DIY Conspiracy review ‘Dear Smash Hits, We’re From Scotland!’

An alternative history of Scottish DIY culture, tracing how zines, tapes, and sheer necessity built a world far from the usual punk epicentres.

'Dear Smash Hits, We’re From Scotland!: An Alternative History of Zines & DIY Music Culture (1975–2025)' arrives at a moment when punk history risks collapsing under its own accumulated weight. We already have deep dives into specific eras and subgenres (Ian Glasper’s books remain untouchable in that respect), exhaustive discographies, and coffee-table label histories. At the same time, niche cultural publishing increasingly survives on enthusiasm rather than profit. That alone makes the continued output of Earth Island Books admirable. Dear Smash Hits… is clearly not a book designed to sell in huge numbers, and that is precisely why it matters to talk about it.

Alastair MacDonald Jackson’s approach feels refreshingly detached from the heritage-industry version of punk history. Rather than recycling familiar New York or London-centric narratives, he builds his story from lived experience and a clear affection for the awkward logistics of making culture far from any supposed centre. Jackson notes that the book was partly spurred by musicians like Siouxsie Sioux and Tracy Thorn reflecting on the “isolation” of the London suburbs. In contrast, the author’s own youth on the Isle of Skye involved a 126-mile (200+ km) round trip and a ferry crossing just to reach the nearest record shop in Inverness, or a two-week wait for indie singles ordered through an electrical emporium in Portree.

From this starting point, the book unfolds as a history of how people created their own infrastructure when none existed. In short, zines sit at the heart of this story, not as artefacts to be archived but as working tools. The author situates these publications within a broader continuum of independent publishing, encompassing cassette culture, flexis, and other hybrid formats, where sound, print, and community were often inseparable.

The narrative finds its first spark with Bam Balam, founded by Brian Hogg in February 1975. Positioned as Scotland’s first modern music zine, it famously influenced Mark Perry’s Sniffin’ Glue, positioning punk’s zine mythology in a pre-’77 lineage. Jackson incorporates a series of striking anecdotes that link global icons to the Scottish landscape: Jamie Reid, later the Sex Pistols’ designer, was living on the Isle of Lewis when he received the telegram from Malcolm McLaren pulling him back into the project; Joe Strummer’s grandmother hailed from the crofting township of Umachan on Raasay; and Bill Drummond’s psycho-geographical obsessions led to Echo & The Bunnymen playing the Skye Gathering Hall in 1983.

As the book expands beyond its early chapters, Jackson devotes significant attention to how zines functioned as connective tissue rather than cultural ephemera. In Aftershock – Fanzines and the Fallout of Punk, he shows how publications like Bam Balam, Next Big Thing, and Ripped & Torn helped sustain scenes ignored, misrepresented, or exploited by the mainstream music press. Sold cheaply at gigs, record shops, or circulated through mail order, these photocopied pages mattered as much as John Peel or the weekly papers for discovering new music and exchanging ideas. In a pre-internet world, Scottish zines linked geographically isolated scenes to wider UK and international networks, helping make punk one of the most thoroughly self-documented subcultures in history.

This documentation was rarely neutral. Jackson captures the evangelizing DIY spirit of the period, inspired by bands like Desperate Bicycles and Scritti Politti, where zine editors actively encouraged readers to start their own publications. Some included blunt cost breakdowns, practical “how-to” guides, and explicit calls to participation. As punk shifted into post-punk and anarcho-punk, many zines became vehicles for openly political content, shaped by the autonomy and anarchist ideas promoted by bands like Crass. Scottish examples such as Glasgow’s Last Hints and Stirling’s Guilty of What? underline how production, politics, and participation blurred together, often involving young teenage punks, workplace photocopiers, and grassroots activism.

Subsequent chapters address the pivotal role of women in shaping Scottish independent music, pushing back against the macho attitudes that often persisted within the scene. Jackson documents the influence of feminist and indie zines like Lucy Toothpaste’s Joltand Saskia Holling’s Heavy Flow, grounding broader arguments in specific publications and voices rather than abstraction. Drawing on conversations with members of The Rezillos, The Pastels, The Vaselines, and others, he shows how zines and informal networks created space for women to write, organize, and document scenes that often proclaimed egalitarian values while quietly reproducing exclusions.

Jackson’s own experiences making zines form some of the book’s most engaging passages. His work on Hype! and later X124 is described from the inside, with close attention paid to the unglamorous realities of production. Elsewhere, Jackson reflects on his brief “art terrorist” phase as part of the Rust Brothers, during which he mailed postcards to Scottish celebrities asking a deceptively simple question: “What is Scottish culture?”

One of the book’s best offerings is its refusal to flatten Scottish DIY culture into a single narrative. Jackson moves between islands, Highland towns, and major cities like Glasgow and Edinburgh without collapsing their differences. Tape trading, local radio, and zines function as connective tissue between scenes divided by geography and infrastructure, creating networks shaped as much by necessity as by taste.

As the narrative moves into the twenty-first century, Dear Smash Hits… rejects the idea that zines and tapes belong only to the past. Instead, it traces their persistence and mutation through projects such as Johnny Lynch’s Lost Map Records on Eigg and institutions like the Glasgow Zine Library. The extensive A–Z appendix of Scottish music and music-related zines from 1975 to 2025 is invaluable not because it claims completeness, but because it openly acknowledges gaps, omissions, and the sheer scale of a culture that insisted on documenting itself.

Ultimately, Dear Smash Hits, We’re From Scotland! reads less like an archive than a long, absorbing conversation guided by memory and reflection. In an era flooded with punk histories, its value lies in its modesty and precision. It documents how culture was made far from recognized epicentres, under conditions that demanded invention rather than imitation. That a publisher like Earth Island Books continues to support work like this feels entirely consistent with the ethos the book describes: a careful account of the ordinary labour, persistence, and quiet joy of doing it yourself.

Get it from Earth Island Books.

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