The Garage project

RICHARD LANGSTON writes about how his DIY Duned-in music mag in the 1980s has returned as a US-published time capsule.

- RICHARD LANGSTON

No one in their right mind would start a fanzine with the dream of it eventually finding a publisher in the United States. That sort of thing doesn’t happen in real life.

Yet somehow it happened to me.

Nearly 40 years after I produced my zine, Garage, in my Dunedin bedroom, I am boarding a flight from Auckland to Chicago. I’m going to meet Todd. That’s Todd Novak of HoZac books in Chicago, USA.

He’d emailed me two years ago, excited to have seen copies of the zine online. They’d been scanned onto the web in 2011 for record label Flying Nun’s 30th anniversary. Noise artist and writer Bruce Russell did that as he knew there was a small international audience who obsessed over the music of Flying Nun.

Todd read them and immediately emailed me, “I want to make them into a book. These are amazing.” My doubts were outdone by Todd’s enthusiasm.

I decide to call the book Pull Down the Shades, a homage to the song by Dunedin band the Enemy, my favourite punk song ever, and one that is a foundation stone of NZ indie rock, with Chris Knox’s opening snarl.