6NR Late Nite was a radio show run by the Curtin University of Technology student guild. Late Nite was one of the finest agents of musical corruption available to the youth of Perth in the 1980s, and certainly did wonders for me as a teenager: hearing sounds from who knows where coming over the AM airwaves, last thing at night.
In late 1986, they decided to do a magaziney fanzine thing (clearly inspired by my work on Party Fears) called Vortex, or ✪Vortex✪ if you used too many fonts. Most of the work was done by Anna Zanella, with contributions from everyone in range of Late Nite or Dawn Bailey’s Friday afternoon Australian indie show Sessions.
The financial basis is entirely unclear to me. They printed it on shiny expensive paper and the first two issues were given away free and later issues were $1. I strongly suspect they were just throwing money down a black hole and collecting the radiation of the resulting magazines.
It eventually stopped because (I asked her this some time ’88, ’89?) Anna didn’t think she could really have taken it much further. I spluttered at this, thinking just what I could have done with some sort of actual subsidy for my fanzining instead of attempting to pay for Party Fears out of my Austudy or dole … probably pretty much what I did, but with less angst and earlier computerisation.
Brad Lambert kindly scanned his collection a couple of years ago and sent me DVD-Rs of the lot. And nearly two years later, I have finally started putting them up. (Sorry Brad for the delay!) Issue 1 is up on the Party Fears World Service page, with issues 2 to 6 to follow.
If you have any other Perth indie press from back in the day, please send scans my way and I’ll put them up! (Yes, I’m particularly thinking of The Harvey. But there were lots of others.) And I’ll take less than two years about it this time, promise.
Hey! Great to see this again. Anna and I put Vortex together back in the mid eighties. Anna was the artist director and workhorse, I was the muse and whip cracker. We never had an editor which may explain some of the rambling interviews. We did it basically for kicks, inspired by the punk mags like sniffing glue from the seventies. I was broadcasting officer for Radio station 6NR at the time and we had a small budget for promotion at the time, so we poured it into Vortex. Plus we had full access to the student guild newspaper resources which included an exciting new invention called an apple macintosh and a printer. We deliberately choose the typewriter font over dozens of others because it looked more street. After 4 issues we started to run out of money and steam and tried to charge for it. That’s what really killed it off.
It was a load of fun to do. Highlights would be hanging with Matt Johnson from The The and being part of press gang for Australian Made (that our heros The Triffids were on the bill was both surreal and inspiring). We even produced a couple of Flexi discs (kryptonics and the palisades, yeah!). I have some issues in box if you want some. Paul Buchanan
Ha ha, lovely to see the interview that Peter Bonner and I did with Morrissey there in Issue 2. I would give a decent sum of money to have the tape of that interview, which, I still contend, is the only interview conducted with Morrissey by an Australian media outlet.
Peter had a friend in Madrid who did some artwork for Rough Trade and through her had a line to Geoff Travis and the media person there. Some faxes and phone calls later and, voila, there was Morrissey on the other end of the line between shows in Nottingham, I think it was. God, England seemed a long, long way away then.
Thanks very much for posting it.
yeah, there’s so many interviews I’m wishing I still had the tape of.
(there was one that I didn’t do – it was Graeme Revell from SPK on 6-UVS, talking at length of why SPK gave up on horrible noise and went pop. It was the best contemporary explanation of the decision that I’d heard.)
great to see all this up and running – great memories.