Kill Your Pet Puppy is the kind of site that makes me remember why I love the old web. It's a massive, sprawling, deeply personal archive built around a punk fanzine that ran for just six issues between 1979 and 1983. Six issues. And yet the website documenting it and the world it came from has been running since 2007, growing into something far bigger than the original zine ever was.
The fanzine was started by Tony D, who had previously created Ripped And Torn (itself an iconic punk zine from 1976-1979). The story of how it got its name is perfect: born "in the collective hell of one room squatted by eight people with no bathroom or running water." The first 500 copies were finished just in time for an Adam and the Ants New Year's Eve concert at the Electric Ballroom, December 1979 into January 1980. All 500 sold that night.
But here's the thing. The website isn't just scans of old fanzine pages. It's a living, breathing community archive. When you start clicking around, you find layers upon layers of content. There's a massive collection of audio downloads featuring rare records and cassette tapes from the era. There are hundreds of photographs organized into albums with names like "Centro Iberico," "Wapping Autonomy Centre," "Stonehenge 1983," "Peace Convoy," and "Sheriff Road - Puppy Mansions 1." There are albums dedicated to specific people's memories: "Memories of Fod," "Memories of Tinsel," "Memories of Min." Just those album titles alone tell you something about how this site was built. With care, and with the input of dozens of people who were actually there.
The essays are something else entirely. A contributor named Alistair Livingston (Al Puppy) wrote pieces with titles like "Crass In Context," "Alone In A Darkened Room With Bauhaus," "Diary Of An Anarcho-Goth-Punk Fiend," and "Subway Surfing Anarcho-Goths." Al also created his own spin-off fanzine called Encyclopaedia of Ecstacy, all three issues of which are scanned and viewable on the site. One reviewer described it as a "psychedelic goth punk fanzine" with a cover featuring an all-seeing Masonic pyramid that looked like Gustav Klimt rendered in blocky magic markers. That's not a combination of words you encounter every day.
The site also connects outward to related projects. There's a link to the Ripped And Torn website where you can view every page of every issue of Tony D's earlier fanzine. There's a connection to All The Madmen Records, the label associated with The Mob. And in the comments and recent posts, you can see the community still active, still talking, still remembering people. A recent post from September 2026 is a remembrance of Mick 'Lugworm' Queally. The comments section on the contact page has a university student asking to use squat photographs for a dissertation, someone looking for Astronauts lyrics to play for A-level students, and someone trying to find a home for old copies of Toxic Graffiti fanzine rather than sending them to the tip.
I should mention the name. The site is very clear about this: "Kill Your Pet Puppy" is not about harming animals. The "puppy" is symbolic of the first externally imposed responsibility used to train children into conformity and obedience. "Kill" means breaking free of that. You can agree or disagree with the philosophy, but there's a whole thought-out worldview behind the provocation, and the site lays it out honestly.
What struck me most, clicking through page after page, is how much this site resists the flattening of history. The people behind it started building it because, as they put it, they could hear "cultural archaeologists beginning to restrict this history to a mere musical framework." This wasn't just about bands. It was about squats, about the Thatcher years, about surviving skinhead attacks, about scraping together a life outside the system. The music was part of it, but only part.
Mickey "Penguin" keeps the site running and clearly puts real love into it. If you have any interest in UK punk history, anarcho-punk, early 80s counterculture, or just the kind of deep, obsessive, personal web archiving that the internet was made for, go lose yourself in Kill Your Pet Puppy. Bring some time. You'll need it.