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Savage Messiah
Introduction by Mark Fisher
Preface by Greil Marcus
The acclaimed art fanzine’s psychogeographic drifts through a ruined city
Savage Messiah collects the entire set of Laura Grace Ford’s fanzine to date. Part graphic novel, part artwork, the book is both an angry polemic against the marginalisation of the city’s working class and an exploration of the cracks that open up in urban space.
Preface by Greil Marcus
The acclaimed art fanzine’s psychogeographic drifts through a ruined city
Savage Messiah collects the entire set of Laura Grace Ford’s fanzine to date. Part graphic novel, part artwork, the book is both an angry polemic against the marginalisation of the city’s working class and an exploration of the cracks that open up in urban space.
496 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2011
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807 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
July 16, 2012
This is my favourite book I've read this year and definitely the best book about London I've ever read. I just totally loved it. It's the kind of psychogeography book about London I wanted Iain Sinclair to write, but instead found him too posh. This is London from below. The history and stories of squats and punks and a desperate housing shortage and prices going up and a future wasteland. Sometimes seeming autobiographical sometimes more like short stories but it always feels very real. Mixed with photos and artworks as a cut and paste zine rather than a traditional comic the art just multiplies the feelings on the page. There's a real feeling of depression, hopelessness and tragedy here but there's also an overwhelming sense of life. Each chapter looks at a different part of London but overall you get a sense of how interconnected it all is. This book is absoultely fascinating. I don't think it's for everyone but I think I know many people that would really love this too.
August 28, 2021
‘A Class War is being waged, but only one side is fighting. Choose your weapons, choose your sides.’
👊🏼✊🏼
👊🏼✊🏼
August 16, 2016
This is a collection of a zine created, written, arted, put together by Laura Oldfield Ford that chronicles her travels through and stories about London 2005 - 2009 with memory jaunts back to the 80s and 90s and up to the dystopian future of 2013.
In a way, reading it reminded me of reading the Beverly Cleary books as a kid. The state and place of my fucked up childhood made me approach those books with the eye of an amateur anthropologist. “Tell me of these things called suburbs. Show me how children have neighborhood friends.” In the case of Savage Messiah, I’m a dweller in the post-urban ahistorical sprawl of Los Angeles. So Oldfield shows me what it’s like to live and move in an old, layered, compact city. A city where you can move around on foot and discover all the hidden ways, the forgotten paths, the overgrown lots in the middle of one of the world’s modern capitals.
She stands at the opposite psychogeographical pole from Iain Sinclair, the other chronicler of the streets of London. He’s established, an old guy. He’s got books, columns, appearances in documentaries. He’s a face. Oldfield’s just a young person wandering the streets and paths of London, from squat to rave to demo to couch. And always watched by the cameras and the cops and the cops with cameras. The pall of surveillance and power drapes her every movement and it’s a testament to her skills as a flaneuse that she can sometimes find the hidden and forgotten ways and places to take her out from underneath that oppression. She has nothing but the precarity of all those her age.
Using nothing more than collaged photos, sketches, and text laid out skewed in chunks over the images, she evokes her London with a skill that makes the reader feels the streets, the heat, fugged out pubs, the rush of the drugs coming on as the DJ drops the beat.
I first ran across a mention of this collection in Greil Marcus’ Rock and Roll Top Ten (and I pay special attention to anything he says, one of the most influential writers in my life), and the Mark Fisher wrote about Laura Oldfield Ford and Savage Messiah in his collection, Ghosts Of My Life.
Overgrown old brick buildings, canals, the hidden, unknown, forgotten parts of London. The parts that have avoided the commercial neoliberal rebuilding of London into a plastic city. And walking, always walking (again, no one walks in LA). A city revealing its secrets to the pedestrian, the pedestrian who’s fleeing the fears and pressures of the precarious life.
Ballardian collages of parking lots, brutalist tower blocks, and courtyards. Mainly empty. She chooses her shots so that there are very few or no people on the streets, on the stairs, on the estates, in the hallways, in the doorways. The presence of people come from the sketched portraits pasted, taped, glued over the photos. Laying claim to the abandoned territory. Ghosts.
Alleys, back streets, the gaps in the fences, all the hidden ways known to only the few. All illuminated in the orange sodium glare of the streetlights, the glowing urban night sky (tuned to a dead channel? loglo?).
And the trees. And the bushes. And the vines. The lushness of these hidden places, lush and green and growing even in the black and white photos. Another difference between here and there. Urban jungle vs desert sprawl. Again, showing me different ways, places that people live.
The pictures and sketches frame stories of the lives in these places. People going from pub to apartment to party. Bad decisions made in bad boozers because there are no good decisions to be made. But at least those bad decisions give a person a momentary freedom. People trying to live their lives, trying to figure out how to live their lives, bashing up against the bars.
Stories of the past. Past struggles: riots, demonstrations, all in the past. Past events: raves, gatherings, parties, industrial gigs blasting noise out of the all important and necessary sound systems, speaker stacks. The reverberations still echo in the streets, in the abandoned buildings, in the estate courtyards where the ghost noises bounce off the concrete buildings.
Use Savage Messiah as a map. Ford’s the cartographer making the map become the territory because she brings it to life. Keeps the city alive in our minds. She makes sure that this city and these people who live in it will never die because they’ll never be forgotten.
In a way, reading it reminded me of reading the Beverly Cleary books as a kid. The state and place of my fucked up childhood made me approach those books with the eye of an amateur anthropologist. “Tell me of these things called suburbs. Show me how children have neighborhood friends.” In the case of Savage Messiah, I’m a dweller in the post-urban ahistorical sprawl of Los Angeles. So Oldfield shows me what it’s like to live and move in an old, layered, compact city. A city where you can move around on foot and discover all the hidden ways, the forgotten paths, the overgrown lots in the middle of one of the world’s modern capitals.
She stands at the opposite psychogeographical pole from Iain Sinclair, the other chronicler of the streets of London. He’s established, an old guy. He’s got books, columns, appearances in documentaries. He’s a face. Oldfield’s just a young person wandering the streets and paths of London, from squat to rave to demo to couch. And always watched by the cameras and the cops and the cops with cameras. The pall of surveillance and power drapes her every movement and it’s a testament to her skills as a flaneuse that she can sometimes find the hidden and forgotten ways and places to take her out from underneath that oppression. She has nothing but the precarity of all those her age.
Using nothing more than collaged photos, sketches, and text laid out skewed in chunks over the images, she evokes her London with a skill that makes the reader feels the streets, the heat, fugged out pubs, the rush of the drugs coming on as the DJ drops the beat.
I first ran across a mention of this collection in Greil Marcus’ Rock and Roll Top Ten (and I pay special attention to anything he says, one of the most influential writers in my life), and the Mark Fisher wrote about Laura Oldfield Ford and Savage Messiah in his collection, Ghosts Of My Life.
Overgrown old brick buildings, canals, the hidden, unknown, forgotten parts of London. The parts that have avoided the commercial neoliberal rebuilding of London into a plastic city. And walking, always walking (again, no one walks in LA). A city revealing its secrets to the pedestrian, the pedestrian who’s fleeing the fears and pressures of the precarious life.
Ballardian collages of parking lots, brutalist tower blocks, and courtyards. Mainly empty. She chooses her shots so that there are very few or no people on the streets, on the stairs, on the estates, in the hallways, in the doorways. The presence of people come from the sketched portraits pasted, taped, glued over the photos. Laying claim to the abandoned territory. Ghosts.
Alleys, back streets, the gaps in the fences, all the hidden ways known to only the few. All illuminated in the orange sodium glare of the streetlights, the glowing urban night sky (tuned to a dead channel? loglo?).
And the trees. And the bushes. And the vines. The lushness of these hidden places, lush and green and growing even in the black and white photos. Another difference between here and there. Urban jungle vs desert sprawl. Again, showing me different ways, places that people live.
The pictures and sketches frame stories of the lives in these places. People going from pub to apartment to party. Bad decisions made in bad boozers because there are no good decisions to be made. But at least those bad decisions give a person a momentary freedom. People trying to live their lives, trying to figure out how to live their lives, bashing up against the bars.
Stories of the past. Past struggles: riots, demonstrations, all in the past. Past events: raves, gatherings, parties, industrial gigs blasting noise out of the all important and necessary sound systems, speaker stacks. The reverberations still echo in the streets, in the abandoned buildings, in the estate courtyards where the ghost noises bounce off the concrete buildings.
Use Savage Messiah as a map. Ford’s the cartographer making the map become the territory because she brings it to life. Keeps the city alive in our minds. She makes sure that this city and these people who live in it will never die because they’ll never be forgotten.
April 19, 2022
So so beautiful.
You must, surely, have known a gruff punkish boy or a frail but defiant pale chain smoking girl? Or an effing blinding bloke with a two litre bottle of cider and yellow fingers? Some nomadic Peace Convoy types? Where are they now? Absorbed or still out on the margins somewhere, in a side street full of ragworts and Ford Fiestas? More likely in some shabby seaside town where the developers haven't quite taken over. A house boat, caravan, in Spain maybe.
Savage Messiah is about working class lives as the glitz and superficiality are sprayed about like a kind of disinfectant and, street by street, the thieves move in, then the petitions get started, the ASBOs are handed down, and the scruffs are evicted. Corner shops and pubs and squats and small industrial units erased, smoothed over. In London, as documented here, but in cities up and down the UK, in Atlanta and San Francisco and Amsterdam and Berlin and Vienna.
Everywhere is the same now. Everything is the same now. Everyone is the same now, despite their little identity tags: the hive mind rules. I hate it.
But a little of the history is preserved here, the places, people, music, spirit. Very moving, and warmly recommended.
You must, surely, have known a gruff punkish boy or a frail but defiant pale chain smoking girl? Or an effing blinding bloke with a two litre bottle of cider and yellow fingers? Some nomadic Peace Convoy types? Where are they now? Absorbed or still out on the margins somewhere, in a side street full of ragworts and Ford Fiestas? More likely in some shabby seaside town where the developers haven't quite taken over. A house boat, caravan, in Spain maybe.
Savage Messiah is about working class lives as the glitz and superficiality are sprayed about like a kind of disinfectant and, street by street, the thieves move in, then the petitions get started, the ASBOs are handed down, and the scruffs are evicted. Corner shops and pubs and squats and small industrial units erased, smoothed over. In London, as documented here, but in cities up and down the UK, in Atlanta and San Francisco and Amsterdam and Berlin and Vienna.
Everywhere is the same now. Everything is the same now. Everyone is the same now, despite their little identity tags: the hive mind rules. I hate it.
But a little of the history is preserved here, the places, people, music, spirit. Very moving, and warmly recommended.
October 29, 2019
Fabulous psych geographical drift through the lost liminal spaces of london. Genius art work too !
August 19, 2013
A remarkable collection of zines that work well together, and although it takes some getting used to the disjointedness, the format somehow works. I bought this in an art gallery bookshop and it's obvious she is an artist first and foremost. Her journey through the ruins of the city marries the lowlife and poetic. Beautiful, strange, enigmatic and disturbing, she haunts forgotten zones of the city and at times it's hard to know whether this is the past, present or future. One of the most interesting and affecting books I have read in a long time. An acquired taste but if the psycho geographical genre is of interest, then this is worth a look.
November 9, 2025
This is a real mood. Daily life mashed into urban description with strange vignettes of workplaces, street scenes, quotes from critical theorists, sometimes even dystopian future imaginings, all with eerie, repeated illustration and photographs. Inspiring psychogeography.
February 7, 2017
Gorgeously apocalyptic Debordian disorientation; radical; disruptive; intoxicating, in ways both pleasurable and un-, on several levels.
August 31, 2024
3.5 Stars!
We want YOUR house
Part Debord and the Situationists and part Sinclair and the Psychogeographers, these pages read like gritty, dirty shards of urban melancholia and nostalgia, you can almost smell the stale smoke and hear the unprovoked abuse calling out as you slip through the cracks of these Brutalist Ballardian landscapes where the threat of eviction and privatisation loom large, casting a constant shadow over whole communities.
“I’ve looked into the future and I can’t find myself anywhere.”
The presentation itself very much harks back and pays homage to the many innovative DIY Punk/Post-Punk zines of the late 70s and early 80s, this is further reflected in the many references to much of the music of the same era from The Clash and Sex Pistols to Crass and Throbbing Gristle. Often the way that Ford has chosen to draw some of her characters, gives them a pale, ghostly look so they appear like lost souls, haunting the pages of the broken, barren landscapes searching for the places that were taken or stolen from them.
FUCK OFF MIDDLE CLASS WANKERS
Ford also draws on aspects of architecture, poetry and literature to further enhance her feelings on the encroachment and take-over of these areas. In one sense she tries to recapture the magic of the accidental discovery, the art of drifting and the thrill of ambling aimlessly through your own city without the overwhelming force of consumerism, privatisation and greed bearing down on you.
Local community culture has been bulldozed and sold off to make way for cold, clinical cleansing of gentrification which washes away the heart and soul of communities, destroying cultures to make way for a kleptocratic global elite, and the corrupt professional classes, who bring with them a forest of corporate logos, bland, bloated architecture and billionaire, absentee landlords who have no interest in the shared values which existed before.
Ultimately she raises vital issues about how we view and engage with our surroundings and the immeasurable value of interaction with friends and strangers alike – something which was once called community and identity.
November 14, 2019
Initially I wondered how the hell I was going to get through 464 pages of listy prose and drawings of boys who looked like Terry Hall, girls like Siouxsie Sioux. But it starts to take hold, like drinking on an empty stomach, and before long you’re reeling with Ford through endless punk rock shadows of London; a situationist dérive with Ford at the helm. She likes bad boys. Why does her forever wasted opportunist sex seem incongruous with her bibliography of heady philosophers, Situationists and novelists? That’s on me. Her drawings improve, extend, textures grow in facility. Her typewriter text is collaged over photographs of derelict London. Her tribe is at war with the cops and the march of gentrification. How old is she? It’s 2012 but the graffiti’s 1984. Time locks open and close like a Greil Marcus fancy (he writes the preface), like Queen Elizabeth I and Adam Ant in Jarman’s Jubilee from '78. I’d almost lost my own squatted London of 1989, fly-pitching at Camden Lock at the end of the Cold War. It’s weirdly more vivid through Ford’s collection of zines come diaries / prose / psychogeography… Bricks and mortar, weeds and flowers, never trees.
My only misgiving is the contradiction within Ford’s philosophy; she’s so in love with the detritus and stolen zones of the city that despite the battles of her allies, she doesn’t really want security, she’d find that suffocating. She’s addicted to poverty and danger. In her description of an aging punk pulling away from the domesticity of his wife and babies, Ford sympathises with him, not with the straight wife, who’ll be left in the lurch. Though as the narrative meanders toward the present day (through this compile of an episodic zine) she’s on the wrong side of power/right side of history.
My only misgiving is the contradiction within Ford’s philosophy; she’s so in love with the detritus and stolen zones of the city that despite the battles of her allies, she doesn’t really want security, she’d find that suffocating. She’s addicted to poverty and danger. In her description of an aging punk pulling away from the domesticity of his wife and babies, Ford sympathises with him, not with the straight wife, who’ll be left in the lurch. Though as the narrative meanders toward the present day (through this compile of an episodic zine) she’s on the wrong side of power/right side of history.
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July 22, 2020check me out, i read this in under a month!
the picture it paints of london is absurdly white, which combined with the liberal use of random swastika drawings (more evidence of the writer’s really, really white standpoint) and the speaker’s aloof crustpunk schtick makes it insufferable at times. the story about tunde in the heathrow chapter is one of the most interesting / moving.
that said - and to be clear: it really fucked me off - it has a lot of charm and beauty, it’s probably one of the best modern works of psychogeography. formally i’m really interested in it, although anyone saying it’s a graphic novel... i’m a formal descriptivist but very little of this *behaves* like a comic. the silent portions when the images take over are, for me, the most interesting.
the picture it paints of london is absurdly white, which combined with the liberal use of random swastika drawings (more evidence of the writer’s really, really white standpoint) and the speaker’s aloof crustpunk schtick makes it insufferable at times. the story about tunde in the heathrow chapter is one of the most interesting / moving.
that said - and to be clear: it really fucked me off - it has a lot of charm and beauty, it’s probably one of the best modern works of psychogeography. formally i’m really interested in it, although anyone saying it’s a graphic novel... i’m a formal descriptivist but very little of this *behaves* like a comic. the silent portions when the images take over are, for me, the most interesting.
February 12, 2023
I picked this book because Mark Fisher wrote the introduction (really liked his part btw) and also because I was fascinated by the term psychogeography. I liked the art, liked the personal stories, liked the photos, liked the ocassional quotes from poets and situationists (i would love more), but the descriptions of places felt repetitive at times. I hope I will visit London soon.
September 4, 2020
Absolutely amazing! A must read.
August 6, 2019
"But Sofia, you can just go outside..."
"..."
"..."
Read
March 10, 2017*Read for Class*
I don't want to rate this book because I did not finish all of it. I only read a few zines, but I really liked the concept and the collages. Really insightful about contemporary London. Based off what I read though I would give it four stars.
I don't want to rate this book because I did not finish all of it. I only read a few zines, but I really liked the concept and the collages. Really insightful about contemporary London. Based off what I read though I would give it four stars.
March 8, 2012
Couldn't get into it and didn't finish it.
April 14, 2017
Excellent, visually but--for me, anyway--also textually. Yes, it's a London that I recognise in many ways (as well as being very familiar with some of the places in detail because I lived and worked in them). A very exciting read, stimulating and dense use of language. I'll come back to this.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews