This Is a Message to Persons Unknown is the first full history of the legendary band Poison Girls. From their first gigs in 1977 to years of DIY tours across Britain and Europe, the band forged a radical path through music, politics, and art.

Fronted by the uncompromising Vi Subversa—a singular lyricist, songwriter, and voice—Poison Girls challenged punk’s Year Zero myth, weaving ferocity with wit, emotional depth, and inventive sound. Just as formative to anarcho-punk as Crass, yet defiantly their own, Poison Girls confronted misogyny, ageism, and authoritarianism with a passion and clarity that still resonates today. Drawing on exclusive interviews, zines, contemporary accounts, and the personal archives of band members, this richly illustrated history documents Poison Girls’ unforgettable songs, striking graphics, and fierce campaigns of resistance.

More than just a band biography, This Is a Message to Persons Unknown tells the story of a group of dissident artists who turned punk into both a protest and a possibility—an experiment in living, creating, and fighting for something new.

The book is currently at the printers. We’re having a kickstarter for the book and there’s a couple days left on it. If you are at all interested, please help- we’re very close to our goal. The basic support level is basically pre-ordering and support levels also go up to include re-issues of the music and other PG merch. The link for that is here.

Also:

This has been a long and complex project, and one that I’m very proud of! Poison Girls were cool people, with interesting ideas, and left us beautiful music and a rich text of their creative and politically-active lives. And, in my opinion, as opposed to many music books and band bios, you don’t need to be a superfan to get something out of this history.

For the book design, one of my main inspirations comes from David King’s largely visual histories of the Russian Revolution. I really admire the way he pulled off accessible design with lots of images while maintaining a strong graphic language that complimented the subject matter; I am equally influenced by the Time Life popular history books, which were slim, mostly hard bound, large format history books that I grew up reading. These books offered minimal, non-intrusive layouts, lots of negative space, and an image on almost every page–I am disappointed with long history book that have a small tipped-in section of grayscale photos in the middle. I hate reading and then flipping through a handful of images trying to find a picture of the person I’m reading about. Saying that, I understand that image use in history books is often a matter of economics, so I’m grateful that PM offered full support on this project, allowing us to go full color all the way.

So with this book, as with It Did Happen Here, I wanted to deliver photos and visual references on almost every page, that also corresponded with the text and timeline of the book. I was fortunate enough to work with a writer and editor (Rich Cross and Erin Yanke) who were engaged in this process and helped track down and hound people for images from specific periods. Poison Girls were a visually rich band. They had some very iconic icons- the various crow silhouettes and the foetal yin yang being the most well-known. But they also printed and published much of their own material, they made zines, posters, and badges. They worked with artists generously, and had a sense of the theatrical. We ended up with a decent amount of images for the book, most scanned from primary sources. But even with 500 plus images (including snapshots, promo photos, flyers, record covers, notes, zines, posters, etc) I still feel like we only hit the tip of the iceberg of what was possible. There were many images online that were too low res to use, that had no trackable source, and there were also many brilliant photos from the big music publications form the 1980s that we were unable to get permission to use.

Poison Girls created some serious bangers of early punk and also some essential tracks of late 20th century political music. Their ongoing commitment to revolutionary thought and art coupled with their almost compulsive sense of play, provides real inspiration as our bodies age and our souls tire of the endless barrage of garbage, stress, and violence in the late capitalist west.

Another Hero:

The cowboys and the Kennedys are grabbing what there is to sell
The president’s advisers advise us all to go to hell
And those who deal in weapons are rumoured to be doing well.
The rumour goes
Another hero bites
Another hero bites
Another hero bites the dust