“One of the questions we were most frequently asked when we first announced we would be publishing our own zine was, ‘Can’t you just do it as a PDF instead?’ And this is precisely the reason why the printed word and, within that, zines are still hugely important. I’m worried that when I’m an old man, boring my grandkids to death, I’ll have nothing tangible to show them, or pass on to them. As I beckon my offspring to gather around my external harddrive so I can show them an alphabetised list of all the MP3s I downloaded when I was their age, I’ll be wishing I kept all those beautiful vinyl records or even CDs.
And it’s this sense of romanticism that made us want to do things like this with our zine, Heat Rash. We’ve gone for a slightly more hi-fi approach than xerox and Pritt Stick; each issue is full colour, professionally printed and comes with a 7” of new music we’ve written, especially for the project, but it’s this desire for something permanent and three-dimensional that got us here. The nature of blogging means anyone can spill their most vapid of thoughts into HTML and have it legitimised by the fact it exists outside of their heads, within seconds. Going to the effort to have our equivalent thoughts made into paper and ink gives us the added responsibility to stand by what we write, to actually think about it and to be proud of it. With the dialogue between bands and ‘fan’ (though I hate that word) becoming more and more conversational, due to things like Twitter et al, having another outlet for conversation, such as a zine, is something that I can only see becoming more and more popular into 2012 and hopefully far beyond.”
