Stumpy 1

Punk style zine with a focus on occult and horror films. Early 1990's Produced by Andrew Leavold. 

STUMPY fanzine was my first project, musical or otherwise, as a fresh-faced scenester straight out of uni, frustrated and bored fuckless working at my soul-crushing public service prison sentence. Slapped together on a Centrelink photocopier during teabreaks, with interviews taped on a Tandy micro-cassette recorder and transcribed onto a rickety manual typewriter with an off-centre “e”, it pretty much dominated my existence from late ’91 to early ’94, gave me my unfortunate moniker (“Andrew Stumpy” was truncated even further to just Stumpy, El Stumpo, The Stump Wizard, and very occasionally Rumpled Stumpskin), was directly responsible for my first three bands Mr Bastard, Invisible Empire and Queer, and forged many lasting friendships. Looking back, it’s weird to see my first ever conversation with Lance Sinclair is in Issue One, and long-time partner in crime Cal Crilly was interviewed TWICE in number Two.

From the very first Idiotorial, STUMPY set out as a personal crusade against the prevailing cultural dogma: a sardonic, irreverent and cheerfully profane championing of the musical and filmic one-percenters. My interviews with Fred Negro, Killdozer, Venom P. Stinger, The Splatterheads, and local assholes Big Bongin’ Baby, Alien Virus, Invisible Empire, Noose, were characterized by in-jokes and endless, rambling conversations with people no-one had heard of let alone be willing to spend half an hour of their lives wading through. Plus there’s me trying to be witty, which I’m clearly not, while aiming at dumb AND profound in the same sentence, which only truly gifted writers can pull off, leaving the rest of floundering for air in a sea of pithy one-liners and piss-poor segues.