So here we are in the cold of our East London bunker in the middle of February 2025, busier than ever, thinking about ignoring Organ’s 40th birthday next year and just getting on with it, threatening a book we’ll probably never get around to. Marina Organ is busy over there with her weekly Other Rock radio show on London’s unique arts radio station Resonance FM, I’m here writing 98% of the Organ website content and at the same time painting, curating, sometimes raging against the machine and not having time to proofread and not bothering much with social media (yawn).

Here in 2025 the Organ website is read, or at least visited by around 10,000 people a week, often far more when a band, label, an art gallery, artist or curator can be bothered to return the support and share a link when they’re covered. Organ is about the here and now, there is quite a history though…    

ORGAN , kissing big ugly sharks, in one form or another since 1986 – Art, Music, Underculture, words, links, art, art galleries, bands, radio, TV, albums, Resonance FM. In print, on walls, on line, on the air, in a gallery, on the street since the handmade photocopied punk rock DIY fanzine times of the last century.

Since Organ’s birth back in the messy art school days late 1986, it has enjoyed a life as, firstly a very handmade hand screen-printed hand-painted underground fanzine, then as a full on glossy magazine (there was about 100 printed paper editions between 1986 and 2010) as well as very busy website. Actually there’s been a number of websites that have run almost non-stop since something like 1994. The first Organ website was in the mid 90s, in evolved quite a bit in the early part of this century and this current online version burst into life in 2012. There have been issues of Organ pasted on walls, released on cassette, there’s been a record label (I think we put out something like 200 different albums, singles, slices of vinyl and such back there). There was a weekly TV show for a couple of years (way before the days of YouTube, this was on your proper TV via Sky’s long gone Public access platform). And we’ve been regularly broadcasting on London-based arts radio station Resonance FM for over 20 years now. Organ has existed for many many years in many formats. and as a result of all that Organ has a worldwide reputation, awareness and following.

Back in the late 80’s Organ was very much a handmade labour of love, it was started by two then teenage art students, the first issue hit the streets in December 1986, an initial print run of 100 sold out in two days. It really did hit the streets, launched out of the back of an old army ambulance with the help of the blue lights and a smoke machine outside a Hawkwind gig in Guildford where the 50 we took along sold out in minutes, the second 50 were sold outside the next Hawkwind gig in Reading. The cover was hand screen-printed and spray painted, the whole thing was put together by hand, a 24 page A5 thing, it was as much about the artwork as the underground music covered inside. We ended up selling 300 copies of the first issue mostly outside London gigs. Three months later a second issue was produced using the same handmade methods – silk screen-hand made cover, manual typewriter, toxic spray paint and print paste, had cut covers, photocopied pages compiled and stapled by hand. We did the same with issue three, this time a print run of 1000, all night collating sessions. it wasn’t until issue 12 that we stopped hand printing and hand painting the covers, by issue 12 we were up to a print run of 5000 and well, the hand made days were over (although there were still lino-prints of some of the covers, and there was spray painting on the covers way beyond the hand-printed days)

You see back there we really really were on the streets. Sure, there were a lot of zines about but most of them we only on the shelves of places like Rough Trade or Shades or available via mailorder. We were really (really) properly out there, walking it and not just talking it, selling hundreds a night at gigs, to queues outside gigs, at art shows, at festivals as well as all the Rough Trades and such. It was always about a little more than just sucking up to the NME trying to get a job or chasing a mention in i-D (actually we were covered in i-D, we turned down all the offers of music press jobs although later on there were a couple of monthly columns in a couple glossies and the occasional bits of writing about bands that were being ignored that we might have done under other names – well if they weren’t going to review our own releases then why not sneak in and do it ourselves? We had very little respect for the 90s music press)          

So yes, issue four of Organ was an Organ Radio compilation on a C90 tape, so was issue eight, Issue seven was screen-printed, some of that issue on t-shirts and some screen printed as a paste up that went up on walls outside various London venues (there was always bits of street art going on. Actually there was way before Organ). There was one early issue that was a piece of sound art released on a tape in a hand made collaged cover, while another early issue, maybe Organ No.14 was nothing but photocopied and hand-customised artwork and manipulated photocopy imagery, the backgrounds without all the writing in the way (there was only 100 of that issue, that one was only a mailorder thing)    

By the mid 90’s Organ was a full on time-eating glossy production, more a magazine than a zine, we’d starting putting on gigs, there were hundreds of Organ gigs and events all over London.  There was a busy offshoot record label, at one point we were printing 20,000 magazines every two months, it was way too big a monster with national and international distribution although we never ever did get to walk into the New York branch of Tower Records and buy a copy (we did, I admit, once go into a branch of W.H.Smiths just for the buzz of picking up a copy off the shelf and buying it).

ORG Records got going properly in the mid 90s, it did actually start in the late 80s as a tape label, first with the Organ Radio compilations then with tape releases for bands like No One, The Lettuces, Bolt Thrower, Stone Cold and a few more as well as further tape compilations featuring early moves from bands like Webcore, Ullulators, Cardiacs, Wolfsbane, Sabbat, Niadem’s Ghost, Civilised Society? Ozric Tentacles and many more. In 1990 there was a 12″ vinyl release for a band called Atom Seed that came out as a one off as an Organ Records release. We were heavily involved in Atom Seed at the time, doing all their artwork, designing and selling their merchandise, booking all their gigs, roadcrewing, getting them a record deal and then doing all their record covers once they did get that deal and those fifteen minutes. The results of the black and white paint your own t-shirts that were sold with sets of fabric paints were interesting! The Atom Seed period was an eventful couple of years, we could write a whole book about just that time, there were many adventures and things that we could never ever commit to print. 

ORG Records started seriously with an Angel Interceptor single – later Angel Cage once Captain Scarlet’s lawyers had got on our case – the seven inch was a pressing of 1000 in a bright pink printed wrap around cover that was then Jackson Pollocked on with gloss paint. That first single was quickly followed by that almost legendary Huge Baby 10″EP, a run of 500 that came with another wrap around cover each with a hand lino-printed gold heart as well as a rather exciting Map 10″ single wrapped in a red and yellow print of a Sean Worrall collage. Actually the first 1000 12″Atom Seed singles had a lino-print on them as well as hand applied numbers and a spray paint attack. By the Mid 90s ORG Records was in full flow, there was something like 200 releases on vinyl and CD, bands such as Cay, Dream City Film Club, Cardiacs, Sea Nymphs, Brian Jonestown Massacre, Charlie’s Angels, Cynical Smile, My Vitriol, Camp Blackfoot, Cuban Boys, Coptic Rain, Rhatigan, Disco Pistol and many more. There was also the ORG-AN-ISED Singles series that launched quite a few bands and the Organ Radio series of compilations expanded to full on CD albums rather than just the hand duplicated tapes of the early days and ran until Organ Radio 21. One of the final releases on ORG was the final Cardiacs single before Tim Smith left us, the Ditzy Scene single was released in 2007 and with Tim’s passing there was little heart left for a record label. Other things were calling…

Organ carried on in print until something like 2008 as an A5 glossy publication coming out every two months with a print run of 20,000 each time. The print version was mostly focused on alternative underground music and by the early part of this century Organ was also coming out as a weekly on-line magazine focusing both on visual art and music. Visual art had always been a big part of Organ (we did start it at art school after all), art was important, especially in terms of the evolving look, the handmade covers, the back cover art, the cut ‘n paste layout and the backgrounds that were often frustratingly obscure as we crammed too many reviews into each issue. By the first decade of this century we were as engaged in and motivated by the covering of visual art, street art, contemporary art exhibitions as we were engaged with alternative music. BY 2008 and the last printed Organ Marina was more focussed on her radio broadcasting, things in add time signatures as well as her animating while Sean was more focused on his own art, on painting and exhibiting (not that he hadn’t been painting and making art all the way through the life of Organ and ORG Records, including many of the ORG covers as well as covers for other bands)

And there there was the gigs, under the Organ banner, we but on maybe a couple of thousand gigs, probably more? Mostly in the 90s and the early part of this century all over London at places like the Marquee, the Astoria, the Barfly, Camden Monarch, the Borderline, The Garage, the Underworld and quite a few more delightful places now long gone. Loads of bands, far too many soundchecks, damn those endless drum soundchecks  and all the hanging around. Many early moves from a soon to be few big names, some brilliant gigs from now long forgotten bands who never got any bigger than middle on at the Marquee. We won’t bore you with a name-dropping list of bands who played on Organ bills, those Cardiacs gatherings were special though, back before anyone else much would dare to mention Cardiacs. There were loads of great gigs, if you were there you know who we put on, if not then we’re here for the here and now and not the tales of back there in the day. The same could be said about the list of names of visual artists who’ve appeared as part of art exhibitions we’ve put on as gigs gave way to art shows…

So 2010 and the gigs, the label and the printed glossy magazine gave way to art shows and curating and art on the streets and things done the Organ way in white walled art galleries and by late 2011 after a number of co-curated art shows in other places including the Stinging Netil – a take over of an East London street market with a music stage and stalls full of artists and collectives – artists Sean Worrall and Emma Harvey opened Cultivate, an artist-run gallery smack bang in the middle of what was then the most happening art street in London. Hackney’s Vyner Street at that point when we moved in had something like fifteen galleries and art spaces operating and the Organ attitude was thrown into running a full time full-on maximalist art gallery in the middle of Vyner Street and First Thursday and all that that involved…

Organ took a short break while the early days Cultivate ate up all the time, money and everything else only to return after something like a year of very little in terms of actual Organgrinding in late 2012 (although some might argue that Cultivate and Organ were pretty much the same thing and if it wasn’t such a bad name of an art space then it might well have been called Organ Gallery).  Cultivate existed with a very busy programme of art exhibitions in Vyner Street until late 2014 and properly developers buying up the street and closing everything down, Since 2015 Cultivate has been nomadic, art exhibitions in various white walled formal galleries as well as condemned East London warehouses, closed down office buildings, Edwardian dress shops, under a railway bridge in Hackney, im an ex-greengrocers shop, art events by the seaside… Organ came back after a mostly quiet year in November 2012 as this website you’re now reading

There was a need, we needed Organ back and flowing, not just as a way of shouting about our own Cultivated art shows but to cover the hundreds of other art shows and (mostly) artist-run exhibitions that were happening at that point that the London visual art media were mostly choosing to ignore. It was as a result of chasing one editor of a rather unadventurous London art online publication that some might say loves itself way too much to come cover one of our Vyner Street shows only to be told he felt himself and his publication too important to be covering “small backstreet East London artist-led shows” – that’s a big part of why Organ was brought out of what was always going to be temporary hibernation. I mean we were going to so many good art shows that just weren’t being covered in any kind of way (we still are) and after a brief time to recharge our battered ears and to explore lots of the music we had written about but not had proper time to explore and enjoy it was time to start writing about new music  and new bands and fresh releases again…

And so this Organ website that you’re now reading has been here since 2012. And yes, some of you may not know it, but Organ has actually been a thing since our art school times of 1986. These days there’s daily online coverage of music, art and underculture here on the Organ website, sometimes small bites of things, sometimes in-depth reviews, sometimes an Organ Thing of the Day, a brief mention and a shared piece of music or an art show announcement and a link, sometimes a deeper dive into an art exhibition or event or an album or an artist. Organ is probably as busy as ever, and yes we’re still often the only ones covering an art show or a band, the only ones bothering to go actually to the show and properly cover the art rather then just regurgitating the press release and as news story about an exhibition that’s beneath you to go to. 

So here we are in the cold of our East London bunker in the middle of February 2025, busier than ever, thinking about ignoring Organ’s 40th birthday next year and just getting on with it, threatening a book we’ll probably never get around to. Marina Organ is busy over there with her weekly Other Rock radio show on London’s unique arts radio station Resonance FM, I’m here writing 98% of the Organ website content and at the same time painting, curating, sometimes raging against the machine and not having time to proofread and not bothering much with social media (yawn). 

Here in 2025 the Organ website is read, or at least visited by around 10,000 people a week, often far more when a band, label, an art gallery, artist or curator can be bothered to return the support and share a link when they’re covered. On with it all, on with all the exciting art, music and underculture…