Data Kill and Hoax! Magazine

Data Kill (or is it Datakill?) was a fanzine that came out of Brecon in the late ‘80s. As you can see from the cover of Issue 1 it heavily, but not exclusively, featured Welsh bands such as the mighty Datblygu and Colwyn Bay punksters 4Q. It was approximately 20 pages in length and A5 in size. The editor of this impressively produced mag with its chopped up graphics and tiny print went by the moniker Johnny Datakill.

In the early ‘90s the mysterious Johnny Datakill changed his editorial name to John C S Quel and began producing another Brecon-based magazine, Hoax!. Hoax! was more subversive in outlook than its predecessor covering stuff like KLF, Robert Anton Wilson and Church of the Subgenius. I’m told that it was militantly anti-work and advocated office-based sabotage. It became something of a pranksters’ bible.

According to a snippet on the internet Quel was once implicated by a Sunday newspaper as a prime suspect in the Mardi Gra bombing campaign. He sounds like an interesting chap – any more info on Hoax! would be much appreciated.

*Data Kill has also been causing a fanzine-related frisson over at Y Twll.