Mild Peril #8

By Deanperil and Sausage Punk Pete (and others)
myspace.com/mildperilzine
£1 half sized.

Despite going to three (!!!) anarchist bookfairs (and yes, I know not all anarchists are punks) last year I have a weird relationship with punks and the punk scene. I’m not a punk, but during high school and university I hung out with a lot of punks, lived in my town’s “famous punk house”, went to punk shows and parties, and was at least tangentially involved in the scene.

Why did I do this if I wasn’t that into punk (or at least not the hardcore that was prevalent at that time and place)? Well, because I didn’t live in that big a town, and there weren’t really that many options for who vegetarians that cared about the arts and sustainability could hang out with. Hell even in cities you’re going to struggle to find many anarchogoths (or whatever it is I am).

Okay, so why am I going on about this? I guess it’s because zines like this about local punk scenes make me nostalgic for an era that it seems unlikely I will ever reclaim.

Mild Peril is all about the Norwich punk scene, and it’s really big! At over forty pages it took me longer to get through this than most zines I’ve reviewed so far. It features loads of interviews with bands, both local to the area and stopping by there on tour, loads of reviews of cds, records, shows, and other zines, a comic, rants, and some other stuff.

I found the show reviews the best part, possibly because they were for bands I knew of and, in one case, had actually seen (Gogol Bordello!). Also they were more diary entries that talked about events surrounding the shows rather than just the show itself. I guess that despite liking punk music (Defiance, Ohio are one of my favourite bands), I don’t know enough about it to find most of the comparisons in the reviews to be useful. Amusingly the one band I did look up turned out to be one who appeared on a mix CD I received last year.

Anyway, this was a pretty good read, and worth checking out if you’re into punk music. I’ll be sending my copies onto friends that are more into the scene than I am.