About Are You Scared To Get Happy?

Are You Scared To Get Happy?

Are You Scared To Get Happy? was a Bristol indie music fanzine published between 1985 and 1987, running to just six issues. By any commercial measure it was tiny: handmade, sold at gigs and in a handful of record shops, and gone within two years. By cultural measure it was one of the most consequential British fanzines of the 1980s, because it helped define the sensibility later called twee pop, pioneered the flexi-disc fanzine, and led directly to the founding of Sarah Records, the defining British independent label of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Its story has been retold in Uncut's coverage of Sarah Records and in retrospectives of the indiepop movement it helped to create.

The fanzine was published by Matt Haynes and Mark Carnell, who met as students at the University of Bristol. Haynes continued alone after Carnell left following the third issue, and it was Haynes who, with Clare Wadd, went on to co-found Sarah Records in 1987, the year the fanzine ended. Are You Scared To Get Happy? therefore occupies a rare position: it is both a document of a scene and one of the instruments that brought that scene into being.

Two Students in Bristol

Matt Haynes and Mark Carnell met as students at the University of Bristol, and the fanzine grew from the enthusiasms and arguments of student life in the mid-1980s. Bristol offered gigs, record shops and a student population receptive to music made outside the commercial mainstream. A fanzine was the natural student medium of the period: cheap to produce, free of advertisers and editors, and capable of carrying an argument about music further than conversation could. Haynes and Carnell used it to advocate, with unusual seriousness, for guitar pop that the music press of the day often treated as slight or unfashionable.

The partnership lasted for the first three issues. Carnell then left, and Haynes continued the fanzine alone for issues four to six. That transition matters because the later issues, produced by a single editor, sharpened the publication's identity. What had begun as a shared enthusiasm became a personal manifesto, written, assembled and distributed by one person. The experience of sustaining a fanzine single-handedly, building its network of bands, illustrators, shops and readers, was also the practical apprenticeship for running a record label.

A Lyric for a Title, Hungry Beat for a Model

The title Are You Scared To Get Happy? was taken from a lyric by Hurrah!, the Newcastle guitar band whose melodic, emotionally direct songs embodied the values the fanzine championed. Choosing a question from a song as a title was itself a statement: happiness, in the fanzine's world, was not naivety but a challenge, something listeners and musicians had to be brave enough to want in a decade whose dominant pop moods were irony, grandeur and artifice. The question mark was part of the provocation, addressed to readers as much as to the music industry.

The fanzine's acknowledged inspiration was Hungry Beat, the fanzine published by Kevin Pearce. Pearce's writing demonstrated that a fanzine could be literary as well as enthusiastic, that writing about pop singles could sustain expansive, personal, even poetic prose. Haynes absorbed that lesson thoroughly. Are You Scared To Get Happy? was noted for writing that reached well beyond reviews and listings, treating small independent releases as worthy of the kind of lyrical attention usually reserved for established literature or classic albums.

DIY Production: A5, Colour Photocopy and Collage

The physical character of Are You Scared To Get Happy? was central to its identity. It was produced in A5 format, colour-photocopied, with a collage style that mixed text, imagery and illustration. Colour photocopying was not the cheapest option available to fanzine editors, most of whom worked in black and white, and the choice gave the publication a bright, handmade distinctiveness on a record-shop counter. Illustrations by Elaine, the fanzine's regular illustrator, contributed to a recognisable visual world that matched the music's blend of innocence and sophistication.

Collage was more than decoration. The cut-and-paste method embodied the fanzine's argument that culture could be assembled by its audience rather than handed down by professionals. Readers who saw pages built from fragments, handwriting, drawings and photocopied colour could imagine making something similar themselves, and many in the indiepop scene did. The Bristol fanzine's look helped set expectations for the scene's later artefacts, in which packaging, hand-lettering and small details carried meaning alongside the music itself.

Sold at Gigs and in Two Record Shops

Distribution for a 1980s fanzine was a physical, person-to-person affair, and Are You Scared To Get Happy? was sold at gigs and through named shops: Revolver in Bristol and Record Collector in Sheffield. Those details locate the fanzine in a real circuit. Revolver served its home city, where Haynes could deliver copies and talk to the people who bought them; Record Collector gave it a foothold in Sheffield, another city with a strong independent music culture. Gig sales put the fanzine directly into the hands of audiences already gathered for the kind of music it covered.

This small circuit mattered disproportionately. Fanzines travelled by post, by recommendation and by being left on counters, and a copy sold in Sheffield could influence a band or a future fanzine editor there. The network that Are You Scared To Get Happy? built through gigs and shops became, in large part, the network Sarah Records inherited: bands who had been written about, readers who had become correspondents, and shops willing to stock independent product. The fanzine's distribution list was, in embryo, a label's mailing list.

Writing Twee Before Twee Had a Name

The music Are You Scared To Get Happy? championed is now generally called twee pop, although the fanzine itself was helping to create the category rather than applying a ready-made label. Its focus was on melodic, guitar-based independent pop: songs that valued tunes, emotional openness and a deliberate rejection of rock bluster. Where much of the contemporary music press prized innovation defined as noise, scale or fashion, the fanzine argued for craft, feeling and the perfect three-minute single.

Its writing style reinforced the argument. Accounts of the fanzine consistently describe expansive, lyrical prose, very different from the terse consumer-guide reviewing of the weekly music papers. Haynes wrote about records as experiences and about bands as bearers of a shared sensibility. That approach built loyalty: readers were not just informed, they were recruited into a way of hearing. The fanzine's hardline independent ethic completed the position. Independence was not a distribution detail but a moral and aesthetic commitment, governing which records were praised and how success itself was judged.

The Flexi-Disc Innovation and Sha-La-La

The fanzine's most concrete innovation was its pioneering use of flexi-discs. Through the shared Sha-La-La label, issues of Are You Scared To Get Happy? included flexible records, so that readers received actual music with their magazine. The flexi-disc was a cheap, lightweight format that could be attached to a printed publication, and the fanzine's use of it turned criticism into distribution: instead of only reading about obscure bands, a reader in another city could hear them immediately.

The list of bands whose earliest releases appeared through this route is remarkable. Talulah Gosh, Razorcuts, Baby Lemonade, Remember Fun, The Clouds, The Bachelor Pad, The Siddeleys and Reserve all featured, alongside early Sarah Records bands. Several of those names became central to the history of British indiepop. The flexis gave young bands a first physical release, gave the fanzine a claim on its readers that prose alone could not match, and demonstrated a model, magazine plus music, that blurred the line between publishing and record releasing. Sarah Records, when it came, was in one sense that blur made permanent.

From Fanzine to Sarah Records

In 1987, the year of the fanzine's final issue, Matt Haynes co-founded Sarah Records with Clare Wadd. Sarah went on to become the most mythologised British independent label of its era, famous for its numbered singles, its aesthetic consistency and its principled stance on the economics of independence. The line from Are You Scared To Get Happy? to Sarah is direct and documented: the fanzine's bands, readers, shops and ethics all fed into the label, and coverage of Sarah's history, including Uncut's documentary attention, treats the fanzine as the label's foundation.

Understanding the fanzine explains Sarah's character. A label run by a former fanzine editor treated sleeves, inserts and cataloguing as publishing, and treated its audience as correspondents rather than consumers. The hardline independent ethic that the fanzine preached became the label's practice. Equally, the fanzine's belief that small, melodic pop songs deserved serious, lyrical writing became Sarah's belief that they deserved beautiful, carefully numbered objects. Are You Scared To Get Happy? was the draft; Sarah Records was the fair copy.

Six Issues and a Long Afterlife

Are You Scared To Get Happy? ended in 1987 after six issues, a run too short to be explained by failure. It ended because its editor had found the larger vehicle his work required. Fanzines often die when enthusiasm fades or money runs out; this one was superseded by its own success, its energies transferred intact into a record label. The six issues remain the primary record of a moment when British independent pop was redefining itself around melody, modesty and conviction, written from inside that moment by one of its protagonists.

The fanzine's afterlife has grown as indiepop history has been written. Retrospective coverage, including uDiscover and Uncut's attention to the Sarah story, presents Are You Scared To Get Happy? as essential evidence: of Bristol's place in the scene, of the flexi-disc as a creative format, and of fanzine writing as a literary act. Original copies are artefacts of a do-it-yourself culture that valued colour photocopies and hand assembly over polish. Six issues, two editors, one illustrator and a handful of shops proved sufficient to alter the course of British independent music.