Here be Tygres – fanzines and my life underground

I’ve been thinking about the impact fanzines have made on my life – and the result is this blog! Enjoy…

For someone who really was a Teenager in Devon (the poem isn’t an exaggeration http://www.rosiegarland.com/news-and-events/item/53-i-want-to-be-a-teenager-in-devon.html ), it’s hard to overstate the impact on a fifteen-year old geek girl of a let-off-the-leash long weekend in London.

Mid 1970s. Mum sets a friend and me up in a vicarage beyond the twilight zone of the North Circular. Every morning we take two long bus journeys into central London. My mate smokes cigarettes and swills cider like any normal teenager. I haunt Dark They Were And Golden Eyed, Atlantis Bookshop and the innumerable second-hand bookshops around Soho. It’s a four-day sojourn in a tatty oasis for the starved mind and spirit. As well as the books and comics I expect, I also discover fanzines.

They flick an entirely different switch in my imagination.
I’ve been making magazines since I was a kid, but now see I’m not the only nerd in the world to spend evenings with glue and a stapler. Even more groundbreaking, the zines cover interests I’ve learnt to conceal in order to limit my bullied isolation: horror movies, vampires, sci-fi, punk, weird illustration, weirder literature. The Gothic, in short. For the first time in my life, I see myself reflected. I encounter an underground community of the imagination. I know I’ll never meet any of these fellow-weirdoes, but I am not alone.

I return to the mix of beauty and soul-death of rural Devon (miles north of the artsy bit around Totnes), grit my teeth, make it to 18 and escape. In my new home, Leeds, one of the first things I do is check out the 2nd-hand / radical bookshops (a tip ‘o the pen to Austicks & The Corner Bookshop). As well as reviews in mainstream music papers such as Sounds, Melody Maker & NME, I now feature in fanzines that interview my band The March Violets (eg Rendezvous, Attack on B-Zag, The Angels are Coming, Whippings & Apologies – best zine name ever IMHO). We even produce our own Violets zine. High production values, or handwritten, it doesn’t matter. It’s all part of the vibrant build-your-own record label / indie scene of the early 80s.

Another hiatus follows when I quit the UK to work in Sudan from 1984-1986. In 1987, semi-fanzine independents Shocking Pink & Spare Rib inspire my move to Manchester where I find a thriving LGBT scene. However, it soon becomes apparent that being a dyke AND a Goth is a step too far. I have no problem making the connections between goth, punk and post-punk, fetish, feminism, queer, vampires and weird literature but I’m damned if I can find a queer pal who’ll go to The Banshee with me. As for my penchant for leather trousers, the less said about that the better. I can come out, but not about everything. However, late 80s feminism is a different blog.

It seems I can still feel isolated in a massive city, and I learn what it’s like to be marginalised within a marginalised community. I need help, and once again find it in the fanzines of the late 80s / early 90s. One particular pleasure is Dominic Regan’s graphic Dom Zombi story in AARGH (Artists Against Rampant Government Homophobia ) which drew everything together so succinctly. Others include: For the Blood is the Life, Bats and Red Velvet, The Velvet Vampyre, Udolpho and early issues of Skin Two (produced on Tim Woodward’s kitchen table). Listings of penpals, society meetups and clubs provide me with a flesh & blood community, not simply one of the imagination. All of it pre-internet, off the map, under the radar. I even meet a bisexual Goth.

Jump cut to the present day.
I’m excited and encouraged by the rebirth / renaissance of Xeroxed, glue-and-collage, passed from hand-to-hand zines. There’s a fresh new family of folk learning the liberating impact of turning off search engines so your keystrokes can’t be tracked in order to tailor more bloody advertising into your feed. To quote Keith Lowell Jensen: “What Orwell failed to predict is that we'd buy the cameras ourselves, and that our biggest fear would be that nobody was watching” https://twitter.com/keithlowell/status/347741181997879297

Only last year I met a woman in Athens, Georgia, who knew my work because she’d come across Pink Bomb, a CD fanzine produced in Manchester by the radiant Ste McCabe . Our words don’t need wifi to span the globe. And if you can’t hold something in your hands, it doesn’t really exist.

Fanzines are still there when the battery runs out on your phone. When some yellow-haired dictator decides you can’t Google ‘that’ article any more. Fanzines can’t be deleted at the swipe of a button. So - Buy that ancient typewriter. Get stapling.

© Rosie Garland 2017‏

Darkness and Light: Exploring the Gothic

Thursday, 16 July to Sunday, 20 December 2015

I was honoured to receive and invitation from Liza Leonard to curate a case at this exhibition! I took as my theme Women and the Gothic. I could have chosen a hundred books, easily, but was limited to five.. The choice was very difficult, needless to say. It's been a great experience to work with the staff of The John Rylands Library. I am particularly grateful for the help and support I have received from Xavier Aldana Reyes and Linnie Blake of The University of Manchester.

The exhibition is running till the 20th December and is free to enter.

'Housed in the neo-Gothic grandeur of The John Rylands Library, Darkness and Light reveals how Gothic architecture and anatomy inspired and influenced a literary genre, and how the lasting legacy of Gothic can be found in art, films and subculture today.
From the fantastical to the macabre, this intriguing exhibition unearths Gothic treasures from the Library's Special Collections to investigate subjects as varied as the role of women in the Gothic movement, advances in medical science and classic literature.

Amongst the fascinating items on display is Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), the first Gothic novel. With a Gothic medieval castle, doomed love and restless spectres of the past, it sets the scene for the genre and sits alongside a whole host of Gothic bestsellers including The Monk, Udolpho and Jekyll and Hyde.'
Click to go to the John Rylands Library page

The March Violets 'Made Glorious' Tour 2013.

ALL dates - 10 gigs - are now confirmed. That should be it now...

Please come along and have fun.

Click on this link to buy tickets for any date!

A selection of images taken by the amazing Bobby Talamine, Rock and Roll Photographer.

The March Violets – headlining at Convergence XX, Chicago, April 2014.

Rosie Garland with Si Denbigh, Tom Ashton & William Faith.
Shots include soundcheck, backstage (with Mars Williams of the Psychedelic Furs, guest sax) and concert shots of Rosie singing with The March Violets. The Bottom Lounge, Chicago.

All enquiries should be sent directly to Bobby Talamine. He’s a great guy.

http://www.bobbytalamine.com/

http://blog.bobbytalamine.com/

Cabaret Macabre

The Fulford Arms,
121 Fulford Road,
YO10 4EX York
North Yorkshire

7pm till late

Join your host, Rosie Lugosi!
The Fulford Arms will be transformed to host our Cabaret Macabre show - come and join us to be entertained!

We are delighted to have Rosie Lugosi join us as our host for the evening. Rosie Lugosi, the Vampire Queen, mistress of ceremonies, performs twisted cabaret and has been tantalising audiences worldwide with her unique blend of camp humour, mayhem and song for many years.
Come and experience the 'Cabaret Macabre' at the Fulford Arms. Rosie will be joined by A Mere Kat, A Short Dark Stranger, Alice Nicholls, Marie Devilreux and Victor & The Bully.

Part of the Black Rose Ball weekend.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/black-rose-ball-weekend-2019-cabaret-macabre-tickets-59523096183

The Bellwether Syndicate

Wave-Gotik Treffen

Time - 19.10h
Venue - Täubchenthal
Markranstädter Straße 1
Leipzig, Germany

I'm honoured to guest with The Bellwether Syndicate at WGT! With a special rendition of Snake Dance (The March Violets).

Fronted by veteran artist William Faith (of Faith and the Muse) and Sarah Rose (aka DJ Scary Lady Sarah), The Bellwether Syndicate are, as illustrated by their debut, coloring outside of prescribed genre lines, choosing here to push the boundaries of style and substance into something relevant and vital.

The Bellwether Syndicate are William Faith: Vox • Guitars
Sarah Rose Faith: Vox • Guitars
Paul Sin: Bass
Philly Peroxide: Keyboards • Percussion
Stevyn Grey: Drums

https://www.wave-gotik-treffen.de/ro/go4it.php?id=197&loc=en

Gothic Styles Street / Fashion Show

Sunday, 29 October 2017 at 6:00 pm
Location: Exchange Square,
Manchester City Centre,
M3 1BD

Join us for an extravagant exploration of what it means to have goth style!
Real-life goths, punks, steampunks and other assorted ‘weirdo mosher freaks’ will strut, stomp and parade their individual dress sense for the public of Manchester. Interspersed with the street style will be fashion looks from students and alumni of Manchester Met’s Manchester Fashion Institute, showing the pervasive influence of goth sensibilities in contemporary haute couture. Sound tracked by goth music, introduced by two queens of goth-dom - Rosie Lugosi The Vampire Queen and Manchester’s monochrome drag par excellence Liquorice Black – this will be a catwalk to remember and a brilliant way to round off your Halloween weekend in the city.

Featuring:
Comperes Rosie Lugosi and Liquorice Black
Border Morris from Stone the Crows
ArA DJS
Kiku Corsets
Fantastical make up competition winners from House of Fraser
In association with the Sophie Lancaster Foundation.
Part of Halloween in the City produced by Manchester BID.
FREE – Tickets available on Eventbrite
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/gothic-styles-streetfashion-show-tickets-36606979461

Rosie Garland: 'The Night Brother' - Reading and Book Signing

Location: John Rylands Library Historic Reading Room,
Deansgate,
Manchester M3 3EH
6-7pm
Free event

Introduced and chaired by Dr Xavier Aldana Reyes (Manchester Met).

Tagged ‘literary hero’ by The Skinny, Rosie Garland is an award-winning poet, novelist and singer with post-punk band The March Violets. With a passion for language nurtured by libraries, she started out in spoken word, garnering praise from Apples and Snakes as ‘one of the country’s finest performance poets’.
She is the author of Vixen, a Green Carnation Prize nominee. Debut novel, The Palace of Curiosities, won Book of the Year in the Co-op Respect Awards 2013 and was nominated for both The Desmond Elliott and the Polari First Book Prizes. Her latest novel The Night Brother (Borough Press) was reviewed in The Times as "A rich and ambitious tale set in late Victorian Manchester... Garland's prose is a delight: playful and exuberant. There are shades of Angela Carter in the mad world she creates... Full marks.'

Her most recent poetry collection, As In Judy, is out with Flapjack Press. She is half of The Time-Travelling Suffragettes. #gothfest17

https://www2.mmu.ac.uk/artshumanities/rah/gothic-manchester-festival/detail/index.php?id=6561

Leeds Festival of Gothica

Leeds City Museum
Cookridge Street,
LS2 8BH Leeds

14 October at 11:00–16:00
Free entry.

Take a dark trip into the bones of Leeds Gothica on the 14th of October.
Explore gothic literature, fashion and music.
Special guest –Rosie Garland, reading from her work!

With stalls and installations from jumbo records, ultimate skin tattoos, Leeds libraries, the West Yorkshire Playhouse Costume Department, ‘dead things’ by Kate, Sohos, Nyx and the Sophie Lancaster foundation to name but a few!

The Black Rose Ball 2017

Saturday 2nd September

Rosie Garland book launch and reading
The Gothic Café,
De Grey Rooms,
St. Leonards Place,
York YO1 7HD

2pm-3pm
£4 advance, £5 on the door

Special Black Rose Ball event.
Come and meet Rosie Garland – singer with the legendary March Violets - and hear her read from her latest book 'The Night Brother'!
She will also be more than happy to answer any questions regarding her work and sign her books.
Book your ticket now via our ticket page.

http://blackroseball.co.uk/reading