Old blog post from February 2008.
The current t-shirt hookup between Boy’s Own and Berlin’s Firmament, using Dave Little‘s iconic fanzine and flyer art is another quintessentially European use of dance music and streetwear that separates us from our international brethren when it comes to our varied musical obsessions. Harvey’s Gimme5 affiliations, a Stussy endorsed 2006 Sub Club session that carried Michael Kopelman and Gerry Rooney on the same bill and Slam Jam’s lowkey involvement with releases like the Baia Degli Angeli compilation are just recent examples that make up the tip of an iceberg.
I guess the ultra-simplified notion of clobber-fixated terrace types becoming deeply involved in the acid house explosion goes some way – the stereotypes of glowstick wielding muppets or gormless characters decked out in Daniel Poole are more than a little off-the-mark. Clubbers and clobber sit together perfectly. Clubland permeated street culture at every level, and elevated more than a few brands on these shores from the late ’80s to the present day. The industry is run by househeads.
Boy’s Own began as a legendary fanzine courtesy of London’s Terry Farley, Steve Hall and Andy Weatherall and series of parties, before becoming a record label with many, many offshoots, leading to its current label incarnation as Junior Boy’s Own. Boy’s Own’s publication is still famed for ripping the shit out of anything and everything but deifying the Chicago sound – an anarchic spirit that would be picked up by Jockey Slut (RIP) magazine in its lo-fi early issues, influencing club nights like Leed’s Back 2 Basics that maintained the spirit of house’s origins as the era of the superclub dawned.
From the embers of that dark era, and picking up on the glimmer of light ’96’s, Body & Soul parties offered, Farley, alongside the likes of Soulsonics’s Stuart Patterson, Jim Piercy and Raoul Galloway created Faith – another fanzine, with a great website and regular night at East Village – Faith maintains the same ‘door policy’ for its pages in terms of attitude, and uncompromising to the newcomer making short work of fads with inclusions like a regular two-page spread that revels in insulting bad collaborative clothing, but educating the reader with some in-depth interviews and superb retrospectives like lan Arscott’s two-parter on jazz dancing’s history that evoked Big Daddy and Grand Slam reportage. Best of all, it’s free (and as the cover boasts, “STILL not sponsored by THE MAN”).
GWARIZM 