This jam-packed fanzine from the U.K. starts off with about a dozen different contributors ranting against British nationalism in their columns. The rest of the zine then follows the standard punk zine format by including more columns, then articles, interviews, and reviews. I didn’t care for the article about “What Filth Teaches Us,” which pointed out some porn movie clichés. The “International Rules of Manhood” piece (example: “Women who claim they ‘love to watch sports’ must be treated as spies...”) was equally annoying. If I were a guy, I would be pissed off by all the macho garbage—perpetuated by beer commercials and punk editorials alike—that makes men look like a bunch of moronic meatheads. The interview section is short, but the review section is monstrous, with like, twenty full pages of zine, record, book, and show reviews toward the end. The editor even included full-page lists of materials that they didn’t have enough time to review. All in all, I think that like any multi-contributor music zine, Beat Motel was very hit or miss. If they were trying to pull off a kind of U.K. version of Maximum RocknRoll, then they definitely succeeded. But, you know, they could have set their sights higher. –Lauren Trout (PO Box 773, Ipswich, IP1 9FT, UK, andrew@corndog.co.uk)