Cool blog of old Metal 'zines

I stumbled across this blog yesterday: http://sendbackmystamps.org/

It's chock full of old heavy metal fanzines from the 80s and 90s. They are from all over the world and range in quality from very professional to photocopied junk. It's really cool to read the older 80s reviews and see what people were saying about classic albums at the time. One review calls Ride The Lightning a "major disappointment" and another calls Mercyful Fate's "A Dangerous Meeting" the worst song on Don't Break The Oath. Ha!

It's also interesting to see how genre labels were very fluid back then with terms like power metal and death metal meaning totally different things than they do today.

One gem is Gray Matter #2 that features reviews by none other than Jason McMaster! I had no idea he was cranking out a 'zine before his music career took off.

Awesome find!! Will have to give this a closer look @ home tonight

Very cool, thou back in the day I never bought any fanzines

manny wrote:

back in the day I never bought any fanzines

My brother was good friends with the guys in Incantation when they were first getting started and he helped them out by maintaining their P.O. Box - answering their fan mail, sending out their demo/t-shirt/merch orders, etc. So if a fanzine wrote in asking for a copy of their demo/7 inch/whatever to review he'd tell them to send the band a copy of the zine once the review was printed.

The band never bothered to look at all the zines that would come rolling into the P.O. Box so after a while my brother just started keeping'em. He had piles 'n' piles of 'em from all over the world - Brazil, Poland, Japan, Russia, etc., etc. Some of them were very professional looking and others were just simply cut 'n' paste 'n' photocopied, but they were always fun.

We used to get a kick out of the interviews in the foreign 'zines because the "Engrish" was hilarious. Imagine a Japanese 'zine guy "interviewing" a band from Brazil through the mail (by sending them a written sheet of questions which the band would fill out and send back) and then attempting to translate the results into English... most of the time they'd come out looking like alphabet soup. We still quote bits of "Zine-grish" to each other all the time to this day, it's become a long running private joke.

I love how one of these 'zines uses a 3-15 scale to rate albums. 3-15????? Amazing.

Kerrang was my baby. I ised to get that throughout the late eighties and nineties. I gave away my collection to a friend of mine. Sort of kicking myself now. He's a cool bloke though.