Steve Gardner

US drummer, rock writer, and owner of NKVD Records (2). With two other friends, Gardner created the San Diego-based music fanzine “Noise for Heroes” in San Diego in 1980 and although his partners dropped out over the next couple of years, he went on to publish twenty three issues through 1992, covering a range of punk, new wave and indie bands of the Eighties and early Nineties. He subsequently wrote for New York magazine The Big Takeover in the late Nineties and early '00s. There's now a three volume reissue of the complete Noise For Heroes in book form, published in 2020. Gardner is also the author of the multi-volume history of punk and new wave in the Seventies entitled "Another Tuneless Racket". He started the label NKVD in 1987 to release a single by his first band, Feeding Frenzy. One of Feeding Frenzy's songs, never recorded, was called "Article 58". It was inspired by reading "Gulag Archipelago", and it was about an article in the Soviet legal code of Stalin's time that basically said that if there was no other article in the code under which a person could be arrested, then Article 58 could be used. Stalin's secret police were the NKVD, hence the label name...a black joke that hadn't been meant to persist, but when Gardner released subsequent records by his next band, the Gamma Men, he continued using it. In 1992 he released a CD compilation of European indie, punk and garage bands that he'd raved about in Noise For Heroes called The Violence Inherent In The System, and then subsequently licensed releases from Aussie band The Exploding White Mice and Finnish groups Jalla Jalla and Hitmen 3, bands that were perhaps too obscure for the American market.