The Shrieking Violet is 4 — August bank holiday zine launch with music!

The Shrieking Violet zine entered its fourth year at the start of August. This would have coincided with a new issue was it not for a slight hiccup with procuring a cover design! I offer the multi-talented musician and illustrator Dominic Oliver infinite gratitude for stepping in at the last minute and creating this issue's cover image (hear his latest rock 'n' roll supergroup, Fruit Tones, in action at Wahlbar in Fallowfield this Friday!). It seems particularly appropriate as Dom designed the cover for the first two issues of the Shrieking Violet, as well as illustrating the special Shrieking Violet guide to Sounds from the Other City in summer 2010 and contributing various other illustrations over the years. His designs never fail to surprise and delight me.

Read issue 21 online here:


Pick up paper copies at a garden gig in Chorlton on Sunday August 25, which will handily double as a zine launch featuring the best of Bristol's alt-folk scene. Issue 21 contributor Roxy Brennan will make an appearance as Two White Cranes, alongside fellow Bristolians the Nervy Betters and Welsh/Manc weird rocker Llion Swyd. For more information, including times, and contact details for obtaining the exact address, visit http://clockflavour.tumblr.com.

Due to the time and effort involved in photocopying, folding and stapling zines, not to mention the ever-deteriorating quality of copies coming off the machines and a recent price rise from 2p per sheet to 3p per sheet, this issue will be printed with nice, environmentally friendly paper and ink by marc the printers at not much extra cost. Copies are currently on sale for £2 in Piccadilly Records on Oldham Street and in the bookshop at the Cornerhouse on Oxford Street, or at the Working Class Movement Library in Salford (no price, why not make a donation to the Library). Alternatively, download and print your own copy here.

Read issue 21 in Salford Zine Library (currently housed in Nexus Art Cafe, Dale Street, Northern Quarter, Manchester).

In issue 21:

Adrian Slatcher wonders whether memory is being outsourced in our information age and what the consequences of this might be for our self-belief and creativity. Adrian has poetry and fiction in the Rialto, Sculpted: Poetry of the North West and Unthology 4. He blogs at artoffiction.blogspot.com and makes electronic music as Bonbon Experiment.

Roxy Brennan muses about the theme of nature in the sculpture and writing of poet and artist Ian Hamilton Finlay. Roxy is a writer and musician based in Bristol but mostly she works in an art gallery, telling children not to touch things. She is largely interested in Bruce Springsteen and David Foster Wallace, but is discovering that contemporary art is pretty wild too.

Marcus Barnett delves into the story of Maurice 'two guns' Cohen and how he came to his final resting place in Blackley Cemetery. Marcus is twenty-two, graduated from Manchester University with a confusing and ambiguous Combined Studies Department degree in 2012, and holds a certificate in being able to speak a competent Yiddish from Tel Aviv University from a semester there. Since that he has been working in busy kitchens, quiet cafes and the Working Class Movement Library. His main 'things' are post-punk, modernist things (primarily: communism, buildings, progress), reading, and good food, probably in that order.

The Shrieking Violet presents a selection of small images of Manchester life by photographer Joincey. Joincey has a virtually untraceable output of pseudo/anti-music and noise-related sound art/skronk going back twenty years and, as well as playing alone and with other people in bands/groups/combos/projects as Saboteuse, Remedial Queen of England, Puff, Head Effort, Stuckometer and Wheel of Eyes, has fostered a tendency for ultra-amateur photography (mobile phone apps and charity-shop-found 35mm point and shooters almost exclusively) whose themes and stories may be inscrutable or altogether absent. Born and bred in the Potteries, he is resident in Manchester.

Nick Mitchell, founder of Manchester label Golden Lab Records, writes about hero worship and the all-encompassing joy of record collecting and the DIY music scene, as well as contributing a poem to issue 21. Nick was born in 1975 in West Yorkshire and has lived in Manchester since 1999. He works as a writer/poet and musician and has run the label Golden Lab Records since 2005. His poems and short stories have appeared in a number of publications in the UK and US. Hear Nick open for Joshua Burkett at Kraak this evening (Wednesday 14 August), as Chalaque.

James Robinson, a photographer with a penchant for pet portraiture, contributes a selection of photos taken during his recent travels around Southern India in January 2013. Originally from Lincoln, James studied philosophy in Manchester before moving to London where he plays bass for indie band Being There.

Art student Paul Gallagher adds some colour to the Shrieking Violet with his illustration 'Kaspar Hauser'. Paul is influenced by underground comic book artists as well as traditional African, folk art and classic cartoons such as the Simpsons and Beavis and Butthead. His work often uses colour, abstract shapes and patterns and faces. To see more go to http://paulgallagherillustration.tumblr.com. 

Writer, curator and academic Rachel Newsome contributes an essay on fashion and androgyny. A former editor of Dazed & Confused magazine, Rachel chose to leave the commercial world of media in order concentrate on writing fiction and essays after nearly a decade in journalism. Since then she has authored the novel As It Was In The Beginning (short-listed for the Dundee International Book Prize) and edited This Is Not A Book About Gavin Turk, a series of essays on contemporary art commissioned at the request of the artist. She writes essays on art and culture as well as dark fables that explore both the dark interior of the human psyche and its search for light. Set against a backdrop of contemporary consumer society, these fables occupy a landscape somewhere between consciousness and dream, and owe a debt to the short stories of Angela Carter and Ben Okri and the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde and Hermann Hesse. Rachel is the Director of Don’t Tell Stories, which curates narrative-based spaces and situations and is a Lecturer in Fashion Styling and Image-Making at The University Of Salford. She is currently writing a series of short stories, What Remains And Other Tales.

Manchester-based artist Cherry Styles often uses photographs of herself and long-time collaborator Christa Harris in her collages; get a flavour of her collage work in this issue of the Shrieking Violet. The pair are currently working on a photo book of Cherry's pictures of Christa taken over the past eight years. See more of her work at www.cherrystyles.co.uk.

This issue also features poetry by Kenn Taylor, a writer and journalist from Merseyside who now lives in London. He has a particular interest in the relationship between community, culture and the urban environment.

Manchester-based filmmaker Richard Howe continues his series on mental health in the movies by looking at Woody Allen's best film of the nineties, Deconstructing Harry. Help Richard by voting for his surreal comedy film Dream Bubble at www.virginmediashorts.co.uk/film/4664/dream-bubble#.UfKdcWC1Zc9 and tweet him about films @rikurichard.

This edition's recipe, Spanish stuffed cabbage leaves, comes from vegetarian blogger and aspiring cafe owner Paul Barrett. Paul blogs about the joys of vegetarian parenting and the path he is taking to get a vegetarian cafe up and running in the North West. He aims to open a new cafe in New Mills in Derbyshire in the autumn.

Three litres of sloe gin, or a tale of two blackthorn bushes

This sloe gin started life in late-summer 2011 as ripe sloes gathered from two blackthorn bushes: one on the banks of the Ashton Canal, Ancoats and one by the River Sett between New Mills and Hayfield in the Peak District.

The Ashton Canal winds its way from central Manchester to the market town of Ashton-under-Lyne, six miles to the east. It's a remarkable journey that takes walkers, cyclists, boats and geese past the boom and bust regeneration of inner-city Manchester (half rebuilt and reinvented as New Islington, half still rubble and spaces left by ruined mills and factories); alongside Manchester City Football Club's glittering stadium and the slightly less glamorous Eastlands retail park (highlight – ASDA); near the shabby Victorian elegance of Philips Park, Manchester's first public park, leading to reclaimed nature reserve Clayton Vale and the Medlock Valley; and next to Fairfield Moravian Settlement, an island of tranquil cobblestones and Georgian cottages surrounded by suburban Tameside with its canal-side sports pitches and pensioners playing waterside pétanque.

We are lucky to have this urban oasis running through the city: the canal would have been closed in the 1960s if the local council had its way. When road transport became widespread, canals went out of fashion. They grew obsolete and expensive to maintain – and it took volunteers across the country long and laborious hours to restore Britain's canal network. These campaigners reimagined a new use for the inland waterways as sites of leisure and tourism – for boating holidays and afternoon walks – rather than toil – horses and boats still hauled coal and other goods along canals, including the Ashton, well into the twentieth century, the purpose for which they had been built centuries before. At Ashton-under-Lyne, the Ashton Canal hits the Portland Basin (home to the Wooden Canal Boat Society and Portland Basin Museum), where canal adventurers head south east onto the Peak Forest Canal to continue their journey through the Cheshire towns of Hyde and Marple and then on to New Mills (a place defined by its spectacular geography; the town rises up into the hills as the rivers Sett and Goyt descend into sunken Torrs below) and Whaley Bridge in Derbyshire, where the canal comes to an end.

The second blackthorn bush was encountered along the Sett Valley Trail between New Mills and Hayfield on a rainy yet peaceful bank holiday weekend walk. Hayfield is a picturesque rural village overlooked by the Peak District National Park's highest point, Kinder Scout – a landmark visible back in the city, from Ancoats, where this story starts. In April 1932, Kinder was the scene of one of Britain's most famous protests. Several hundred ramblers from Manchester and the surrounding region, including folk singer Ewan MacColl, led a mass trespass up Kinder Scout to protest that what had previously been common land had been taken over by private interests. It's them we must thank for our rights to roam over Britain's countryside today, something we can take for granted: the ability to explore and reach out from the crowded cities around us, to wander at our leisure.

2012 will be the 80th anniversary of the Kinder Trespass. Find out more at http://kindertrespass.com or visit Salford's Working Class Movement Library, which holds material related to the protest.

The Golden Age of Canals, an excellent BBC4 programme about the formation of the Inland Waterways, mass activism to save canals and their changing uses, will be repeated on Monday at 7pm.