A Bit of History on "Kill From The Heart"

By Chris Hubbard

This website is the result of an idea I had with my friend Jeff in early 2000. The original plan was to create a non-flashy, low-tech site providing information on the early '80s American hardcore punk scene, with an emphasis on content. My motivation stemmed from discovering some cool old bands on the internet a couple years earlier when I moved to New York City for school and didn't meet any fellow punkers for about six months (a particularly shitty time in my life). himself html a few years ago by programing a Born against Website and wrote all the code in the beginning; I learned from watching him. The original page was on Tripod (I think), but didn't really get off the ground. About a year later, upon the discovery that my college provided its students with 50 MB of webspace, we revived the idea. Armed with a copy of the 11th Anniversary issue of Suburban Voice, we created a rudimentary page with about 30 bands. Much of the discography information was cribbed from the Flex website; the rest of it was gleaned from Google searches or our own knowledge/collections. It was Jeff's idea to include other non-US bands, since DOA was on there and it "wouldn't make sense to only cover North American bands." I personally didn't know anything about punk that wasn't from the US, Canada, UK or Australia, but went along with the idea. Kill From the Heart grew fairly rapidly over the next few years. This would not have been possible without the contributions and support of a large number of people from across the world. Little by little, the site was pushed to expand its focus from simply "early '80s hardcore" to pretty much anything punk up until 1990.In early 2004, with some suggestions from Daniel Lupton, I decided to move the website from the rudimentary html version hosted by NYU to a more complex php database version with my own .com address. Though Daniel, who graciously offered to do the lion's share of the coding, warned me the data entry would take awhile, I figured I could re-enter all the bands, discographies, tracklists, comps, interviews, etc. in a couple months, tops. It turned out to take over two years of working on-and-off in my spare time. Work on the site effectively ceased from 2006-2007, during which time I was busy running the punk zine Maximum Rocknroll. In late 2008, I figured it was finally time to try and get the "new" version of KFTH up and running.

KFTH is website devoted to documenting the roots of punk rock and related underground/independent music. The goal of this project is to make information, including primary documents like interviews, available to as many people as possible. It is not meant to be a glorification of the past. If anything, we hope that access to documents from "back in the day" will demystify the early scene, which has been mythologized as some kind of paradise lost by many jaded elitists. There were great bands before the '70s and '80s and there are plenty of great bands around today. In truth, punk was just as full of bullshit and bad ideas then as it is now. The punk scene is a place of contested meaning and competing definitions. Don't look through the information we've collected hoping to find some absolute, pure definition of what punk was or should be. This is impossible in a culture that has always been self-defined by the people who are creating it at a given place and time. This website collects artifacts from what was, at one time, punk rock. Right now the context, and therefore the meanings of what punk is, may be totally different from they were then. Make up your own mind and draw your own conclusions about what is important. In the present age of information as commodity, the punk scene is under threat of losing our vital history to the vaults of collectors who covet records, zines, and other memorbillia of the past because of its exclusive value as a rare possession. This site is in opposition to that kind of hoarding collector culture and its foundation of elitism. It is limited by our knowledge and abilities, but in punk rock everyone is an expert. We hope others will be inspired to help out in expanding the site to include a larger international focus. We want band information, photos, zine articles, record reviews, or anything else people can contribute. Please note that although the vast majority of this site is in English, contributions in other languages are more than welcome and will certainly be added to the site. In order to make the workload on the site slightly more manageable, we are imposing the semi-arbitrary cutoff line of 1989, so that Kill From The Heart will only cover bands that started before 1990 (with only a few exceptions). Finally, don't assume anything on here is actually true! The internet is a mess of rumors and misinformation. We do our best to make sure everything is correct, but given the shear volume of information that is on the site, there are bound to be one or two (or more) inaccuracies floating around here and there.