from Sniffin' Glue on

Sniffin’ Glue was the punk fanzine that showed anyone with a typewriter that they could join in. Mark Perry, a bank clerk from Deptford in South London, put out the first issue in July 1976 after seeing the Ramones. It was typed, hand-lettered in places, photocopied and stapled. The first run was around 50 copies. Within a year the zine’s circulation is usually given as 15,000, and Perry stopped after twelve issues in 1977 rather than let it turn into a regular magazine. Punk fanzines like this one did not only report on bands. They proved the central idea of the movement, that you did not need permission to make something. This page covers the main titles in Britain, the United States and West Germany. We describe them in our own words and do not reproduce their pages.

Punk: the New York original

Before Sniffin’ Glue there was Punk, launched in New York in January 1976 by cartoonist John Holmstrom, Legs McNeil and Ged Dunn. It looked like a comic book crossed with a school magazine, full of hand-drawn lettering and interviews that were half serious and half joke. The first issue featured Lou Reed and the Ramones. Punk ran into 1979 and helped tie the word punk to the scene in print. It also stands between a fanzine and a magazine, with typeset sections and a cover price, but its spirit was do-it-yourself. Our guide to New York punk explains the scene around it.

How Sniffin’ Glue worked

Perry took the name from a Ramones song and wrote much of the early content himself. Reviews were blunt, spelling was optional and the opinions were strong. The zine covered the bands that played London’s small venues in the second half of 1976, from the Sex Pistols and The Clash to The Damned, and its reporting is part of how we know what happened that year. You can follow the events on our page about London in 1976.

Several things made it influential:

1. Speed. A fanzine could appear within days of a gig, while the weekly papers needed a slot and an editor’s approval.
2. Voice. Perry wrote as a fan talking to other fans. That tone made the established music press look slow and old.
3. Access. Bands spoke to zine writers who were their own age and came from the same clubs.
4. Example. Every reader who held a copy could see how it was made. Dozens of new titles followed within months.

Danny Baker, later a well known broadcaster, was among those who worked on it. Perry founded the band Alternative TV, and the twelfth and final issue came with a flexi disc of its first song. He then stopped publishing because he did not want Sniffin’ Glue to become part of the music business it had been mocking. The sources disagree on whether that last issue appeared in August or September 1977.

The British wave of zines

Sniffin’ Glue had many followers in 1976 and 1977. Some of the best known:

1. Ripped & Torn, started by Tony D in late 1976, which lasted longer than Sniffin’ Glue and covered the second wave of bands.
2. Sideburns, a short-lived zine from early 1977 best remembered for a hand-drawn page showing three guitar chord shapes and telling readers to start a band. That page is quoted constantly as a summary of punk’s message, often wrongly credited to Sniffin’ Glue.
3. Jamming!, started by schoolboy Tony Fletcher in 1977, which grew into a proper magazine in the early eighties.
4. 48 Thrills, London’s Outrage and many single-issue titles that are now known mainly to collectors.

Most of these were produced in runs of a few hundred copies, sold at gigs or by post, and paid for out of pocket.

America after 1977

On the American West Coast the zines became more visual and more political. Search & Destroy, started in San Francisco in 1977 by V. Vale, documented the city’s scene in a large format with strong photography. Slash, launched in Los Angeles the same year, covered bands such as X and the Germs and later became a record label. Flipside, also from Los Angeles, ran for decades. In the early eighties Maximumrocknroll, which grew out of a radio show in the Bay Area, became the most important zine of American hardcore, with long scene reports from all over the world.

Germany: The Ostrich and after

In West Germany the first punk fanzine is generally named as The Ostrich from Düsseldorf. Its first issue appeared in March 1977, edited by Franz Bielmeier, who later played in the band Mittagspause. The first print run was about 50 copies, and later issues reached around 300. It ran until 1979. Other cities followed quickly, and the network of German zines helped bands from Düsseldorf, Hamburg and West Berlin find each other. That network later fed into the Neue Deutsche Welle.

Why fanzines matter to historians and collectors

Fanzines are among the best sources we have for what punk looked like before the press and the record labels took over. They show which bands drew crowds in which venues, what audiences argued about and which slang was in use. Original copies are rare because most were thrown away. Facsimile editions exist for several titles, including Sniffin’ Glue, which collected all twelve issues in a single book. For how the established papers reported on the same events, read our page on the music press of the 1970s.