This Chicago zine reached us with the comment that its existence was partly inspired by Creases Like Knives. Music to our ears – what could feel better than motivating someone not just to moan and bitch about us on Facebook, but to make an effort and build their own platform? This isn’t the first ever effort by Warren, editor of The Coldest zine, though: as a teen in the late 90s, the contributed a couple of “crude cut-and-paste” zines filled with ramblings on what was and wasn’t “real punk” / “real hip hop”. In hindsight, he finds them all “quite embarrassing … because of their immaturity, delusions or offensiveness”, he writes, which is “always the risk of throwing out to the world what’s in your mind when you’re young”. Never a truer word been spoken, and I for one prefer to cast a cloak of silence over my own juvenile efforts.
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As with Defiant Pose (1991), Red London (1994) and Tainted Love (2005) before it, Stewart Home raided his record collection for this novel’s title, epitomised by mean and moody rocker Kip Tyler’s smouldering classic single. ‘She’s My Witch’ has been covered by several artists since its 1959 release, most notably in a Cramps style by the Panther Burns (1987), woozy garage rockers the Fuzztones (1992) and most recently psychobillies The Radiacs (2010). I mention these only as Home’s own musical tastes and live forays, particularly to Dalston’s Garageland, get frequent mentions and largely fuel the online relationship which unfolds between the novel’s two protagonists, Vespa-riding personal trainer (and former skinhead) Martin Cooper and video editor Maria Remedios, a former dominatrix more likely to be found in bars with Hells Angels and skinheads than behind an editing suite in her native Spain (in one Facebook message she rues how the latter are now all “just fat middle-aged men”). This in itself opens up the time and place of the novel, East London in the post-financial crisis, pre-Brexit era (understandably as this is published on John King’s London Books imprint, the jacket text goes in heavy on this) where personal wellness and the creative industries meet, mutually reinforcing. As London riots then prepares to stage a few weeks of global sport, Martin and Maria get further acquainted on social media and commence the exchange of favoured YouTube clips of garage rock and proto-punk and the odd cult film trailer.
Skinhead History, Identity and Culture
Creases Like Knives 