Settle down, kids: it’s time for a story.
Once upon a time, there was a young man who loved and lived the turn-of-the-millennium UK punk scene. It was during that time, most probably at a
@lightyearband gig, that he noticed a little pamphlet sitting unassumingly at the merch table. If memory serves correctly, it cost him a quid.
It turned out to be the first issue of
@_rob_phoenix_ ’s DIY art zine, FailedRockStar. Rob’s younger brother,
@richardjphoenix , played drums in Captain Everything! (the main support of the evening, and whose former guitarist Lew of
@the_real_social_club contributed "Normal" to the first issue of Under Northern Skies last autumn), and had brought some copies on tour. While that beautifully simple, photocopied little number has been lost along the many relocations the young (now old) man has made over the past quarter of a century, these two—issues three and four, with swanky screen-printed cloth bags—have somehow survived. Some of the young man’s early photographs can even be found in the fourth issue, alongside the work of proper, actually talented artists like
@davidshrigley ,
@moderntoss , and
@artofalexcf .
The idea that such a thing could be made and distributed by someone with nothing more than a vision and some spare time (and access to a printer) was revelatory. The young man had previously imagined that nice-looking physical things with pages ("books"?) were exclusively something that big publishing companies produced. Professional people who wore suits and dived into swimming pools filled with money and all that. The mere existence of FailedRockStar changed this misconception pretty quickly, and—at the very least partly—paved the way to the eventual creation of Under Northern Skies: your favourite literary journal EVER in the ENTIRE WORLD.
So... cheers for that, Rob and Rich. Either of you fancy being a guest contributor in Issue Two of our scrappy little journal, way over here in the Czech Republic?
(“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take” – Wayne Gretzky, 1983)
