in musicians from the many bands then doing the local pubs. We’d rehearse at Yeoman Cottage, caterwauling fearsomely through the set which Pete had selected from his mouth- watering record collection, including nuggets by The Standells, Seeds, Strangeloves, Animals, Yardbirds and Syndicate Of Sound.
To further our career and push Aylesbury as a kind of San Francisco-style musical epicentre,
Pete then started another fanzine, the AylesburyRoxette, which featured local bands and artists who played the still-thriving Friars, now at the larger Civic Centre.
“I’d been to New York in ’75 and picked up this paper which my friend Alan Betrock had just started called NewYorkRocker. It had pictures of Debbie Harry saying what she was having for breakfast. He was mythologizing these bands that no-one outside the Bowery had ever heard of at that time. It was just totally fantastic. I thought that if we do this with the Roxettewe can pretend that Aylesbury’s all happening. We had all these articles like, ‘Aylesbury’s the greatest place on earth,’ says Ian Hunter. We put local bands on the front cover as if they were already famous. And it worked! Everyone thought they were part of this scene.’
“It was the golden era as far as I was concerned. I’m sure you remember how we used to get stoned out of our bollocks in my music room. It had luminous stars on the ceiling, arranged in strange constellations, and we used to listen to ‘Standing On The Moon’ by Lothar & The Hand People and ‘Song For Our Ancestors’ by The Steve Miller Band. Then all of a sudden we were listening to the Ramones.” During ’76, as the first stirrings of punk rock were making their presence felt, Pete let me interview acts like The Flamin’ Groovies, The Ramones, The Stranglers and Patti Smith, and he soon gave me my own OverTheTop
The times they were a-changin’. Genesis, Dr Feelgood, Ian Hunter and
Debbie Harry in ZZ (this page); Kris Needs gets his own supplement and appears on the cover of the Aylesbury Roxette before taking over editorship of ZZ (opposite, top); Kris and Magenta DeVine present Nick Lowe’s boots to a competition winner. Lucky git!
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supplement where I could froth about the new movement. Symbolically, I was photographed ripping up a copy of Hotel Californiawith my teeth.
In Spring ’77, he handed me the editorship. This was pretty brave as Zigzaghad its
diehard crowd, many feeling that punk was a tuneless racket. Much of it was, but Pete had plugged into the spirit and energy. Referring to an Eddie & The Hot Rods feature, he reckons, “We were the first UK music publication to have the words Punk Rock on the cover. At first, I was dismissive of punk – but then I realised it was a new unstoppable movement, just like rock ’n’ roll had been 20 years earlier, washing away everything that had gone before. Game over. I thought, ‘I‘m not going to be like some old fake pretending that I’m still on the case; I’m getting out of here and handing over to someone who feels the new music coursing through his veins.’ By this time, it was quite obvious that you were exactly like I’d been but more so! So you got the gig! You were already the total-immersion rock writer, hanging out with Sid Vicious and The Clash.”
The June ’77 issue (number 75) was my first as editor. I put The Slits on the cover and carried on cavorting in the eye of this remarkable, history-changing hurricane. For a while, Pete continued contributing his family trees but he bowed out when Graham Andrews sold the magazine to a distributor called Phoenix, based off Portobello Road. For the next two years I not only reported from the front line of the new movement but relentlessly tried to educate new Clash- inclined readers by also interviewing legends like Captain Beefheart, while Tobler was in there too as a link with the earlier incarnation. I’m still regularly accosted by people who read Zigzagat this time.
Sadly, Phoenix went bust and Zigzagwas picked up by vile Hooray Henrys who systematically destroyed its spirit, eroded my position and diverted any money which came in to the short-lived Zigzag Club. It was sad to see Pete Frame’s baby being kicked about and abused by greedy, clueless imbeciles. As Pete sums it up, “What people didn’t understand
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