About Ratboy

What this site is

Ratboy is an independent zine covering British punk, skate culture, and the DIY music scene that connects the two. The focus is the scene as a whole - the towns, venues, records, graphic design, and clothes - rather than running coverage of any single artist or band.

The format is a small set of long, focused guides:

• The Scene - the social and physical geography of UK skate-punk.
• History - a five-decade timeline from 1977 to today.
• Albums - the records that built the canon.
• Style - the visual identity that ties it all together.

The pages are written to be useful as references rather than as scrolling news feeds. They are revised when something material changes.

Who runs it

Ratboy is written and edited by Callum Pryce, a UK-based music writer. I have been listening to and covering British punk and skate-adjacent music since the late 2000s, when I started filing record reviews for a local zine in the south-east of England. I have written for a rotating cast of small print and online outlets since, mostly under bylines that did not become famous, and have worked behind the scenes on zine and venue programming in the UK home counties.

Ratboy is the long-form, single-author project that pulls together the things I keep writing and rewriting on commission: the recurring history of the British scene, the recurring lists of essential albums, the recurring explanations of the visual aesthetic.

Editorial approach

Three rules:

1. Cite where it's possible. Where I can name a specific record, label, year, venue, or designer, I do. Where the internet disagrees with itself, I say so.
2. Speculate where it's labelled. Where I am offering an opinion or making an inference, the page will say so explicitly. The reader gets to decide how much weight to give it.
3. Person-light. Ratboy is about the scene, not the celebrity layer. Where artists are named, it is to anchor a point about the broader culture, not to chase coverage.

What this site is not

• A news site. The pages cover the broad picture and are updated occasionally rather than continuously.
• A merch shop. Nothing is sold here.
• An affiliate marketing layer. There are no commission-tracked outbound links.
• A venue or label promotion outlet. Where I name a venue or label it is editorial, not paid.

Contact

Email: [email protected]

Use this address for corrections, factual disputes, tipoffs about scenes or venues I should be writing about, or general feedback. I read everything that arrives. I respond when I can, usually within a few days.

Legal, briefly

Ratboy is operated as an independent editorial project from the UK. Visitors' privacy is handled per the privacy policy. The zine is not affiliated with any record label, venue, festival, or industry body. Where third parties are named in the editorial copy it is purely for the purpose of writing about the scene.