Mike Diboll founded, produced and published the leading anarcho-punk fanzine TOXIC GRAFITY, producing six issues between 1978-82 \"with various spin-offs.\" Never your typical band-interview-record-review zine, Toxic Grafity set about \"to capture and express the ethos, attitude, aesthetics and politics of anarcho-punk using found images, collages, logos, slogans, ‘rant’, prose, prose-poetry, free verse, and essays.\" Issue 5 carried with it a flexidisc by Crass, featuring the especially recorded song 'Tribal Ribal Revels' which made that issue one of the best-selling zines of the entire period.
After growing disenchantment with the direction of anarcho-punk, Mike withdrew from his close association with Crass and the other residents of Dial House. Following a period of addiction, near homelessness, and a surprise temporary conversion to religion (Islam), he finally embarked on Higher Education, taking a double first in Modern Languages (majoring in Arabic) and Comparative Literature, and graduating with a PhD in the comparative literatures of the British occupation of Egypt 1882-1956.
This specialisation found him working and teaching in Higher Education in Bahrain in 2011, when the \"Arab Spring\" reached the small island nation, leading to a peaceful, carnivalesque uprising and then a brutal and bloody counter-revolution by State forces. Mike witnessed this deadly repression in person, and on this episode discusses the reality of a Bloody Revolution versus the ones we may all have fantasized about and idealised in our fanzine days. The horror also revived the memory of a life-changing incident riding a motorbike to school with friends at the age of 16. Please be warned: this episode contains graphic descriptions of death.
In recent years, despite an ongoing battle against PTSD and Major Depressive Disorder, Mike has revamped Toxic Grafity online, both as a depository for his zine writings and as a public space for new ones. He contributed a chapter on 'Mental Liberation' to the 2018 book Ripped, Torn and Cut: Pop, Politics and Punk Fanzines From 1976, published by Manchester University Press.
Toxic Grafity can be found at
https://toxicgrafity134567235.wordpress.com/
Mike Diboll can be found directly at https://www.facebook.com/mikediboll
The Best of Jamming!: Selections and Stories from the Fanzine That Grew Up 1977-86 is published by Omnibus Press
Tony Fletcher can be found at https://tonyfletcher.net/
Tony's latest music, writing and social media can be accessed from https://linktr.ee/TonyFletcher
His One Step Beyond podcast is at https://shows.acast.com/onestepbeyond
'The Jamming! Fanzine Podcast Theme' is by Noel Fletcher.
Logo by Greg Morton