…was a beacon of colour in the monochrome early 80s dominated by misery merchants Crass and TG. A zine I never saw at the time, but had read about in passing on a few occasions. I retold what I knew during a talk on magick and anarchism about ten years ago, which surprised ex-puppy Alistair Livingstone who was in the audience.
We corresponded on and off and he very graciously provided me with a couple of back copies. It was great stuff – uncompromising writing from uncompromising times – drugs, sex, magick, squats, music, politics, you name it. Most importantly, KYPP showed that the eighties couldn’t be divided up into subcultures (punk, crass, industrial, goth, skinheads, etc) so easily – there were strange mutant combinations, and other forces at work.
Al took up this theme at length in his excellent Greengalloway blog, which then became a bit of a pole of regroupment for old lags. As we stand possibly on the brink of an economic crisis every bit as ferocious as 30 years ago, it’s a good time for reflection.
The KYPP site is as ramshackle as the mag was, with a bewildering number of sections, contributors, subsites and spin offs. What is great is the sheer amount of knowledge and perspective about how the 80s counterculture operated, with some nods to how this may be relevant today.
And of course new maps – how did the punks join up with the hippies to form the convoy? Did you know that Colin Faver went from working at punk indie label Small Wonder to DJing techno on Kiss FM?
What is also great is the vast quantity of digitised music from the era which is up there for download. Loads of obscure (post)punk seven inches, whole albums by The Apostles, Adam and the Antz live sets, interviews with early Psychic TV, it’s all there.
All those luxury flats which have sprung up and are now empty – soon to be picturesque ruins? When the right time comes it will be dread for sure, but maybe we can use those ruins for our own purposes again soon.
Oh, there goes the rest of the working day. Incidentally, can anyone actually download the stuff on there? I can listen to it playing but don’t seem to be able to get a file down. Cool if that’s not available, just curious(incidentally, before anyone accuses me of being a greedy file horder, I only want the Conflict ‘Centro Iberico’, Ants ‘Electric Ballroom ’79’ and UK Decay ’33 Arts Centre Luton’ recordings and nothing else).
Martin – when I listen to KYPP sounds,accessing site via Mozilla Firefox, I get a Real Player box which pops up top right hand side of screen which asks if I want to download the clip- say ‘Yes’ and it does. Possibly you need to have Real Player to download the music.
If you still have problems e-mail me at alistairliv@aol.com and I will pass the problem on to Gerard and/or Penguin.
AL Puppy
Yeah it’s probably just yr configuration – I can simply right click on the link and “save as”. Might be ctrl click on a mac?
Hi Al!
Cheers for the kind words John,dunno about ramshakle though!! Seriously it was a little confusing but I have spent the best part of five days tidying it up (I have time off work!), so it should be a bit better now, loads more stuff in the photo gallery in all the sub-albums. Will whack a link to your page fella…
Oh, just saw some God Told Me To Do It stuff you posted, if you are interested go to KYPP photo gallery (Printed material) and check out the review of their one and only gig (it was arse – I was there!), some flyers and an article on the Libyan Embassay squat.
Right – so work take away my trusty battered Mac, give me some spanking new shiny G4 turbo-powered bollocks, and now I can’t do half what I could before…no wonder Flux used to bang on about “progress”…
I’m afraid all I get, using Explorer or Safari, is a thin audio strip and a completely white background. Oh you know what, it’s probably configured to iTunes or some bollocks, I know that’s installed on this machine….
when you get to the page,click on ‘file’ menu of your browser and then ‘save page as’.
it will then download and save in .mp3 format.
hope that helped