Earlier this year, the Library was delighted to host a series of recording sessions with the four co-editors of Clod Magazine. For those of you who don't already know, Clod is an independent magazine, founded in Luton in 1987, and now approaching its 40th issue. It appears irregularly, with publication ceasing entirely for seven years at one point. ‘No one noticed’, says their Facebook page.

The Clod editors moonlight as members of a similarly long-established music group called the Knockouts. While the magazine has its origins in the indie music fanzine scene of the 1980s, and maintains a DIY cut-and-paste aesthetic, it is not much concerned with music - and is not itself a fanzine.

Rather than music, the substance here is art, humour, and a decidedly prickly and surreal form of social comment. If the Vorticist artist and writer Wyndham Lewis had lived in South Bedfordshire in the second half of the twentieth century, he might well have come up with something like Clod. As with Wyndham Lewis’s provocative journal Blast, Clod has a penchant for morally upbraiding its readership through didactic and slightly deranged polemics. 

2024 saw the publication of the collected Clod Magazine issues 1-21 in one bumper 660pp volume. Early issues are out-of-print and impossible to find so this initiative was very welcome. I’m pleased to say the Library has acquired a copy for its collection.

It seemed a good time to conduct some interviews on the history of the magazine and to record some readings and, happily, everybody agreed to participate.

ABOVE Clod editors, clockwise from top left: Stephen Whiting; Tim Kingston; Andy Whiting; Andrew Kingston.

The readings were drawn not just from Clod but from a range of related publications, including the short-lived football fanzine TOWN, and Tim Kingston’s 1998 book Kenilworth Sunset? A Luton Town supporter’s journal. We also recorded a selection from the long-running ‘Luton Haiku’ series (five volumes published to date) and some of Andrew Kingston’s non-Clod solo works.

An exciting exclusive was Andy Whiting’s very funny account of the pleasures of following Hitchin Town FC (aka the Canaries). All being well, this should be published in Clod 40.

Here is a short extract from the recordings. This is Stephen Whiting reading from Clod 36: We queue up for boiled fish

ABOVE hand-stamped embellishments are a common feature.