Grey matter/literature/area: Bucketfull of brains, fanzine form and cultural formation.

Abstract

Having ceased publication in 2015, Bucketfull of Brains (aka BoB), founded in 1979 by Nigel Cross, is prime candidate for the United Kingdom’s longest-running music fanzine. When Cross relinquished control of the zine in 1985 its identity changed, but it retained the ‘voice’ of a zine despite increasingly assuming the ‘look’ of a magazine. This liminal identity also extended to its transatlantic focus and its straddling of punk and psychedelic music scenes. This article demonstrates how BoB also ‘bridged the gap’, especially in terms of taste communities, between the countercultural/underground publications of the 1970s and the punk and post-punk fanzines which came later. In doing so BoB was ideally situated to document the long-running garage rock revival of the 1980s and indeed was regarded as ‘the Bible’ of this scene by its readers. Drawing on interviews with BoB editors Nigel Cross and Jon Storey, the article is primarily concerned with the motivations and work of fanzine editors/writers in documenting the histories and development of interlinked popular musical sub-genres and micro-genres. In providing various layers of context to elucidate the place of both BoB and the publications that had a significant influence upon it (e.g. ZigZag) in the history of rock fanzine scholarship and the reasons for the persistent neglect of such scholarship, the article is also influenced by concepts of literary form and genre.