Mild Peril #9

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

Somewhere in here amongst the 40 or so pages that make up this zine there's a reference to it being used as bathroom reading. Not something I'd have mentioned in this review if I hadn't managed to accidentally drop the zine into the (thankfully clean) toilet and then snatch it out again without it getting even a little bit wet. My quick reflexes, combined with the weight and solidity of the zine, and the way it fell into the toilet meant that it barely even touched anything at all.

Despite all that, this zine really doesn't belong in the toilet, being a totally solid punk zine filled with record reviews, band interviews, rants, tour diaries, show reports that start off as factually inaccurate accounts of viking history, bad spelling, and recipes (I really want to try the caramel shortbread recipe but fear it would be all I eat for the rest of the week).

Reading through all the reviews and everything here I'm struck by two things. First, none of the bands seem to be able to take being interviewed seriously. Their answers to the questions are constantly filled with brutal honesty, stupid jokes, and outright lies. It's kind of strange to read an interview with a band and have them say that at the last show they played nobody showed up, and yet they still had a good time.

And that's the second thing that struck me, the repeated references by various bands and reviewers about bad turnouts, promoters disappearing, nobody showing up to shows, or the people that do being assholes. And yet they keep doing it because they love it and when they do have good shows they're amazing, and even the ones that sucked they're able to laugh at. One of the bands talk about how on the last date of their first tour the bar didn't even seem to know the show was supposed to happen, so instead they all piled into someone's car and drove off to another show and had an awesome time. Being able to create positive from negative situations is a way of living that should be adopted by more people (including me). Hurray!