Off the record

Rip It Up, Issue 45, 1 April 1981, Page 22

Off the record

Simon Grigg

C6OGo The cassette magazine from Australia we mentioned a couple of months ago, Fast Forward, is still going great guns and looking for contributions. The.magazine’s format is a mixture of talk and music and there is room for New Zealand in both categories. If you have demo tapes in particular which you would like air-ed for a growing Fast Forward audience,in Australia, wrap them up and send them .to PO Box 5159 AA GPO Melbourne, Victoria, Australia 3001. . - ‘ .- Strip Mining ' Another publication flourishing against all kinds of odds is the local comic fanzine, Strips. Now at issue number fifteen. Strips probably suffers a little from being the only outlet for local cartoonists which allows for more than one-liners. Hence you get Barry Linton’s dated rock and roll = sex = violence strip with its air of Ponsonby '69 next to an almost entirely abstract piece called ‘Gordon Meets The People'. Over all, Strips still has rather too visible links with the underground comics of ten years ago, but all the Bob Dylan scenarios, science fiction westerns and Cheech and Chong rewrites shouldn’t be allowed to detract from the truly excellent standards of the graphics. These people sure can draw. Ruffly Speaking ' My lit. crit. days are pretty well over by now, so I won’t say anything about Kenny Kane’s poetry but the way he has packaged it deserves a mention. Ruff h/lix is both a book and a cassette, and just like Fast Forward, ;.it might be one of those ideas whose time has come. Scour the hippest of your local bookshops, or the most cultural record bar in the neighborhood if you want to judge for yourself. Listening In We've all got our gripes about the failings of middle-brow journalism where rock and roll is concerned. How seriously do you take the New Zealand Flerald's concert reviews, or their monthly album round-up? • !. To thousands of readers, the only regular relief from that gnashing and wailing is Gordon Campbell of the Listener: Just how much of a relief can be judged from the recent Listener Rock 1 Supplement. In what seems like a one-man show, he bas filled thirty pages of half-sized Listener with interviews and well researched essays. Heaven knows how long some of the pieces have been lying about the office, but the bulk of them are obviously recent and relevant in their various ways. The supplement scores twice. It’s seldom that somebody with the enthusiasm to go so far beyond the call of duty has enough skill to deliver the goods, and it's even more rare for someone with the skill to have the faintest trace of real fandom left. - ' Francis Stark Swindle Victim 'Enjoyed It ’ The Great Rock and Rolf Swindle could easily have been subtitled Carry On Swindling. It’s great fun, though perhaps too strong a reminder of what we've lost. .!"• 'IsMBhHttHM I should add that I’ve felt more cheated by many film -festival movies aspiring to be art. The movie is full of music, including some superb live stuff, and after, the film, the soundtrack album makes a lot more sense. - : • > If you don't like rock and roll, or feel that Bollocks was a swindle itself, don’t bother. Me, I'm going to see it again. . . '