For more than 30 years, Vique Martin has been embedded in punk and hardcore, helping build and document the scene from the inside. From starting Simba Fanzine and Simba Records in the U.K. to running Revelation Europe, relocating to Southern California, and spending two decades at Revelation Records, her story mirrors the evolution of the scene itself. Boys in Bands, her latest book, is a collection of candid photographs from the 1990s hardcore world.

Shot in a pre-smartphone era of handwritten letters, long drives, couch surfing, and borrowed time, the images capture bands and friends hanging out, killing time, and living their lives. Featuring future and current members of bands like Refused, Texas Is the Reason, Swing Kids, Chamberlain, The Promise Ring, The Locust, and Kill Holiday, the book isn’t about myth-making or nostalgia. It’s about community, friendship, and the quiet moments that made the scene what it was. In this conversation, Vique reflects on feminism and punk, documenting a world before everything was content made for Instagram, and why archiving these lives still matters. 

Tell me about yourself.  You have decades of experience in music. You ran labels and worked at labels and made zines and now this book, 

So I started doing Simba Fanzine in 1991, and then I started doing Simba Records in 1994, which expanded to be a distro (mostly via mail order, back before everyone ordered online). And then in 1996, I took over the title of “Revelation Europe.” And so, for a couple of years, I ran Revelation Europe, and then Jordan (the owner of Revelation) offered me a job in the U.S. And in ’98, I moved to the U.S. to work at Revelation Records, headquartered in Southern California, and I’ve been in SoCal ever since. I worked at Revelation Records as the manager and the distribution manager for 20 years and three months, and I now work at Pirates Press Records, and I’ve been there nearly seven years. 

I still run Simba Records and put out one release every two years, maybe. I did a collection of my zines as a book in 2012, and I just put out my second book, which is a collection of photographs of bands hanging out in the ’90s. 

How did you get into punk rock?

I really struggled with music my whole life because I didn’t really like most of the lyrics. I became a radical feminist when I was 12 and grew up in Brighton, which is like the San Francisco of the U.K. It’s the most left wing, LGBTQIA+-inclusive city, in many ways, in the U.K.  It’s a really radical city to grow up in. You’re just radicalized by your environment the same way you would be if you grew up in San Francisco or Berkeley or something like that. When I was 14, I listened exclusively to Billy Bragg. When I was 15, I discovered Devo. My musical world was very limited by lyrics that meant something to me. I listened to Billy Bragg and Devo exclusively for two years! And then, when I was 17, I had a crush on a boy who I knew liked Devo, and he had four other band t-shirts. One day I took the train to London and I bought the four LPs depicted on his shirts—Black Flag, Minor Threat, Descendants, and Youth Of Today. 

And then those records, like, blew your mind?

Yes and no. I mean, in some ways they were great, and in other ways, they weren’t. I’d already started dabbling in Crass and Conflict, and I really love the Crass Penis Envy album. It’s such a fucking great record. And I’ve always been drawn to feminist lyrics. And I always found hardcore, you know, difficult because it’s such a sausage fest. I was drawn to some bands more than others. And I definitely went down that rabbit hole that one did in the ’80s and ’90s of looking at lyric sheets and figuring out, “OK, well, if I like this band, what else was also released on Dischord?” I’m happy to admit that whilst Minor Threat are great, Rites of Spring and Embrace are better. I started to find what I truly loved—which became the hardcore that mattered most to me. 

What was the hardcore that mattered most to you?

Bands like Policy of Three and Greyhouse, the bands that played more of a post-hardcore style. But more with bands like Policy of Three, where politics was included. I definitely appreciated all of the politics on labels like Ebullition, but not a lot of their releases really resonated with me. I love the Swing Kids. I also love post-hardcore. I love Chamberlain; I love Samuel. You know, bands like that. Bands like Kill Holiday. It doesn’t always have to be political to mean the most to me. But the ones that do include that have this really special place in my heart.  

And then I think that kind of lands you into this whole scene of what’s in the book? 

Yeah. I started going to the east coast of America in ‘93, meeting the women that I’d been corresponding with that wrote zines. I was part of this group of straight-edge women that did zines, put on shows, and were really, really present in their scenes in their retrospective cities. Our friend group was (and is) called Chicks Up Front Posse. And some of those women are still some of my closest friends now. From ‘93 to when I moved to the US in ‘98, I was on the East Coast for three, four, five months of the year. So I saw a lot of bands and spent a lot of time going to shows and hanging out. And then from ’96 to ’98, when I was running Revelation Europe in the U.K., I was also booking tours and tour managing. So a lot of those photos are from those tours. 

Lisa Johnson from the Punk Rock Museum hit me up three years ago and asked for my hangout photos rather than live photos of bands, because they already had so many of those. Once I sent her my photo collection, she said, “You should do a coffee table book.” I was hesitant, as I was already working on my second book, but in the end, I got this one finished first. It took a while. Sometimes it’s hard to find the right words to say about your exes. 

Seeing these candid snapshots is interesting. It’s kind of like, you know, you’re snooping around at a friend’s house and they have a shoebox full of photos, and you’re like, “Oh, I remember this!” 

Absolutely, absolutely.  I’m also somebody that has all of my photos, for the most part, in photo albums. So you can look through my decades of photos in albums. This is a condensed version of that. But I think it’s really nice that whilst in this era of everybody’s photos being on the cloud or photo archives on Instagram is great—There’s nothing like the fucking printed page. There isn’t. I’m not somebody who likes looking at things on a screen. I don’t own a Kindle. I still read books. You know what I mean?  I like vinyl. I like books. I like printed photographs.  

And back then, nobody carried cameras in their pocket. We didn’t have iPhones. We didn’t have this immediacy of taking a photo and capturing the moment. Also, developing photos was expensive, and camera film was expensive. And so we only did it when we were on vacation and special occasions. And because my travel in America was kind of vacation, I took a lot of photos. 

And, God, I wish I’d taken more—At the time I thought I was taking a lot, but in hindsight I have one photo of each person. When I was putting it together, it kind of reminded me of when you look through a coffee table book of ’60s mods or Carnaby Street ’70s punks. It really represents the fashion, the haircuts, the accessories, and the clothes of the ‘90s. Which for those of us who were in our teenagers or 20s in the ’90s, it feels like it was 15 years ago, but it wasn’t—It was 30 years ago. And it feels silly to archive something like that so recently. But one of my friends said, “Well, somebody’s got to do it first.”

And then there is the difficulty when you’re trying to remember a name and a date and a geographical location.  I wanted to do it now before I forget more because things just get hazier and hazier as the years pass.  

Totally. I think you kind of touched on this, but, most of the pictures are obviously pre-internet-in-your-pocket, pre-social media era. While putting together the book, and writing, you probably thought a lot about that. Like, what do you think that we’ve gained or lost in that time? You know, it’s so radically different. 

You know, I think we’ve lost patience. I think we had a lot more patience back then. The idea now of having a crush on somebody and sending them a letter, and waiting to get a letter back? Yeah. That seems crazy, right? 

Yeah. Like now, my daughter is waiting on the other side of the text message with the ‘dot, dot, dot’ … Someone’s typing. You know? 

Yeah. So I think we’ve lost patience.  But I think that if you were dating somebody, it gave you space, and it gave you time to process your feelings and figure out what you wanted. And all of those things feel lost that now everything is so instantaneous. 

Yeah.

There’s no time to even gather your thoughts. Because you know, people will think if you don’t write back to that message, “Oh, well, you’re not interested”. So dating has drastically changed because of that. But also, I was recently in a long distance relationship for two years—and the ability to talk for however long you want, whenever you want is beautiful. I remember going and standing in a phone box for four hours at a time in the U.K. in order to be able to talk to somebody. And I’m glad I don’t have to do that. And I love how many photographs we can take and how often we can take them and how many memories we can have record of. Because that’s lovely. And the convenience of the camera being so small in our pockets that I don’t have to take a bag everywhere. So lovely. But, you know, it was also the ’90s, so everybody had a backpack anyway

You wrote something in the book about “the magic in the waiting”—that everything wasn’t so immediate and in-your-face. 

And that there’s beauty in anticipation and hope. That’s part of the beauty of life. And we don’t really appreciate that anymore, I don’t think. 

Let’s talk about nostalgia. Personally, I kind of struggle with it.  The things that I did decades ago were super important to me, but I try to avoid being too trapped in the past. But, at the same time I’m super sentimental. I’ve got tons of boxes of memories and photos and artifacts and weird stuff that I’ve been literally dragging across the country and from apartment to house to apartment for decades. So I’m wondering how you think about it?

I’m not really that nostalgic or sentimental. But if my house was gonna burn down, I probably would grab my photos. 

Yeah. 

And that was also another reason for doing this was because I’m really glad that if I lost my photos to a house fire, at least the ’90s, ones would be mostly preserved. Doing the lead-up to the book, I scanned in another 400 photos that didn’t make it in the book, and I’m slowly posting them on my Simba Records Instagram. So for pretty much all of my ’90s photos, a good scan has been made. I would still probably grab my photos, or maybe my two wooden boxes of love letters. But that’s partly because one of the boxes was my dad’s when he did his national service, when he was 16. So it’s the box itself that I’m sentimental about.

The things I’m probably most sentimental about are my parents’ possessions. I lost my parents when I was 23 and 27, so I own things like their wedding dinner service. I’m very sentimental about anything that was my mum’s or my dad’s, to the point where somebody had to persuade me to throw away a 40-year-old wooden spoon the year before last, saying, “The wood is very soft. I don’t think this is good anymore.” And I said, “But it was my mom’s!” And Murph was like, “Yeah, but you need to put it in the trash. I’ll buy you a new wooden spoon.” And I’m like, “OK, OK.” But then he didn’t—and sentimental things should always be replaced. So maybe I AM really sentimental—but not that nostalgic? But about random things that are only meaningful to me. Every time I use something in my house that was a gift, or belonged to someone else, I think of the person that bought it for me. So perhaps I’m just ridiculously emo? 

I can totally relate. What’s interesting to me is that when I was looking through the book was that I didn’t get the sense that this was a nostalgia trip. 

Nobody’s asked me about that in the interviews I’ve been doing. And when I stop and think about it, I think it’s because most of the people that are in the book are still in my life. And I love the people that they are now. They’re much better versions of themselves than the dicks they were when they were 20. I’m a much better person than I was when I was 20. You know what I mean?

Yeah, I think it’s the nostalgia thing, like the rekindling of all these emo bands that are reviving, and that type of thing. This nostalgia factory that, I don’t know, maybe I’m being too jaded or whatever, but is, like, just cranking along.

I mean, I get nostalgic when I see a band to some extent, and it’s a visceral response that the opening chords to a song start and tears just run down my face, and I have no control over that whatsoever.

But there are probably only about 10 or 12 bands that will do that to me. But I’m a fucking weepy mess when they play. Promise Ring, Kill Holiday, and Chamberlain are the hardest for me, but they’re also the best for me. But Elliot gets me going. I was crying at Mineral, at BFF, I was a wreck at Policy of 3 last month, and Swing Kids get me going too. So there’s a few. Samuel. And Swiz. So, yeah, maybe 10 bands. It’s not a huge list. And I don’t know whether it’s nostalgia. It’s that there’s this part of me that was positive I was never going to get to experience this again. And this well of joy that comes up—It transforms into tears. 

Totally. I don’t think that is the same as nostalgia, because I’ve had the same experience with live music, a physical response to hearing that bass line or whatever.  A lot of that also has to do with the community of people and experiences. It just all comes back, and it’s amazing and beautiful.

Absolutely. 

The thing I was trying to process was ,on one hand, you’ve got a reissue factory over here and a band reunion fest over there. And then looking at your book of photos, it was a lot more like grabbing the photo album off your shelf and flipping through.

That makes me really happy. I can see what you’re saying. And it is hard with reissues because when I did the Greyhouse reissue, we didn’t even put a single photo or any lyrics in, and some people were disappointed that it was just the music. You guys have been complaining that you didn’t have the music to listen to. Here’s the music. If you want to collect all their photos and their lyrics, then you go and do that. Because I care about the music. I love a good box set as much as the next person where someone has painstakingly put together everything. But it is also hard to do in an authentic and connecting way, I think.

When I look at the book I was also just trying to figure out why I don’t I get this nostalgia trip vibe from this book. And maybe it’s because they are these informal portraits. These kids being dorky kids, you know? It captures a level of sweetness and innocence of these friendships. 

I tried to keep the text short and let the pictures speak for themselves. And I do think there is a sweetness to it. A bunch of hardcore kids on tour or having dinner or hanging out. There was never a plan, and there didn’t need to be a plan. I hope that millennials had that and that Gen Zs are having that now, you know, but the world also feels so much harder now. 

The other thing I wonder, looking at this big collection of snapshots, is whether that is even possible today? You know? Everybody expects something’s going to show up on Instagram or what? 

 All of these photos were taken with no expectations. And nobody was following the latest trend. Whether it’s holding up their fingers or sticking their tongue out. Everything was authentically who they were. And you never had any expectation that it was going to be “used” or “posted” or not. They weren’t even concepts that we had names for. Kids these days really must struggle with that

It’s interesting. And then I guess maybe the last bit on the nostalgia, the book avoids the “It was all so much better back in the day” angle, which is what I think my real problem is with nostalgia. And, you know when you see some documentary of some band, and it’s just a lot of people talking about how awesome it used to be. And I think, “ugh, no!”

You didn’t say that when you were stuck on the side of the road in Denmark, when your van nearly flipped. And you have no cell phone and you have no maps and you have nothing. You know what I mean?  It certainly wasn’t very easy to be vegan on tour back then. You know, there’s so many things that were a real struggle. But I do think our generation is probably the last one that had an innocence in those terms of certain things. And that might be defined as better. But maybe not? 

But I am really glad that you don’t think that it came off either as nostalgic or that things were so much better in my day. I don’t identify as a nostalgic person.  I’m also somebody who believes that everybody thinks music was better in their day, but that’s because of your brain development. Every generation thinks that—because there’s actual neurological pathways that close up to music in your early 20s. It’s science that we ALL feel like that. Not that the music is better!

What don’t you have documentation of during this time that you wish you had? 

Oh, that’s a good question. Well, there are a lot of photos that are not in the book. Just so that people understand, I’m working on a third book that’s about Chicks Up Front. It would seem from looking at this book that I barely had any female friends. That was absolutely not the case. And there will be a ton of girl photos rather than boy photos in the Chicks Up Front book. The Chicks Up Front book is actually way more involved. I interviewed several of the Chicks Up Front and a bunch of other women that were involved in hardcore before and after me. So it’s actually gonna have a shit ton of text. It’s gonna be a very, very different book. It’s not going to be a photo book. It’s going to be a book. And then will have a ton of photos in it.  

I barely took any photos on the Refused and Ink and Dagger tour. I think there’s only two in the book. I barely took any photos on the Locust /Jenny Piccolo tour, considering it was a month. Even looking at the Kill Holiday European tour—There should have been a lot more for a month. 

I think there are also a bunch of lost photos that over the years I pared down. You know, “I don’t even remember this person’s name.” Or “I haven’t remembered this person’s name for 10 years. Why do I still have this photo?” I would throw out photos sometimes. I wish I hadn’t done that. 

I wish I’d taken tons, tons more. I do. Especially of people that I’ve lost. There’s only one photo of me with Eric Allen. I only have, I think, two photos of me with Kim Kinakin and I wish I had more of those. But you also don’t know who you’re going to lose. 

That’s true. I’m super excited about the Chicks Up Front book. I think that sounds like a cool project. When is that going to come out? 

I am planning on doing the bulk of the writing this winter. This autumn has been a crazy time of band reunions, of Policy of Three, Elliott, Swing Kids, and Swiz. I’ve been traveling a lot and my plan is to knuckle down and do it this winter. And the reception to this book has been very motivating because people are genuinely glad that I am archiving this.  

I’ve got all the photos scanned in and it’s not only my photos of the ladies. It’s also Moon’s photos and Kim Nolan’s photos. So there’s a lot of photos that people have never seen. I’ve never posted them on social media and neither have they. But there’s also a lot of classics. There’s a photo that’s always shared of Chicks Up Front—There’s  seven or eight of us X’d up and kicking, us standing together at the first More Than Music festival. And that’s where a lot of us met for the first time. But there’s a bunch of photos that were In Daisy’s zine Not Even. Or in my zine, Simba. But there’s a ton that has never been shared, and I think it’s gonna be fun

It sounds like it’ll be a great document of something that ought to be documented.   

This Chicks Up Front book started because I was on a panel about a different straight-edge book that came out, where most of the people interviewed were men because the men were in the bands. And an audience member of the book panel brought up whether somebody is ever going to write a book about the women that were involved. Because we were all so much more behind the scenes—doing zines, putting on shows, etc. So the Chicks Up Front book needs to be written. And it needs to be written by one of us. And if that’s going to happen, I’m the only person that’s going to fucking do it.  

And so in 2018 and 2019, I did a bunch of interviews and started collecting all the photos. And I did my last interview the week before lockdown in March of 2020. And then I wasn’t creatively inspired in 2020 or 2021. And in 2022, I started working on this photo book—Everything takes longer than expected, but I’m determined that it’s not going to take another three years. I’m highly motivated to crank it out this winter. 

After seeing a bunch of friends play the Best Friends Forever fest what you wrote, about going to that festival in D.C. (Positive Force 40th anniversary) resonated with me when you said putting together the book was reminding you of  who you were, who you’ve been, who you are today, who you want to be. I thought that was beautiful. It really resonated for me. And I think that’s why you are getting such positive feedback—It’s because this documentation, it’s not a nostalgia trip, but it’s the visual equivalent of hearing the opening chords to that song that you love.

You just made me well up with tears saying that. Thank you. A friend here ordered the book who is maybe 12 years younger than me. So she got into hardcore and post-hardcore way later. I sent it to her and I put a note in there that said, “I don’t know how many of the bands you’re familiar with, but my hope is that even if none of the bands are familiar to you, that there is something about this that resonates with everyone with regard to the emotional attachments that we make in our 20s and the friendships that we build.” I hoped that this could be a universal theme that people could feel sentimental about without being nostalgic over. 

I think the older we get, it’s not that those friendships are better. It’s not like a friendship is more important because you’ve had it for 30 years as opposed to 20. But when those people have stuck around in your life and you have been through the fucking ups and downs of life and you have years upon years of shared memories. I think it makes those relationships even more significant. And especially when you don’t see each other very often because of adulthood, it makes you treasure those moments when you do get quality time with them. Then we can look back on these times in our 20s when we had all the fucking time and not a care in the world and we can go “Oh, wasn’t that lovely?” Not in a “life was better then.” It was just lovely. I hope that there are universal themes of friendship that people can get from the book, I really do. And the fact that that seemed to have resonated with you makes me really happy. 

Boys in Bands is out now, and you can order it here. Follow Vique Martin on Instagram to keep up with future announcements.

Photo Credit: Lisa Johnson