Shane Pinnegar – Editor In Chief, 100% ROCK MAGAZINE
Shane Pinnegar – Editor In Chief, 100% ROCK MAGAZINE
Editor In Chief & roving writer of 100% ROCK MAGAZINE, Shane Pinnegar is also a freelance contributor to Perth, Western Australia’s X-Press Magazines and has contributed to Australian publications The Music, Music Feeds, Beat and Brag magazines, and Around The Sound. He has published three books to date: a novel, an anthology of short stories, and his late father’s memoirs.
I was born & raised in Perth, Western Australia – the world’s most isolated regional capital city – and developed a love of music from an early age, religiously sitting glued to Australia’s COUNTDOWN TV program every Sunday at 6pm. It was the late Seventies and early Eighties – punk gave way to new wave and the new romantics, and I was fascinated. The Stones in the clip for Start Me Up – who were these zombie werewolf lookin’ dudes? Duran Duran – Girls On Film – girls on a greased pole pillow fighting. OMG!!! Yes it was a fiesty time to be a young teen and there was much to love.
Queen was my favourite band for a few years, and then came the one-two punch of Iron Maiden’s Run To The Hills and Number Of The Beast, and Rose Tattoo’s We Can’t Be Beaten. My jaw hit the ground. THIS was my music. This was what I’d been waiting for.
The next few years were a blur of heavy rock and metal to the exclusion of most else – that’s kids for you, right? Metal Billy & I would spend all our spare change at The Purple Ear, the record store next to Myers in Morley, or, later, Twilight Records in the city. Our knowledge grew exponentially when we discovered Kerrang! magazine and our vinyl and cassette collections grew. I still have my old records – I wish I had the hundreds of cassette tapes from those days – and oh, if only I still had the time to spend hours compiling mix tapes of the most obscure tunes we could find!
We graduated to going out most Fridays to the City Hotel to see Trilogy, a metal covers band who peppered their three sets a night with original tunes and eventually released one still-amazing album in 1986, Life On Earth. Heady stuff for a couple of sixteen year olds with hand-forged fake ID.
My next musical epiphany was late one night – well, probably early one morning – after some drunken shenanigans in the mid Eighties. Howie Unco and I had ended up at Mad Ken’s pad, and as we wound down, guzzling yet more beers, he started spinning some 7 inch vinyl that blew my mind wide open.
I’d largely marginalised pop music for 4 or 5 years at this stage, burrowing deep into the metal underground – but this was something different from both those things. The Hard-Ons – Girl In The Sweater. Lime Spiders – Cave Girl. Radio Birdman – New Race. The Stooges – Raw Power.
Garage punk was a brave new world that led me to The Sex Pistols, The Damned, The Ramones and – crucially, my favourite punk band alongside early Hard-Ons – The Anti Nowhere League.
Fast forward almost thirty years and I still love metal – MY metal, the metal of the Seventies and Eighties, not the metal of today. I want some melody and lyrics I can mostly understand. Even my Mum only hated Venom and Mercyful Fate a bit – they’re almost Poison by the standards of today’s extreme music, and I just don’t dig anything that I can’t try to sing along to.
I love punk, hard & heavy rock, blues, garage, soul, and a lot more besides. There must be a word for it – I’m not an audiophile geek who needs the highest quality stereo to listen to, I just love the passion of organic, powerful, sweaty, catchy music!
Along the way I’d fallen into an early career in IT support, travelled internationally, became a chef, but always harboured a desire to write about music. Chef work took me around the world again, working in England, Canada, Greece and France, and in 2009 I finally started a blog with an acquaintance and started teaching myself to write and run a magazine.
Three years later it was time to move on to something better, this time retaining control rather than dealing with dishonesty, and ensuring that the content was as professional as we can make it. Quality over quantity.
This, my friends, is 100% ROCK MAGAZINE. We have a wide remit – hard and heavy rock, metal, blues, garage, punk – it’s all welcome here. 100% ROCK MAGAZINE is for music lovers.
And it’s not just music – books, movies, theatre, you’ll find all of that here. We focus across popular culture – we’re about EVERYTHING that rocks your world. I’ve no doubt you will find something of interest in our pages.
Please note I only review from physical products, rarely write about anything I only have a download of, and will never interested in streamed music. Life’s too short!
Contact me at shane@100percentrock.com
