Gabba Gabba Hey - Winners + Launch Details

Back in December 2020 two writers (Anthony Neil Smith and Matthew Gomez) were shooting the shit on Twitter when one of them suggested that what the world really needed was an anthology of short-stories based around The Ramones – what a dream it’d be if only they could persuade a publisher to take a risk and green-light the project.

It literally took them a couple of tweets and one direct message to convince me that Fahrenheit Press was where this anthology was meant to live.

I’ve followed The Ramones since I was a teenager and now in my 50s I still love them. I couldn’t bear the idea that anyone other than Fahrenheit would publish this book so I jumped on-board and put Fahrenheit’s money where my mouth is – after all – what’s the point in owning your own publishing house if you can’t pull some strings sometimes, right?

We put out a call for submissions and were absolutely blown away by the response – we got hundreds of submissions,  the calibre was very high and all the writers were richly varied in their approach.

We had 3 judges, each of whom read every story totally blind - all author information was stripped out of the submissions received by the judges so none of us had any idea who had written any of the stories. (We think this anonymity is important when judging anthologies because even with the best will in the world it’s hard not to look favourably on stories written by people you know and like.)

Each judge scored each story out of 20 and all the results were sent to an independent editor to collate – only when all the scores had been added up and ranked out of 60 were the details of the author’s identities revealed to anyone.

On the whole, the judges broadly agreed on their Top 50 (1 story even received 20 out of 20 from all 3 judges) - when the results were collated and the twenty-four successful contributors were chosen there were only 7 marks between the No.1 entry and the No.24^th..

By a total fluke the successful stories broke down roughly 50/50 between authors based in the USA/Europe, roughly 50/50 between Male/Female authors and roughly 33/33/33 between stories in the Crime/Horror/Music genres and even more amazingly, we didn’t have a single duplicated song title in any of the highest ranking 24 stories – an issue the cover designers were dreading.

We already felt the Universe was smiling on this project but when LA Punk Queen BRENDA PERLIN agreed to write the preface for the collection we knew we must have had some serious karma in the bank.

As many of you will know, Brenda is known for her Punk Rocker anthology series, set in the music scene of the late seventies to the early eighties though anyone who follows her Instagram account @LosAngelesPunkRocker will know Brenda is also the premier archivist of the Los Angeles Punk & New Wave scenes - I know I've spent many happy hours getting lost in the memories brought on by the photos + videos she shares on her feed. We feel so blessed that she's agreed to get involved with this project.

Okay so here without any further ado are the winning entries (the order they’re presented in here correspond to the order they appear in the anthology - not to the judges scores).

Congratulations to all the winning entries…

• Do You Remember Rock 'n’ Roll Radio by David Noonan
• It's Not My Place by Philip Charter
• I Wanna Be Well by Christopher Bond
• Somebody Put Something in My Drink by CW Blackwell
• I Wanna Live by Clark Boyd
• Pinhead by Kelly Robinson
• Suzy Is A Headbanger by Derek Farrell
• Cretin Hopp by Mike Burr
• Rockaway Beach by Lex Vranick
• The KKK Took My Baby Away by Kevin David Anderson
• The Crusher by Shaun Avery  
• 7/11 by Amanda Crum
• I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend by Vinnie Hansen
• S.L.U.G. by Thomas Pluck
• Danny Says by Hannah O’Doom
• My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down (Bonzo Goes to Bitburg) by Bret Nelson
• Baby I Love You by Tina Jackson
• Chainsaw by Gregory Nicoll
• Here Today, Gone Tomorrow by James Ryan
• Merry Christmas (I Don’t Want to Fight Tonight) by Joshua L. James
• Sheena Is a Punk Rocker by Wendy Davis
• I Don't Wanna Go Down To The Basement by Christina Delia
• Main Man by Joseph S. Walker
• Too Tough To Die by Jon Park

I mean trust us, the stories are awesome but I think we also might have just made the BEST RAMONES COMPILATION ALBUM IN THE WORLD – and yes, of course we’ve put together a Spotify play-list – you can listen to it here.

And here you go, this is what the finished book is gonna look like.

We’ll be publishing on 4th July 2021 – which marks the 45th Anniversary of the 1st gig The Ramones ever played outside of the USA - it was at The Roundhouse in Camden, England and the timing seems perfect for a transatlantic labour of love like this one.

As for the book itself, it'll be printed 8.5" x 8.5" format and made available in both Paperback (£14.99) & Hardback (£24.99) 

To mark the launch - THIS WEEKEND ONLY You can pre-order your paperback copy now for the special price of £12.34 and the hardback for £20.24 (see what we did there?)

In other news, as some of you who follow us on Instagram might already know, in an over-arching act of ego I painted and framed the artwork that's used for the cover myself - this book really is a labour of love for me.

As so many of you who followed the project on Insta have said such nice things about it we've decided to make a small number of limited edition prints available.

So there you are, from a conversation on Twitter in December to an actual book published on the 4th July - that must be some kinda record right?

We're so excited by this anthology and we know that when you see it you all will be too - as we said earlier THIS WEEKEND ONLY you can pre-order your paperback copy now for the special price of £12.34 and the hardback for £20.24.

Gabba Gabba Hey, We accept you, one of us, one of us....

xx