Digging up the dead cities: Abandoned streets and past ruins of the future in the glossy punk magazine

Abstract

Abstract This article excavates, examines and celebrates the short run of the magazines Punk’s Not Dead! (a single issue printed in 1981), Punk! Lives (eleven issues printed between 1982 and 1983) and Noise! (sixteen issues in 1982) as a small corpus of overlooked dedicated punk literature – coincident with the UK82 incarnation of punk − that takes the form of a pop-style poster magazine. This revisiting is undertaken with three key aims: to re-assert these resources back into both the punk historical canon and the general history of pop music literature, to provoke a critical discussion of what their existence might imply, and to take a more detailed look at the iconographic construction of the images in what are essentially photograph-driven poster magazines within a wider music-media climate of carefully crafted images. In examining the images it identifies three predominant themes: the street, the apocalypse and the graveyard, respectively mapped across from the genres of Oi!, street-punk/UK82 and positive-punk/goth that are covered in the magazines.