Ruptured Ambitions Issue 10

A bumper 20 page scan here of Rushfords finest publication. Ruptured Ambitions issue 10 features interviews with the likes of Chaos UK, The Filth, and Plymouth's one and only C.D.S. In a grand display of techno-Ludditeism, we find our hero on page 6 fulminating against the inexorable rise of the C.D. and lamenting the looming threat of D.A.T. (Go ask your grand-dad pop kids!) And at this distance I suppose it's easy to snigger at how we all thought that the imminent death of independent music was upon us. This was written in 1992 when technically speaking, the Internet existed, but no-one really knew what it was capable of. (Mostly delivering high-quality Hobbit pron as it turns out.)

*** Techno-rant ALERT! I think the danger is that now pop music is too big, too diffuse, and perversely enough too accessible for any one person to understand more than a fraction of it. Just as an exercise, if you really do have a lot of time on your hands, take down the name of every band, band member, and track in this 20 page fanzine. Now stick that list in Google and compile the results. I reckon that would take several hours of work, involve the downloading of many tracks, and result in a cool couple of hundred pages of text. Now multiply that by the number of Punk fanzines that were produced in 1992; a couple of hundred in the UK alone
perhaps? Say you work really diligently and continuously, you might get the whole lot finished in a year. And at the end of the year you could probably regard yourself as 'the' expert on 1992 Punk in the UK. Now multiply that by all the publications in the US, Europe, etc., etc. It'd probably take the best part of ten years to do all that. So, in ten years by dint of mighty diligence you may know everything about the state of Punk as defined by fanzines in 1992. Now repeat for Heavy Metal, Hip-Hop, Rap, plain old vanilla Pop, Jazz, and then you run out of time because you are dead. Anyway, the upshot of all this is, it has become virtually impossible to know everything about even such a small topic as Punk in 1992. We are drowning in a sea of data, never mind "I don't want your progress, it tries to kill me.", our own history is now entrapping us in an orgy of... (Oh dear, I seem to have gone all N.M.E. on myself, Nurse! The screens!) ***

Back to the issue at hand. Charmingly, I seem to have ended up with one of the two mis-printed copies that were printed, see P.10. I don't think I ever did get my free gift though, grr...Finally, I can't pass over the end of this issue without commenting on the remarkable comic-strip talent displayed by one J. E. Savage. Yup, it's "The Invincible Violence Man" A small snippet below, (see the whole thing in its' full glory on page 19). I wonder if it's time someone else started drawing I.V.M. again, the way Alan Moore took on a defunct comic character like Swamp Thing and made it into a huge success?


No, probably not.

Panic In The Streets of ... Lamerton?

April, 1992, the Credit Crunch was not even a tingle in an American banker's underpants yet. John "The Madman" Major was in charge of the county, and Devon's own one-man publishing empire was producing another fine issue of Ruptured Ambitions to thrust down the throat of an eager, punk-infatuated, audience. Featuring this time, in what was probably a first, actual bands that you might have heard of (possibly). Sadly, the interview with Extreme Noise Terror looks as though it was done via the novel medium of pages torn out from the back of an exercise book. Still, it was only 1992, we had to make our own entertainment, and you see this Internet thing? This was all just fields back then.

Still, mad Pritt-Stick photoshopping skillz though:


Next time: Invincible Violence Man. (Just, just, don't ask OK?).
(Ta! to Wheely for letting me post this.)

We were all so young and so innocent back then...

Well, my mate Wheely was anyway. Here for the first time anywhere* on this here internet thingy, is a scan of Ruptured Ambitions #1, a fine fanzine indeed. From this point sprang the mighty Ruptured Ambitions empire that we all know and love today. An admittedly slim publication of four pages, it did come out however, at the remarkably low price of 0p as a fanzine within a fanzine as part of Extreme Diabolism. And what was troubling our editor in chief at the time? Well, April 1991 seemed to be dominated by a war in the Gulf (plus ca change). The Plymouth punk gig situation was looking reasonably healthy though:

Mind you, seeing the first gig in the list still makes me hang my head in shame. Yes, gentle reader, I was the bass player for H.W.D. Somewhere, I suspect I have some pictures from that gig. If you're all very, very, good - they'll stay hidden.
T' Subs and The Lurkers are still going of course, and C.D.S. continue to delight us from time to time (note to Sav. - man-flu is no excuse for pulling out of a gig, ya' great Jessie). Most of the other bands have probably gone the way of all flesh I suspect. Doing a quick Google search for Daktari Safari draws a blank. Similarly, a search for "The Desired" reveals nothing of note, sadly.
I do know that I have at least a couple more issues of Ruptured Ambitions salted away somewhere, and they will get posted here in due course.
In the mean time, keep watching the sky. Especially for Bile Beans - all will be revealed soon. Honest.

*Unless you know differently of course. Oh, and thanks to Wheely for letting me post it.

About This Blog.

This little corner of the interwebs is a tiny haven for some overlooked areas of the world of the printed word. The small, the insignificant, the pootling, the just plain weird, obviously all tend to get overlooked in favour of the important and significant, I intend to post on here all that stuff that falls through the cracks elsewhere. Old adverts, unusual publications, historical items, anything that takes my fancy really. I just hope that one day, someone, somewhere in the world will find something I've put up here and say "My God, I never thought I'd see that on-line!" If you ever come across something here that you object to on copyright terms please e-mail me to let me know, and I'll take it down. Apart from where noted I will only be posting items that I believe to be in the Public Domain, so if you can find a use for it in a mash-up or whatever, please go ahead and use it. Though an attribution would be nice, as would a click or two on the advert box on the left. So, on with the blog. Coming soon, a punk fanzine or two. Oh, and Bile Beans. There's always Bile Beans.