The Inside Story of Viz: Rude Kids

скачать книгу бесплатно


Admission to the function room was 50p, payable at the top of the stairs. As proof of payment you got your hand stamped ‘anti-pop entertainmenterama’. Sitting on the door counting the money was a scruffy bloke who looked as if he’d just spent a night on a park bench, and then walked through a particularly severe sandstorm. His name was Andy Pop and he always looked like that due to a combination of Brillo pad hair and bad eczema. Andy was the business brains behind the Anti-Pop organization. Sitting alongside him was his partner, the creative guru, a tall, thin man called Arthur 2 Stroke. Arthur 2 Stroke’s eponymous three-piece band were playing that night, and Jim had recommended them highly. 2 Stroke cut a bizarre figure on stage. He was an awkward, gangly sort of bloke, dressed in a dandy, second-hand, sixties’ style. He wore a powder blue mod suit that was far too small for him and a comically extreme pair of winkle-picker boots, and he had an unmistakable Mr Spock haircut. He was a bit like a cross between Paul Weller and Jason King. He couldn’t sing very well, or play the guitar, but he had a wonderful comic aura about him. Next to him was an upright, smiling, red-haired guitarist who went by the name of WM7, and in the background there was an almost unseen drummer whose name was Naughty Norman. Their manic set included a half-decent cover of ‘The Letter’ and a plucky tribute to the well-known 1970s French TV marine biologist, ‘The Wundersea World of Jacques Cousteau’. Also on the bill that night were the Noise Toys, a power-packed post-punk four-piece who bounced around in oversized baggy suits and raincoats, shaking the ceiling of the old codgers’ bar below. Singer Martin Stevens was a timid, slightly built, shaven-headed bloke – a more energetic, better-looking, heterosexual version of Michael Stipe. In total contrast his sidekick, the trilby-hatted guitarist Rupert Oliver, was a bullish, ugly, bad-tempered prima donna, prone to lashing out at the audience with his microphone stand. The rhythm section were the industrious but less noteworthy Mike and Brian, and the highlights of their set were their own song ‘Pocket Money’ and memorable covers of ‘Rescue Me’ and ‘King of the Road’. As well as the Noise Toys and Arthur 2 Stroke there’d be anything up to three or four other bands on the bill, and a lot of them would be playing their first ever gig. Anti-Pop’s policy was to encourage kids to come along and have a go. You didn’t need fancy equipment, or talent. Anyone could ring them up and book a support slot. This was the punk ethic being put into practice, and it attracted quite a few weirdos. But it was always entertaining, intimate and exciting – the very opposite of going to Knebworth to see Rush or lying on the floor and listening to Pink Floyd. At the Gosforth Hotel I felt like I’d found my spiritual home.

Arthur 2 Stroke

Another positive effect of punk was the emergence of fanzines, small DIY music magazines – usually the work of one obsessive individual – that were hawked at gigs or sold through independent record shops. My brother Steve had put me and Jim in touch with a new Newcastle fanzine that was looking for cartoonists. When we met the editors at the Market Lane pub in town we were dismayed to find they were all hairies, and their new magazine – Bad Breath – was going to be a ‘rock’ fanzine. I drew a cartoon about a punk band called Angelo’s Nonstarts for their first issue, but when I saw the finished magazine I wished I hadn’t bothered. It was a feeble orange pamphlet with very little content, badly designed too, but the worst thing about it was the tone of the editorial. It took itself so fucking seriously. There was an article about Lou Reed, and an earnest review of a pub gig by The Weights. It was all such a load of wank. Jim and I had been toying with the idea of producing our own magazine, a proper one this time with more than one page, and Bad Breath was so bloody awful it inspired us. We wanted to produce a comic that was also a fanzine, and the only artists we wanted to write about were Arthur 2 Stroke and the Noise Toys. The Gosforth Hotel would also be the ideal outlet for selling this magazine – and it would give us an excuse to talk to Gosforth High School girls – so we decided to take our idea to Anti-Pop. Whether we were looking for advice and encouragement, or merely an excuse to visit their office, I can’t quite recall.

The Anti-Pop office was in the Bigg Market, in a run-down building full of small rooms with glass-panel doors – the kind of office suites where private detectives sit drinking whisky and waiting for their next mysterious client to walk through the door. Their room was up on the third floor, wedged between a hairdressing salon and a derelict former pools collecting agency. We knocked and nervously entered. The room was tiny, like a short corridor with the door at one end and a sash window at the other. Already it was full of people. There was a solitary desk, a chair, and a built-in cupboard running along one wall which was being used by half a dozen or so people as a communal seat. All of the Noise Toys seemed to be there, plus their slightly dim roadie Davey Fuckwit. Arthur 2 Stroke himself was perched on the windowsill, gazing at a shit-covered shoe lying on the ledge outside and repeating the word ‘guano’ to himself over and over again. It looked like a form of meditation. ‘He’s thinking of ideas,’ someone explained. Jim and I were a little intimidated finding ourselves in the presence of so many pop idols, but we somehow managed to blurt a few words out about our proposed magazine and I held out a folder of our cartoons as a sort of peace offering. These were passed around the room and met with grins of approval. Turning to Andy Pop I asked if they would allow us to sell the magazine at their gigs in return for a free advertisement on the back cover. This was immediately agreed. Then came an unexpected bonus. Martin, the singer with the Noise Toys, said that he was a cartoonist and offered to contribute to the new magazine.

Andy Pop

Our project had got the green light – the only problem now was that we didn’t have a clue how to put a magazine together. Someone at Anti-Pop suggested approaching the Free Press for help. The Tyneside Free Press described themselves as a ‘non-profit-making community print co-operative’, whatever one of those was, and Jim and I went to see them at their print works in Charlotte Square. I explained to the man on the front desk that we wanted to produce a magazine but had no idea how to put it together, technically speaking. He was most helpful and began by explaining a few of the basics. For important technical reasons we couldn’t have ten pages as I’d suggested, we’d have to have eight or twelve. And if we had twelve pages they would be printed in pairs, page 12 alongside page 1, and page 2 alongside page 11, etc. This was called page fall. I was fascinated. Then he talked about the artwork, explaining how the ink is always black and how greys are made out of lots of little black dots. Finally, he produced an estimate for printing 100 twelve-page magazines. This came to a staggering £38.88, in other words almost 40p per copy. He must have noticed my face drop and quickly pointed out that the more we printed, the cheaper it would become per copy. He mentioned that a T Rex fanzine they’d printed recently had sold out of 100 copies in a week and had since been back for a reprint. Encouraged by this I asked him to price for 150 copies, and this came to £42.35. It was four quid more, but it brought the cost of each comic down to 28p each. It still seemed a lot of money so I shopped around for some other prices. The Co-operative Printers in Rutherford Street quoted me £153, and Prontaprint on Collingwood Street said they’d do the job for £156. I decided to stick with the Free Press.

Jim and I had quite a collection of old cartoons in hand, but all of our work was small and I needed a lot more material to fill twelve pages. Martin’s contribution was more of a collage than a cartoon, a three-dimensional conglomeration of paint, glue, print and paper featuring an angry metal bloke in a hat, called the Steel Skull. Jim wrote a tabloid-style exposé about the Anti-Pop movement, and I received another written contribution from a newspaper reporter in Kingston upon Thames called Tim Harrison. Shortly after leaving school I’d got bored and put a pen friend advert in Private Eye. The first person who replied was Tim Harrison, and I’d been corresponding with him ever since. But when Tim’s contribution for my new magazine arrived – a girly piece of grown-up satire suggesting that Prince Charles was gay – it was totally out of keeping with everything else I’d gathered. I didn’t want to hurt Tim Harrison’s feelings – at least not until now – so I decided to use it anyway.

We still had to choose a name for the new magazine. At one point Jim’s favoured title had been Hip because he liked the slogan, ‘Get Hip!’ Another proposal was Lump It, as in ‘If you don’t like it (and you won’t like it) you can Lump It’. But in the end I went for the catchier and much more concise The Bumper Monster Christmas Special, which just seemed to roll off the tongue. Viz was an afterthought and sprang from an experiment I’d been doing with lino cuttings. My dad had some spare lino tiles left over after tiling our living room floor and I’d been carving bits of them with chisels, rolling them with ink and then pressing them onto paper in a vice. While playing around I came up with the word VIZ, which was easy to carve, consisting only of straight lines and no curved letters. That’s what I always tell people anyway. Unfortunately the lino blocks, which I still have today, don’t say VIZ, they say Viz Comics, with several curvy letters. So fuck knows where the name came from. I can’t remember.

I assembled the artwork on a card table in my bedroom. It was a bit like doing a jigsaw, trying to slot everything together neatly. There were still a few gaps to fill, so I asked my brother Simon if he fancied doing a cartoon. Simon had recently formed his own noisy youth club band, Johnny Shiloe’s Movement Machine, but he took time out from his budding acting and pop career to do a three-frame cartoon containing sex, cake and vomiting. It was a terrific combination. Eventually all the gaps were filled and on Wednesday 28 November 1979 I took a half-day off work to deliver the artwork to the Free Press. They said it would be ready on Friday the following week.

The original Viz Comics lino print

A bit like those twats out of Spandau Ballet, me and Jim made a big song and dance about Viz before the first issue had even been published. Pre-launch publicity included sticking posters up around Newcastle Polytechnic Students’ Union and lino-printing Viz Comics logos onto a roll of typewriter address labels. These were stuck randomly on windows, contraceptive machines, lamp-posts and bus stops around the Gosforth Hotel and Newcastle Polytechnic areas, and we somehow managed to stick one high on the façade of the Listen Ear record shop on Ridley Place. That one was still visible from the top deck of the 33 bus for several years afterwards. Unlike those twats out of Spandau Ballet, we weren’t students, and so we weren’t allowed inside the Students’ Union buildings. The Poly Students’ Union entertainments officer was a horrible bloke called Paul something-or-other who wore fashionable knitwear and had blond, swept-back hair. We called him Mr Fucking McGregor because every time he caught us fly-posting he’d chase us out of the building muttering various garbled threats about putting us in a pie. But every time he chased us out we’d come back even more determined. Eventually the object of the exercise wasn’t to promote the comic, it was purely to antagonize that daft bastard. This spell of aggravated promotional activity earned us a rather ironic reputation as an ‘anti-student’ magazine which lasted some time. Jim and I hated students. If townies like us wanted to get into either the University or the Polytechnic to see a band we had to stand at the door looking humble and beg passing students to sign us in. We were envious of their cushy, low-price accommodation, their cheap booze, cheap food, cheap and exclusive live entertainment, and the fact that they were surrounded by young women. It was the male students we hated, not the girls.

I took Friday 7 December off work and went with Jim to collect the finished comic from the Free Press. When we got there, the first thing that struck me was how small the box was. I was expecting a stack of cartons, not one flat box. But 150 very thin comics didn’t take up much room. It was raining as we carried them the short distance from the Free Press to the Anti-Pop office. There was nobody there so we retired to a nearby café, Country Fare, where, over a cup of tea and some cheese scones, we sat and read our very own comic. The ink was blacker than black and the paper was creamy and smooth. It made the cartoons look different, more clean and deliberate, almost as if someone else had drawn them. The spines of the comics were neatly folded, and the staples were shiny and new. We sat and admired them for ages. For some reason I’d decided to give away a ‘free ice cream’ with every issue and this meant taking the comics home and spending the best part of the weekend lino printing pictures of ice creams and then stapling them onto the back pages. I’d taken a few advance orders from friends, and the first person to pay for a copy of Viz was a Gosforth High girl called Karen Seery. But it was on Monday 10 December at the Gosforth Hotel that Viz was officially launched.

Myself, Jim and Simon all went along, although Simon was only fifteen and risked being fed to the landlord’s dogs if he was caught on the premises. I decided to take thirty copies of the magazine as I couldn’t imagine selling any more than that in one night. Early in the evening we positioned ourselves on the landing outside the function room door and started offering them to passers-by. None of us were natural salesmen and a typical pitch would be, ‘Funny magazine. Very wacky. Twenty pence.’ People weren’t interested. 20p was a bit steep for a twelve-page black-and-white comic. The Beano was twice as thick, colour, and half the price in those days. There were no takers. One passing Gosforth High girl called Ruth snarled and called me a capitalist. That hurt. I’d paid the print bill out of my own pocket with no prospect of getting my money back. Even if I sold out I was losing 8 pence on every copy. It was hardly capitalism at that stage, love. Things weren’t looking too good until a little man with a gingerish beard and a scarf, more of a social worker than a student or punk, came skipping up the stairs. He looked a bit right-on, the kind of guy who’d give some kids doing their own thing a break. ‘What’s this?’ he said with exaggerated enthusiasm. He had a quick look, smiled, bought one and disappeared into the function room. Not long afterwards people started coming out and buying copies. Once they’d seen someone else reading it and laughing, suddenly they all wanted one. It was the first sales phenomenon I’d ever witnessed, and it was a phenomenal one. Soon we were running out of comics and a friend called Paul, who had a car, offered Simon a lift back home to pick up some more copies.

Skinheed Poster

As well as the Gosforth I also sold copies at a Dickies gig at the Mayfair later that week, and the following weekend at a Damned gig in Middlesbrough. There was only one shop that stocked the first comic, Listen Ear on the corner of Ridley Place and John Dobson Street in Newcastle. The little man behind the counter, who was short and far too old for his comical punk attire, seemed rather non-plussed at the idea of stocking yet another fanzine, but reluctantly agreed to take ten copies on sale or return. He placed them inside the glass counter and under the till, where nobody could see or reach them. ‘If I leave them on the counter they’ll be nicked,’ he said. As well as hawking the comic around pubs and student discos in Newcastle I made a couple of futile efforts to reach a wider audience. In February 1980 I invested £3.25 in a classified ad in Private Eye:

Viz Comics. Very hilarious indeed.

20p plus SAE to 16 Lily Cres, Newcastle/Tyne.

At about the same time I wrote a hopelessly optimistic letter to a magazine distribution company called Surridge Dawson Ltd. and received my first rejection letter:

Dear Mr Donald

Thank you for your letter of 1st February in connection with the distribution of your comics. Firstly, as you are most probably aware, the comic market in the United Kingdom is very competitive indeed, and would be difficult to break into without reasonable financial backing.

From our point of view as national distributors, we would require a regular publishing date and also need to be selling about 10,000 copies per issue to make it a viable operation. To be quite frank, at present I do not think you are in a position to consider distribution on a national scale, but nevertheless we will give the matter further thought on sight of a complete copy of your magazine.

Yours sincerely

T. H. Marshall

General Manager Publishing Department

I hadn’t dared send them a complete copy, just a few selected highlights, because I knew full well that if I’d sent the whole comic it would have gone straight in the bin.

With the benefit of hindsight it was probably a wee bit early to be thinking of a commercial deal, but I was getting some grassroots distribution thanks to a few enthusiastic individuals each taking a handful of copies here and there. A Newcastle University student called Jane Hodgson took twenty copies to sell to her mates and my pen friend Tim Harrison also took ten copies. Then at the end of February I got my first big break. Derek Gritten, a bookseller in Bournemouth, had spotted my ad in Private Eye and wanted to see a sample of the comic. If he liked it he said he would order twenty-five copies, my biggest order so far! My £3.25 investment looked to be paying off, and I rushed Mr Gritten a copy of the comic by return . . . but he didn’t reply.

Never mind. The first comic had been surprisingly well received by the public and I knew that the next one could be much better. By now a second issue was underway on the card table, but this time I was taking care to plan it better, make it look neater and more attractive. Jim had drawn a couple of new cartoons, Simon had done another cartoon with vomiting in it, and Martin Stevens had come up with a brilliant new character called Tubby Round. For music content I’d interviewed a fellow DHSS employee called Dave Maughan about his very serious prog rock band Low Profile – and then written an entirely different story in which they became a disco band. And Jim had written about a new Anti-Pop artist who was rapidly becoming a legend.

Anti-Pop’s first record release, a double A-sided single by the Noise Toys and Arthur 2 Stroke (‘Pocket Money’/‘The Wundersea World of Jacques Cousteau’) had been getting air play on John Peel’s show, but a new Anti-Pop album called Anna Ford’s Bum by Wavis O’Shave was causing a bigger stir both on radio and in the music press. Wavis O’Shave wasn’t a comedian and he wasn’t a singer. He definitely wasn’t a musician either. He was a sort of cross between Howard Hughes, Tiny Tim and David Icke. He was never seen at the Gosforth Hotel and I’d only ever caught a glimpse of him once in the Anti-Pop office, when he didn’t speak at all. To promote the album he only played one gig – at the Music Machine, Camden, in March 1980 – and he didn’t even turn up for that. A heavily disguised Arthur 2 Stroke went on in his place. None of his fans knew what Wavis looked like, so there were no complaints. (Wavis would become better known in later years as The Hard, a bizarre character who made brief appearances on The Tube, hitting his hand with a hammer and saying ‘I felt nowt’.)

Viz comic No. 2 went on sale in April 1980. This time I really pushed the boat out and printed 500, and gave away a free balloon with every copy . . . stapled to the inside back cover. The print bill was £66.67, plus another £4.91 for balloons purchased from fancy goods specialists John B. Bowes Limited, late of Low Friar Street, just round the corner from the Free Press. In those days you never had to walk more than 100 yards to buy a bag of 500 balloons. Viz wasn’t going down too well in Surrey. Having struggled to shift ten copies of issue 1 in Kingston-upon-Thames, Tim Harrison cut his order down to six. But sales were up elsewhere. The Listen Ear record shop took an astounding seventy-five copies, Jane Hodgson took thirty, and Jim’s dad Jack Brownlow, a progressive school teacher and a thoroughly nice bloke, bought twenty-five. My dad didn’t buy any though, largely because he didn’t know Viz existed. By now he was out of work and spending all his time looking after my mum. Both of my parents were blissfully unaware of the comic’s existence, and I wanted to keep it that way for as long as I could.

Issue 2 was clearly a big improvement on issue 1 so I sent an unsolicited copy to Derek Gritten, the bookseller in Bournemouth who’d gone very quiet since receiving issue 1. He wrote back confirming that he hadn’t liked the first one, but the good news was that he did like issue 2 and he promptly ordered twenty-five copies. Despite this promising progress the vast majority of the 500 comics had to be sold in Newcastle by hand, and at nights I’d walk from pub to pub in Jesmond selling comics on my own. I didn’t like going into pubs alone, and I hated cold selling. It was totally against my nature. But something drove me to do it. I did it obsessively, a bit like train-spotting, going from room to room asking every single person if they wanted to buy a comic. The aim wasn’t to sell comics, it was simply to ask everyone. Once I’d asked everyone then I could go home happy, even if I’d sold none. On one of these fleeting runs, through the Cradlewell pub, I inadvertently offered a comic to the new Entertainments Officer from the Polytechnic; a big, bald bloke called Steve Cheney. ‘So . . .’, he said, standing up and turning round to face me, ‘this is the new anti-student magazine I’ve been hearing about, is it?’ His predecessor, Mr Fucking McGregor, had obviously briefed him on our activities. ‘It’s not anti-student at all,’ I told him with a convincing smile. It wasn’t actually, only me and Jim were. ‘Here, have a read and see for yourself.’ I gave the big, baldy twat a free copy and he smiled, said thank you and sat down to read it while I made my escape.

I preferred selling comics when there were two of us. Jim didn’t actually do much selling – he preferred drinking and watching the bands, and the women – but he provided physical and moral support. That could come in handy in the Students’ Union bars where every cluster of students contained at least one gormless twat just waiting for an opportunity to show off to his mates. Occasionally things turned nasty, like the time I foolishly walked into the ‘Agrics” bar at the University and some stumpy, little fat-necked student grabbed about a dozen comics out of my hand, tore them in half and threw them all up in the air above my head. Then he just glared at me as if to say, ‘What are you going do about it?’ I looked at him as if to say ‘Erm. . . nothing, I suppose,’ then sidled away like a coward.

I hadn’t shown the comic to anybody at work. They were all regular, working-class sorts of people. They liked drinking in the Bigg Market and disco dancing, so I thought it might be a little left-of-field for their tastes. But gradually they began to find out about what I was doing and started asking for copies of the comic. When I eventually took some in, to my surprise and delight they all liked it too. All except the old ladies, that is. People laughed out loud, passed them around, and asked for copies of the next issue. This was a revelation to me. Ordinary people found it funny as well as rebellious youths and student types.

As well as crossing socio-economic divides, the geographical spread of sales was also expanding. So far Viz was strictly a Newcastle, Bournemouth and ever-so-slightly Kingston-upon-Thames publishing phenomenon. There was a conspicuous lack of outlets in the capital. Luckily Arthur 2 Stroke had a brother called Tim who lived in South London and Tim volunteered to do some footwork, taking the comic to Rough Trade records and Better Badges. Both shops agreed to stock it. I’d also placed two more ads in Private Eye, one in ‘Articles for sale’, advertising issue 2 for 32p including postage, and the other in the ‘Wanted’ column, offering £1000 for a copy of the first issue. Eager to spread the message I’d also sent copies of issues 1 and 2 to the local newspaper, and this resulted in our first ever press cutting. On 10 April 1980, beneath the headline, ‘A comical look at Newcastle social problems’, the Newcastle Evening Chronicle described Viz as ‘a new comic which is not the usual light revelry, but more a social commentary’. According to their reporter Viz was ‘taking a wry look at society in the form of cartoon strips’, and he summed up by describing it as ‘Sparky for grown-ups’. It was all strangely flattering. They didn’t mention the shit drawings, the foul language or the violent and unimaginative cartoon endings. This was my first ever dealing with the tabloid press, and I’d soon discover how flexible their approach to a subject could be.

Celebrated television producer Malcolm Gerrie, who would later launch The Tube, was in those days producing a dreadful ‘yoof’ show on Tyne-Tees TV called Check It Out. Getting on ‘Checkidoot’, as it was known locally, was the height of ambition for many local bands who assumed that stardom would quickly follow. In reality it didn’t work like that. If they’d looked at the statistics they’d have realized that an appearance on this cheesiest of yoof shows would virtually guarantee them obscurity for the rest of their careers. But Check It Out seemed like an ideal place to publicize Viz, so I bombarded Malcolm Gerrie with copies of the comic and accompanying begging letters. Eventually he invited Jim and myself to his office at the City Road TV studios. Gerrie was a surprisingly geeky-looking bloke with buck teeth, fancy geps, wild eyes, a pointy hooter and ridiculous corkscrew haircut. As if one such face wasn’t bad enough, the wall behind him was plastered with photographs of himself grinning at the camera while clinging to the shoulders of various pop luminaries. Could this be Michael Winner’s illegitimate son I wondered. Jim and I were disappointed by what Gerrie had to say. He explained that he liked the comic very much but he couldn’t possibly consider it for his TV show because of the expletive nature of some of the contents.

By the summer of 1980 changes had taken place at Anti-Pop. Arthur 2 Stroke’s three-piece band had evolved into the eight-piece Arthur 2 Stroke and the Chart Commandos. Around the same time the Noise Toys had folded and Martin Stevens had gone home to Coventry, promising to keep sending me cartoons. I felt like it was time for a change too. At one of the Noise Toys’ final gigs I’d been chatting to a friend called Stephanie and she asked me how my job was going. I told her about all the money I was earning, the tea trolley and the Empire biscuits. ‘You should get out of there,’ she said, ‘before you get addicted.’ She meant to the money, not the biscuits. And she was right. I was getting too comfortable. My dad had told me that if I played my cards right the civil service would be a job for life, but that prospect appalled me. I still had no idea what I did want to do, but I decided to quit anyway and turn my back on the Empire biscuits and £170 cash every month. I handed in my notice and tempered the news by telling dad not to worry, I’d be going back to college soon. But my only real plan at the time was to sign on the dole and produce the next issue of Viz.

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_4ac403ac-3e9e-5645-b707-690cf363bcc2)

Ghost Town (#ulink_4ac403ac-3e9e-5645-b707-690cf363bcc2)

In the summer of 1980 Newcastle’s Quayside wasn’t the glitzy playground for footballers and fat slags that it is today. On the corner of Quayside and Broad Chare there now stands an estate agent’s office where river view apartmentettes are advertised for £250,000 and penthouse suites overlooking the Baltic Art Gallery and the landmark Egg-slicer Bridge sell for a million plus. On the same corner site twenty-four years ago Anti-Pop rented a derelict rehearsal room for £7 a week. Nobody wanted to live or work on the Quayside back then, largely because the river stank of shit. As you walked beneath the railway viaduct, along The Side and into what was once the thriving commercial heart of the city, it was like entering a ghost town. Beneath the north pier of the Tyne Bridge buildings stood empty, their stonework blackened with a century of soot. On the river front itself the Port Authority and a solitary advertising agency seemed to be the only buildings in use. The city’s party epicentre was much further north, and at night you could walk from The Side to the Baltic Tavern in Broad Chare without passing a single under-dressed, drunken woman staggering about in high heels.

The Baltic was a rough-and-ready pub with a reputation for violence dating back to an unfortunate shotgun and testicles incident that had taken place a year or two earlier. But there was cheap rehearsal space in the run-down buildings that surrounded it and the Live Theatre group had established themselves just up the road, so the pub had a pretty bohemian clientele. It was still a sailors’ pub too, with the odd naval vessel mooring nearby, and on Sundays it filled up with dodgy market traders. The Baltic was decorated in a half-hearted nautical theme with fishing nets and orange buoys draped above the bar, and there were a couple of token lifebelts hanging on the wall next to the tab machine. But this was no theme pub. It was a good old-fashioned boozer. The jukebox featured an eclectic mix of disco, soul and early Adam Ant records, and the wall behind it was a sea of posters advertising gigs, plays and exhibitions. In front of the jukebox was a pool table, and it was here I whiled away most of my free time after packing in my job.

Pathetic Sharks

By now Jim Brownlow had got himself a girlfriend. Fenella was a petite and pretty brunette whom I’d known at school, but since we’d left school Jim had got to know her considerably better than me and they now shared a flat. Fenella was a revelation when it came to selling comics. She worked in a clothes boutique by day and by night she’d accompany us on our rounds of pubs and Students’ Union bars. With her looks, patter and personality, Fenella could sell a dozen or more comics where I would have struggled to sell two or three, blokes literally queuing up to hand her their money. Armed with this new sales weapon, in July of 1980 I ordered an ambitious 1000 copies of the third issue. The bill came to £126.57. I hadn’t minded losing money on the first two comics but now I was living on £14 a week state benefit and if Viz was going to continue it would have to start paying for itself. Editorially one of the highlights of the new comic was the début of the Pathetic Sharks. This was a fairly crude half-page strip which had started out as a Jaws spoof before I abandoned it halfway through. Shortly afterwards Jim had picked it up and added a speech balloon, something to the effect that my sharks looked crap. And thus the Pathetic Sharks were born.

During the summer of 1980 I got a message that Brian Sandells wanted to see me. Brian owned the near-legendary Kard Bar tat emporium in what was then the Handyside’s Arcade. This run-down Victorian shopping arcade stood in Percy Street, on the site of what is now ‘Eldon Garden’, a notably plant-free, glass and tiles shopping mall. Today the place buzzes with footballers’ wives spending their husbands’ cash on fancy knickers and designer jewellery, but in the early 1980s it was at the opposite end of the commercial property scale. In the sixties the Handyside had been home to the famous Club A-Go-Go where The Animals had been the resident band. Twenty years on the club was now a grotty carpet warehouse, better known for the historic hole in the ceiling where Jimi Hendrix had once carelessly thrust his guitar, than for its carpets. Most of the low-rent shops in the arcade below sold second-hand kaftans, incense or punk clobber. The Kard Bar was the biggest of these and sold every shade of shit imaginable, from pop posters to dope pipes, via Japanese death stars. The shop was compact and packed, a maze of shelves and racks displaying any manner of tasteless tat. Marilyn Monroe pillow cases, Steve McQueen cigarette lighters, Jim Morrison bath salts. You name it. Brian, the owner, was a smartly dressed, grey-haired man in his late forties who would have looked more at home working in an old-fashioned bank. Standing behind his unusually high counter he looked a bit like a glove puppet operator without a puppet. Brian told me he’d seen copies of Viz and been impressed. A lot of it was rubbish, he added quickly to counteract the praise, but he thought it was well produced. He ordered a modest ten copies of issue 3 to begin with, but paid me £1.50, cash up front, and immediately put them on sale right next to his till.

By now my nationwide distribution network included top retailers like the Moonraker science-fiction bookshop in Brighton and the Freewheel Community Bookshop in Norwich. I got in touch with these unlikely places by scouring the national Yellow Pages archive in the Central Library and sending off unsolicited samples by post. Meanwhile the south coast retirement resort of Bournemouth was becoming an unlikely sales hot spot thanks to the efforts of Derek Gritten. He had even approached the local branch of WHSmith with issue 2. They’d told him where to go, of course, but Derek was still confident enough to order a staggering eighty copies of No. 3. I had distribution north of the border too, a Stirling student called Bill Gordon having forked out £15 for 100 copies to sell among his friends. But selling 1000 copies was proving to be difficult, and after five months I still had a couple of hundred left and not enough money to pay the next print bill. Brian Sandells got me out of a scrape, buying the lot off me and paying cash up front.

Sales hadn’t been helped by our second press review, this time in the local morning paper. I’d sent offbeat columnist Tony Jones at the Newcastle Journal copies of the first three comics and he invited myself and Jim in to meet him and to pose for our first ever press picture on the roof of the local newspaper offices. His review was a bit more objective than the Evening Chronicle’s. Under the headline ‘Comic is a five letter word’ he said that most of the magazine was ‘cheap, nasty and misdirected’. But he wasn’t entirely negative. His concluding words were, ‘If they clean up their act, this enterprising duo could yet find Viz has a future.’

Despite struggling to shift issue 3, I printed another 1000 copies of issue 4 in October 1980. This comic featured the first ever letters page, a combination of genuine letters I’d received (such as the stock letter from the dole office that accompanied my weekly giro) and letters that I’d made up to mimic the vacuous style of the tabloid letters pages. As more and more of my time got taken up by selling – posting off parcels and chasing up payments – the interval between comics was increasing. The next comic didn’t appear until March 1981, but No. 5 was worth waiting for as it marked a watershed. We had our first full-page cartoons, with Jim’s brilliant Paul Whicker the Tall Vicar instantly becoming our most popular character to date. There was also Simon’s SWANT, parodying the American TV series SWAT, and for my money a strip called Ciggies and Beer was Martin Stevens’s best ever contribution. I’d also made my first crude attempt to mimic the teenage photo-romance stories I’d read in girls’ comics like Jackie, taking the pictures at home on my dad’s old camera and using our neighbours as actors. Issue 5 also included the first genuine commercial advert. Brian Sandells asked if he could advertise the Kard Bar and I agreed, on condition that the advert was in keeping with the editorial style of the magazine. This set a famous trend of amusing adverts that was to last for several years. I charged Brian £11 for his half-page advert, and he gave me £15. Brian could be very generous – a little too generous at times when it came to offering advice. On every visit to his shop I’d receive a lengthy lecture on business or graphic design and I’d be stuck there for up to an hour smiling and nodding my head. He was also a real stickler when it came to proofreading his adverts. He always insisted I got the spelling right, for example. He was a real nit-picker, Brian.

When issue 5 was printed the Free Press invited us to come in and do some ‘self work’ finishing which meant that they printed the pages and we put the comics together ourselves. This cut the production costs considerably and was also an important gesture of compliance with the Free Press’s socialist principles. They were, after all, a bunch of commies, not a commercial printer, and for them the object of the exercise was to give us a share in the means of production. Jim, Simon and myself spent many a happy day at Charlotte Square collating, folding and then stapling comics together on a Dickensian saddle-stitching machine. Eventually they let us use the guillotine too, and finally the ‘Hobson’, a fully automated and highly temperamental page collating, folding and shredding machine.

The Free Press was a fascinating environment to work in, with a wonderful mix of characters present. For me that place encapsulated the comical conflict between trendy, right-on socialists and down-to-earth, working-class people that was central to some of my favourite cartoons at the time. Cartoons like Woolly Wilfy Wichardson who orders weal ale in a working-class boozer, and Community Shop where a bloke in a vest goes into a community wholefood collective and tries to buy twenty Embassy Regal. The Free Press was a co-operative where all the workers were equal, but there was an obvious divide between the middle-class political ideologists whose idea it had been to set it up, and the working-class printers who’d been drafted in to work there. Printers like Jimmy, a fat Geordie bloke from Scotswood. He may not have had the intellect of colleagues like Howard, the idealistic hippy, and Andy, the hardcore socialist Scouser, but Jimmy could debunk the lot of them with his blunt wit and choice turn of phrase.

Despite having been fobbed off by Malcolm Gerrie I kept on bombarding Check It Out with copies of Viz and eventually a researcher called Alfie Fox got in touch and invited myself and Simon to a meeting. It turned out Fox was new to the show and didn’t realize Viz was off limits. But our meeting wasn’t a complete waste of time. Alfie Fox took us to the canteen at Tyne-Tees Television for a chat, but I spent the entire meeting listening to someone talking on an adjoining table. A local TV newsreader and continuity announcer by the name of Rod Griffiths was holding court with a group of colleagues, and he was swearing like a trooper. It was astounding to hear such a familiar voice coming out with such unfamiliar language, and I was mesmerized. When we left the meeting we were no closer to getting Viz on TV, but the seeds for a new cartoon character had just been sown.

Bizarrely, after trying for over a year to get Viz onto a shoddy local yoof programme, a slot on national TV fell into our lap. In June 1981 a hand-written note addressed to ‘Anyone from Viz Comics’ was left at the Kard Bar. It came from Jane Oliver and Gavin Dutton, producers of a BBC2 yoof show called Something Else. They were planning to make an alternative programme about Newcastle and were in town looking for suitably disaffected young people to take part. Something Else was a product of the BBC’s Community Programme Unit, and the idea of the show was to give ‘the kids’ access to television.

When we met the two producers they explained that we, the kids, were going to make the programme, not them, the boring grown-ups. They were just going to help us a little. They hand-picked a panel of five appropriately discontented youths from the area, all of whom had got ‘something to say’. As well as myself, representing the comic, there were four others. A motorcyclist called Mick wanted to draw attention to the plight of motorcyclists who are occasionally barred from pubs just because they wear leather clothing. Mick was a fireman, and it occurred to him that if the pubs from which he was barred caught fire, it would be him the landlord would turn to to put the fire out. The irony and injustice of this situation clearly rankled with Mick, and the idea of filming people riding around on bikes clearly appealed to producer Gavin Dutton, who was himself a bit of a biker. Then there was Mark, a chubby, monotone mod who wanted to moan about local bands not getting a ‘fair deal’ from London record companies. There was also Tracey, an actress who I suspected was on the other bus, and had some sort of gripe about the stereotyping of women. And there was Stephen, a long-haired hippy who didn’t like being stereotyped as a long-haired hippy just because he was a long-haired hippy. This was going to be some show.

As with all yoof shows there were a couple of live music slots in the programme to try and entice people to watch it, and because it was our programme the producers said it was up to us to choose the bands. I realized this was a golden opportunity for Arthur 2 Stroke and The Chart Commandos so I got to work lobbying the other panel members. The Chart Commandos were just about the biggest band in Newcastle at the time and their recent single, a dub version of the theme from Hawaii Five-0, had recently stormed in at number 175 in the charts. After a lot of arm-twisting all five of us eventually agreed that Arthur 2 Stroke and the Chart Commandos, and notorious South Shields punk outfit the Angelic Upstarts, would provide the music for our show. With this settled I ran all the way from the BBC studios in Newbridge Street to the Anti-Pop rehearsal room on the Quayside to break the good news.

The next day producer Gavin Dutton rang me. He said he’d been thinking. Because the North-East had such a reputation for heavy metal music, would it not be a good idea to have a heavy metal band on the programme? ‘Not all Geordies are air guitarists,’ I told him. ‘You’d just be reinforcing another stereotype. Can’t we just stick with the bands we chose?’ No, we couldn’t. It turned out that Dutton, himself a bit of a heavy metal fan, had already twisted the arms of the other panel members and the decision had been made to replace Arthur 2 Stroke with a bunch of tight-trousered, cock-thrusting Charlie’s Angels lookalikes, the Tygers of Pan fucking Tang.

My next contribution to the programme was to draw cartoons of a few other North-East stereotypes, such as a man with a flat cap and whippet and a woman chained to the kitchen sink. These were to be included in the show in the hope that the use of such stereotypes on national television would in some way help put a stop to the use of such stereotypes in the media. I seem to recall that was one of the producers’ ideas too. Jim, Simon and I were also going to be interviewed about Viz by another member of the panel. On the day of our interview the film crew were scheduled to arrive at my house at 2.00 p.m. We’d never been on telly before so the three of us decided to pop out to a local pub beforehand in order to calm our nerves. By the time the TV crew arrived we were fucking rat-arsed, Simon especially so, and for some reason we’d dressed up in a selection of silly wigs and false moustaches. Mark, the monotone mod interviewer, read out his questions with some difficulty, and a total lack of enthusiasm, while we gave a giggling performance of Ozzy Osbourne-esque incoherence. When filming was complete all three of us were invited down to London to make a trailer for the show. As a special treat they let us write out the programme credits by hand, in white paint on a very long roll of blue paper. It took us most of the night to do it, and we later learned this had saved them £125 in production costs. The tight bastards didn’t give us a penny. But the benefits of our TV exposure were apparent even before the programme had been finished. In July 1981 I got a letter from TV presenter Tony Bilbow saying he’d seen a copy of Viz at the Community Programme Unit offices and wanted to subscribe to future issues. He generously enclosed £10 and in doing so became our first ever celebrity reader. ‘Something Else Newcastle’ was broadcast on BBC2 at 6.55 p.m. on Friday 25 September 1981. In those days there were only three TV channels, and being on telly was a real event. Everyone either saw us or heard about it, and the programme resulted in a massive upsurge of interest in the magazine, from my parents in particular.

Up till this point they’d been unaware that Viz existed, but keeping it a secret had been getting harder by the day. I knew full well that a BBC film crew arriving at the door might need some form of explanation, but before I’d had a chance to say anything my dad had invited them into the living room for a cup of tea and casually enquired about what they were filming upstairs. The cat was finally out of the bag and a few days later my mum broached the subject of this ‘comic’ on one of my brief visits to the kitchen. ‘Can I see one of these comics of yours?’ she asked. ‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘Actually . . . I’ve not got any at the moment. They’re all sold out. But I’ll get one for you as soon as I can.’ I kept stalling her for days and then weeks, but the pressure to produce a comic became unbearable once the Something Else programme had been broadcast. To make matters worse my streetwise Auntie Thea had heard about Viz by now and had started mentioning it to Mum. Ashamed to show her the real thing I took an old back issue and used Tippex to obscure every swear word in the comic. I seem to recall making twenty-seven alterations before I had the nerve to show it to her. I went into the living room, handed it over unceremoniously then darted back upstairs before she’d found her reading glasses.

Despite our big break on TV I didn’t see Viz as anything other than a slightly shameful hobby. In the year since I’d left the Ministry I’d been supplementing my dole money by dabbling in design work. I’d started off doing a few posters for Anti-Pop, but one job led to another and before long I was producing designs for all sorts of people. I was totally untrained but I particularly enjoyed the design side of the comic and I’d managed to glean the basics of typography by hanging around the Free Press’s design studio and looking over people’s shoulders. I enjoyed the whole creative process of graphic design – from ripping off someone else’s idea, all the way through to cobbling together some makeshift artwork and forging a union stamp on the back. This seemed to be the direction my career was heading in so I decided it was time I went to college and trained to become a proper, professional graphic designer. One that charges £30 an hour instead of just a couple of quid.

No art qualifications were necessary to enrol on the Art Foundation course at Bath Lane College in Newcastle. I found this a little bit disturbing but as I didn’t have a single art qualification myself I couldn’t really grumble. The one-year course was designed to give would-be art students a basic grounding in graphics, ceramics, sculpture, fine art, fashion and eccentric behaviour. For my interview I packed together a few of my early works: a pencil portrait of my late grandfather on my mum’s side, a caricature of Jimmy Hill and my line drawings of castles tailored towards the drunken Norwegian market. I’d been warned by my brother Steve, an art college veteran, that conventional pictures with discernible subject matter – like castles and grandparents – were frowned upon in the academic art world. And a couple of years earlier a friend of Steve’s, an artist called John Boyd, had warned me specifically about drawings of Jimmy Hill. ‘It might look like Jimmy Hill,’ he said, ‘but is there a market for that type of thing?’ John Boyd’s paintings would later sell for tens of thousands of pounds, and sure enough none of them would be of Jimmy Hill. But I left Jimmy in. The only concession I made was to leave my watercolours of diesel trains in the drawer at home. I also decided not to include any copies of Viz in case the bad language counted against me.

The interviewer, who wore suede shoes, whipped through my portfolio like a customs officer searching for duty-free cigarettes. He didn’t seem interested in anything he found, tugging the corner of each drawing then quickly pushing it back into place. Jimmy Hill got nothing more than a cursory glance, as did Granddad and Bamburgh Castle. He seemed so unenthusiastic about my work it came as quite a surprise when he told me I’d been accepted.

The moment I arrived at art college I knew I’d made a mistake. In my first week one of the lecturers, a man called Charlie, was suspended for dancing naked around his studio and trying to stab female pupils in the bottom with a compass point. I sensed I wasn’t going to fit in. I was old, twenty-one by now, and the rest of the students were young, kids of eighteen who all dreamed of being either Vivienne Westwood or David Hockney when they grew up. As the course progressed their dress sense became more extravagant and their hair dye more colourful. Free at last from the social restrictions of their comprehensives and surrounded by like-minded, creative spirits, one by one they were coming out of the closet and declaring themselves Marc Almond fans. All I wanted was for some fucker to teach me how to draw hands properly and explain typography and print, but I’d arrived at art college thirty years too late for that. We rotated subjects every couple of weeks. All I learnt from my brief spell in Graphics was not to call the lecturer ‘Sir’. Everyone laughed when I did that. The correct form of address was ‘Les’. The Photography module was probably the most useful. They didn’t teach you anything about composition or lighting or how to take a decent picture, but they couldn’t avoid showing you how to develop and print a film. What I dreaded most was my two weeks in Fashion and I got through it by keeping my head down and making a 15-inch-high, soft-toy version of a Pathetic Shark. The worst experience turned out to be Fine Art. That did my fucking head in.

At Heaton school my Woodwork teacher, Mr Venmore, spent his spare time working in a small room at the top of the class making himself a beautiful solid ash dining table and a set of matching chairs. At art college the Fine Art lecturer, Brian Ord, spent his spare time in an almost identical room at the top of the class, sawing up tables and chairs and sticking them back together in ridiculous, silly shapes. This was sculpture, apparently.

Over a year the Foundation course sorted the wheat from the chaff. By the end of it the wankers had become hardened art students, destined to have failed pop careers and eventually work in advertising, while dismayed and disillusioned individuals like myself, who were happy with their natural hair colour and preferred Gloria Jones’s version of ‘Tainted Love’, found ourselves back at square one. My parting advice from the senior graphics lecturer, Dave, was that I should get away from this dirty old town, quit Newcastle and head for the bright lights and the big opportunities. He said I should go to Exeter. Apparently Exeter University had an illustration course where I could hone my cartooning talents and qualify to become a greetings card illustrator. If there was one thing I hated it was ‘humorous’ greetings cards. If anyone ever sent me one it went straight in the fucking bin. So I ignored Dave’s advice and decided that my next career move would be to sign on the dole again. Throughout my spell at college I’d continued to publish Viz, but my graphic design work had really started to take off. I’d had one major job to do, designing a clothing catalogue, and this meant working late at night, often all night, trying to cram in other jobs for my regular customers too, then going to college the next day feeling like shit. One morning I actually went to bed for ten minutes thinking it would make me feel a bit brighter when I got up, but it didn’t. Viz No. 6 came out just before I started college, in July 1981, and featured my new creation, Roger Mellie the Man on the Telly. I based his director Tom, the straight man, on my recollection of Something Else producer Gavin Dutton. But a far more popular character launched in the same issue was Billy Britain, a patriotic, right-wing racist who had the catchphrase, ‘What a glorious nation’. The sort of person I’d imagine subscribes to This England magazine. Initially Billy Britain was a much bigger hit with readers than Roger Mellie, but a fatal design flaw would limit his long-term potential. His face was too complicated. I just got lucky the first time I drew it, in the title frame, but subsequent attempts to reproduce the same face weren’t so good. I could only draw him from one angle and with one facial expression, which drastically limited the scope for character development. Roger Mellie, on the other hand, and Norman the Doorman who also made his debut in issue No. 6, were much better thought out. Their simple designs took into account the fact that I was, at very best, a rather mediocre cartoonist. Norman the Doorman was based on the gorillas whose job it was to uphold the ridiculous dress codes imposed by licensees in Newcastle city centre. No white socks, for example. It was also one of those strips where the name came first. You’d think of a name and it sounded so good you simply had to follow it through and come up with a cartoon to match.

Billy Britain

When issue No. 7 appeared in December 1981 it featured the first appearance of Biffa Bacon. Biffa’s name, kneecaps and elbows were undeniably inspired by the Dandy’s Bully Beef, but his character and relationship with his parents, Mutha and Fatha Bacon, were inspired by an incident I witnessed on a Metro train in Newcastle. Two young kids, aged seven or eight, had started squabbling in the aisle of a crowded train and were pushing and shoving each other. Their respective fathers were sitting on opposite sides of the carriage and you’d have expected them to intervene. But instead of reining his son in and telling him to behave, the heavily tattooed father sitting closest to me leaned forward and whispered in his son’s ear, ‘Go on, son, I’m right behind you.’ From that sprang the simple idea of a bully whose father eggs him on rather than spanking him with a slipper. In fact his parents are more violent than he is. Issue 7 also featured a significant strip by Simon called the Lager Lads. This was inspired by a series of what seemed to us unlikely TV commercials for McEwan’s lager in which three young lads went into pubs – laughing, smiling and drinking McEwan’s lager – and never once got pissed or glassed anyone. The Lager Lads was the forerunner of Sid the Sexist.

Biffa, Mutha and Fatha Bacon

With a TV appearance in the pipeline I’d boldly ordered 2000 copies of No. 6, double the previous print run, at a unit cost of just over 11p, and I stuck with 2000 for issue No. 7. By 1981 the comic was reaching cult status among the student population of Newcastle, and sales in city centre shops were taking off. Brian at the Kard Bar was ordering an initial 500 copies of each issue, on condition that he had the comic at least a week before any other shops. By now I’d talked Virgin Records into stocking Viz, and HMV followed suit not long afterwards. Volume (formerly Listen Ear), Virgin and HMV were now all ordering fifty copies on an almost weekly basis. On the one hand this meant I could now retire from hawking the comic around the pubs, but it also posed one or two logistical problems. I couldn’t drive and I had no car, so all the deliveries had to be done on foot and by bus. On at least one occasion Simon and I pressed two of my granny’s ‘Mrs Brady’ style shopping trolleys into service to deliver comics to town on the 33 bus.

Getting HMV on Northumberland Street to stock Viz was a huge boost. The manager, Keith Armstrong, approached me in the pub and asked how it was that his shop was the only record shop in town that didn’t sell Viz. Frankly I’d never asked because I didn’t think there was a cat in hell’s chance of a mainstream music store like HMV touching it. Keith immediately started stocking it, right alongside his tills for maximum exposure. This put Viz under the noses of ordinary people who went to HMV to buy their Rod Stewart and Phil Collins records, and almost inevitably Viz wasn’t to every Phil Collins fan’s taste. One miserable old cow – probably the same woman who reported me to the boss at the DHSS – complained to the HMV head office about the contents of the comic and Viz was immediately banned from the shop. But that didn’t stop Keith from selling it. He simply ignored the ban, kept on stocking it by the till, and told his staff to whip the comics out of sight if they saw anyone from head office entering the store.

Big Vern

The HMV shop had also joined the growing list of advertisers in the magazine. Keeping the adverts funny depended entirely on the cooperation and understanding of the client. Some people just couldn’t get their head round self-parody. Sometimes if a client turned down what I thought was a really funny advert, I’d put the ad in anyway and simply not charge them. But Keith was game for anything and as a result HMV’s ads tended to be among the funnier ones.

Issue 8 came out in May 1982 with a print run of 3000, and as sales rose so the new characters kept on coming. This one saw the birth of two familiar faces, Big Vern and Mr Logic. Big Vern was my tribute to The Sweeney. Like most of my cartoons it was intended as a one-off, a manic précis of the entire 1970s Euston Films genre, all compressed into a silly half-page throwaway strip. A straight man, Ernie, and a funny man, Vern. The same thin joke – that Vern is paranoid about the police – is repeated a few times, and at the end Big Vern kills himself. That was it. Artistically speaking there was nowhere else for Big Vern to go, besides which, from a continuity point of view, he’d already blown his brains out. But people liked it, so Big Vern was duly resurrected and the fact that he always killed himself at the end of the strip became part of the joke.

Mr Logic

Mr Logic was different. He was based very much on real life. The product of a rare collaboration between myself and Simon, Mr Logic – an extreme social misfit – was unashamedly based on our big brother Steve and his hilarious Mr Spock behaviour. It wasn’t until years later we discovered the real name for it was Asperger’s Syndrome.

CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_bca082b8-5aa8-5496-8cba-cfa79d3d73df)

Celibacy and Drugs and Rock’n’Roll (#ulink_bca082b8-5aa8-5496-8cba-cfa79d3d73df)

One underlying reason for Viz’s growing success was probably the fact that I wasn’t getting my end away. I had none of the distractions of a serious relationship, or indeed any relationship at all. I was a bit of a detached, emotionally independent sort of teenager myself. I’d only had one real girlfriend who I’d ditched when she declared herself a Saturday Night Fever fan in 1977. She was the type of girl who expected you to open doors, brush your hair and take regular baths, and I found all that a bit restrictive.

With a CV that featured train-spotting and a record collection that featured the Seekers, my prospects with the girls had never been good. And from a practical point of view living at home had also become a handicap. By now my bedroom, overlooking the railway in Lily Crescent, had almost totally metamorphosed into a design studio. It was a big room, about 20 feet wide by 14 deep, but I’d managed to fill almost every square inch of it with furniture. I had my drawing board, shelves cluttered with ink, pens and drawing materials, a wardrobe full of back issues, my record collection and hi-fi system crammed into a corner, a filthy old settee, the card table for a drawing board, a plan chest, a wooden writing desk, a small set of drawers for my clothes, and finally, amidst all this mess, a very untidy single bed. To add to the romantic atmosphere there was always a whiff of Cow Gum in the air, and what little carpet remained visible wasn’t, due to the amount of litter on the floor. The walls were painted in dismal two-tone green bands – based on the British Railways class 47 diesel locomotive livery of the early 1960s – and there was a large paint stain on one of the curtains where I’d managed to knock a two-and-a-half litre tin of paint off a stepladder. The place hadn’t been properly cleaned or dusted since 1970. It was just about functional as a workspace, but far from the ideal bachelor pad.

I led a solitary existence at home, rarely exchanging more than few pleasantries with Mum and Dad. My social life centred entirely around the pub, and even there I preferred playing pool to talking. I could get on the pool table at 6.30 p.m. and still be winning by closing time. That, and two pints of Whitbread Trophy Bitter, made for the perfect night out. Then, in 1982, my late-running sexual awakening finally arrived.

Karen

Karen was an eighteen-year-old history student at Newcastle University. Andy Pop had told me that a group of girls were interested in starting an Arthur 2 Stroke and the Chart Commandos Fan Club and asked if I’d liaise with them. The girls in question all lived together in an attic flat not far from me. It was at the top of a huge, double-fronted Victorian house belonging to the University, and as I clumped up the communal stairwell I realized that all four levels of the house were completely full of teenage girls. I felt a bit uncomfortable. I found my way up to the top-floor flat and was introduced to three of the occupants. Then the fourth appeared from her bedroom. Her hair was dark and so were her eyes. She seemed quiet and shy but when she smiled her timid little smile, her teeth lit the room and her sparkling eyes gave off the same sexual charge as 10,000 Kylie Minogue’s arses. I was smitten.

That night I tossed – in a purely restless sense – and turned, endlessly thinking about her. Over the next few weeks I made silly excuses to visit the flat but never summoned up the courage to ask her out. I knew I had to so I hit on an idea. Near the Free Press in the centre of town was a little-known medieval monastery called Blackfriars which contained a little-known craft centre and even littler-known restaurant. The perfect way to proposition her would be to ring her and hit her with the killer line, ‘Do you fancy going out to a monastery for a cup of tea?’ There was no way I could have simply asked her out for a drink.

I waited till the coast was clear so I could use the telephone without Mum and Dad overhearing the conversation. Eventually my chance came and I nervously dialled her number. There was a communal phone on a lower landing of the house and my heart pounded as the girl who answered it clattered away up the stairs to find her. When I heard Karen’s voice on the end of the line I babbled my cheesy line out breathlessly and then continued wittering nervously until I eventually ran out of breath. Then there was a short silence after which she said, ‘Yeah . . . okay.’ She’d actually said ‘Yes’! I was in a state of shock and jubilation. We had a date, although I don’t remember much about it. We met at lunchtime, in between her lectures, but I think she declined the offer of food. I might have had a cheese scone, but I couldn’t say for sure. We drank tea and talked for a while. At one point I think she mentioned that her mum worked for the Halifax Building Society . . . or maybe it was the Woolwich. When I’d finished my cheese scone we walked back up towards the University and I vividly remember a group of workmen wolf-whistling at her as we passed St Andrew’s church. Karen had a short skirt on at the time, and very nice legs. Unfortunately our relationship budded for some considerable time without blossoming. Then one day we met up in town and she seemed excited. She had some great news. ‘I’ve got a boyfriend,’ she told me. I was over the fucking moon.

She said his name was Graham and he was studying Naval Architecture, whatever the fuck that was. She’d danced with him at the Student Union disco that weekend and then kissed him goodnight. He made his way home to Fenham, in the west end of town, and she’d gone home to Jesmond, which is just north of the city centre. ‘And do you know what he did?’ she asked me. I was all ears. ‘He couldn’t stop thinking about me, so he walked all the way from Fenham to Jesmond in the middle of the night just to see me again,’ she said with genuine, bubbly excitement. ‘Isn’t that romantic!’ Romantic? Fucking hell. I’d have walked to the end of the Earth just to see her smile, and this randy student git walks two fucking miles and gets a shag. There’s no bloody justice.

I eventually got over Karen and we remained ‘good friends’ for some time after that. In fact she appeared in the photo-story ‘Prisoner of Love’ in Viz issue 8 where she spent the entire story locked in the lavatory. Our good friendship was so strong Karen knitted me a bright red jumper as a birthday present, with the word ‘VIZ’ on the front in great big letters. I couldn’t possibly have worn it but it was a lovely gesture. Mind you, I’d have still preferred a shag.

I hadn’t been entirely celibate all this time. There had been a drunken one-night stand with a platonic, pool-playing friend whose fondness for Stella Artois had possibly affected her judgement on the night in question. She’d invited me back to her flat for the night and mercifully I can remember very little of the event, other than her using the phrase, ‘Hey, what’s the hurry?’ rather often.

In the summer of 1982 I had a fling with a girl called Sally. I’d known Sally since our schooldays and I’d always fancied her, as had every other boy in the school, and most of the male teachers (I remember one teacher in particular loosening his collar, wiping his brow and mouthing the word ‘Phewf!’ after she’d walked past the classroom window). But Sally was unobtainable, way out of my league. She was the stuff of legend. She spent the night in hotel bedrooms with bass players from top punk/mod revivalist three-piece bands (two words, both one syllable), not nerds like me. So imagine my surprise when Sally rang me up one day completely out of the blue and asked whether I fancied meeting up for a drink

Sally was small and stunning with reddish brown hair, and eyes that had always reminded me of Angharad Rees out of Poldark. She was also extremely intelligent, and fluent in Russian which she’d been studying at University for the last three years. We went out a few times to pubs and to the local art house cinema to see Macbeth, but nothing remotely sexual happened in the back row. In fact I fell asleep halfway through the film, which was in Russian, and I missed the last two hours. I guessed she just wanted me for my intellect. Then one evening I walked her to the bus stop and instead of saying goodnight as she usually did, she kissed me . . . and we boarded the bus together. I boarded that bus – a Leyland Atlantean, I seem to recall – a boy. But when the sun rose the next morning, I was a man.

I was also struggling to get my trousers on in a hurry. Like me, Sally was living with her parents at the time and had been a little tipsy when she invited me back. When we woke up she was a different person. ‘Quick, get out before my dad finds you!’ she whispered loudly. I could hear that her father was already well advanced with his morning ablutions in the bathroom next door so I unscrambled my clothes and threw them on as fast as I could, then tiptoed down the stairs and dashed out the front door, fastening buttons as I went. Once I got round the corner and out of sight I slowed down to a cocky stroll and started to smile. Not only had I shagged the best-looking girl in our school, but I’d also gained valuable anecdotal material by having to flee from her father in Robin Askwith style. What a result.

My sexual dalliance with Sally may have put a spring in my step but, together with my burgeoning design workload, it seriously affected production of the magazine. Our summer romance ended in the autumn, rather appropriately, and had it lasted any longer there may never have been an issue No. 9. The new comic finally emerged in November 1982 and new cartoons included the debuts of two Tyneside-based characters, Simon’s Sid the Sexist and my own Brown Bottle. The Brown Bottle was a variation on the traditional superhero theme whereby Barry Brown, a quiet newspaper reporter, transformed himself into an incoherent, foul-mouthed, alcoholic tramp whenever he drank a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale. That character was partly inspired by Davey Bruce, the drummer with the Chart Commandos. Davey was a Geordie ex-council workman, not the college type like most of the musicians I knew. He was the only person in the Baltic who drank ‘Dog’, as Newcastle Brown is known locally. It took more than one bottle for Davey to make his transformation, but once it happened, by hell, what a transformation it was. The inspiration for Simon’s Sid the Sexist was another friend of ours, Graham Lines. In fairness to Graham he was nothing like Sid, but he provided the spark for the idea with his hilarious sexual bravado and endless chat-up lines, none of which he ever appeared to use on girls. Graham was always inviting you out ‘on the tap’, to ‘pull a bit of blart’ and to ‘get a bit lash on’. If you took him up on the offer you invariably ended up having a few quiet beers, sausage and chips from the Barbecue Express, and then it would be back to his flat to get stoned and watch Laurel and Hardy videos into the early hours of the morning. No girls were ever involved.

Getting stoned was something I rarely got the opportunity to do following an unfortunate experience in the Anti-Pop office. I’d been up all night working on a poster for Andy Pop and hadn’t had a thing to eat by the time I arrived at the office. The minute I walked in the door someone offered me a joint. I took a quick drag, just to be polite, and the next thing I knew my head was spinning, there was a noise in my ears like the start of the music at the cliff-hanging end of a Dr Who episode, and all the voices in the room were suddenly distant echoes. I blacked out and smacked my head on a bench as I went down. When I came to I was lying on the floor with someone frantically loosening my collar. ‘I think he’s dead,’ said one voice. ‘Quick, call an ambulance,’ said another. ‘Nah, don’t be silly. He’ll be fine,’ said Andy. My dramatic collapse became the stuff of legend, and from that point onwards whenever there were drugs about people made a point of not offering them to me, so drugs played no part whatsoever in my creative processes. People often asked whether cartoons were drug inspired, but I didn’t even use alcohol for inspiration. Occasionally I might scribble down an idea while I was drunk, but you could bet your arse once I was sober that a good ninety per cent of what I’d written would be absolute shit.

The Brown Bottle

I never tried any hard drugs. Apart from dope the only thing I was ever offered was a little blue tablet which someone once suggested I take to help me stay up all night and finish their poster by the following morning. I believe Andy referred to it as an ‘upper’. The very sight of this tablet scared me stiff and I imagined swallowing it and being found dead in my swimming pool the next day, even though I didn’t have one. I wasn’t brave enough to say ‘No’, so instead I accepted the tablet and then threw it away.

Drugs may have been off the menu but rock ‘n’ roll was still an important ingredient in the comic. Another highlight of issue No. 9 was a Dexy’s Midnight Runners exclusive. Kevin Rowland and Dexy’s were due to open a wine bar in Newcastle and I’d been recruited to orchestrate the event. I sub-contracted my brother Steve to make a wax champagne bottle for use in the ceremony. Following spells at art college and film school Steve was now hoping to get into the special effects industry. On the day of the grand opening a large crowd was in attendance. Posing at the door of the wine bar, Kevin Rowland said a few words then turned and smashed the bottle of champagne over the head of drummer Seb Shelton. The crowd gasped before realizing the bottle was made of wax. I’d explained the stunt to Shelton in some detail, but being a drummer he hadn’t fully understood and didn’t seem to have any idea what was happening. I used a photo of the incident in Viz but made up my own story to go with it. Dexy’s were famously teetotal under Rowland’s strict fitness regime, so our scoop was that he’d caught his drummer drinking a glass of wine and reacted by smashing him over the head with the bottle.

Anti-Pop were now promoting touring bands in Newcastle in an attempt to subsidize the activities of their only remaining act, Arthur 2 Stroke and the Chart Commandos. As a result I got unrestricted press access to various popular artists of the day. One of my first interviewees was Clare Grogan out of Altered Images, whom Simon and I visited backstage at a club called Tiffanys. For me ‘interviewing’ someone simply meant getting some sort of evidence that we’d spoken to them, usually a photograph, then I’d go away and make the words up later. I wasn’t at all comfortable asking questions, but as you were entering the dressing room on the pretext of being a journalist saying something was pretty much unavoidable. Our pop coverage was supposed to be ironic, which is easy to do in print, but trying to be ironic in the flesh is a lot harder, especially if you’re talking to Clare Grogan and you fancy the wee Scottish minx something rotten. We asked her: What’s your favourite colour? Your star sign? Your favourite cheese? That sort of thing. Clare cottoned on immediately and answered every question with a smile, but the band’s lanky guitarist wasn’t getting the joke. He was expecting an earnest interview with a hip fanzine and got more annoyed with each question. ‘What sort of a stupid question is that?’ he snarled when we asked about the band’s favourite biscuits. We persisted, and so did he. Eventually it got a bit embarrassing so I took my obligatory photograph, then we made our excuses and left.

Another act Andy brought to Newcastle was a group of comedians called the Comic Strip. I’d never heard of them until I saw Andy putting up a poster in the Baltic one lunchtime around 1981. ‘They’re fucking brilliant,’ he assured me. He’d assured me A Flock of Seagulls would be fucking brilliant too, so that meant nowt. But the Comic Strip sounded promising so Jim, Simon and myself went along to see them, and thank God we did. Never in my life have I laughed so much and I doubt I’ll ever get close to it again. I was rocking in my seat, aching in the ribs and on the verge of wetting myself. Jesmond was full of social workers in Citroën 2CVs yet I’d never heard anyone (with the possible exception of my dad) make jokes about them. Alexei Sayle and 20th Century Coyote (Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson) were the highlights. I didn’t know people could be so relentlessly, pant-pissingly funny. After the show we hung around the stage door and I pressed a copy of two Viz back issues into what looked like the hand of Jennifer Saunders. It was a very chaotic doorway.

Joe Robertson-Crusoe, from Viz issue 65, 1994

By now the idealistic Anti-Pop organization that had been such an inspiration for me and Jim was effectively no more. They’d lost a lot of steam with the departure of the Noise Toys, and now the label’s last remnants, Arthur 2 Stroke and the Chart Commandos, were also heading for obscurity. They were brilliant live and won support slots with touring acts like Ian Dury and the Blockheads and The Q Tips, but it was impossible to keep an eight-piece band on the road playing pubs and college gigs. Eventually they pawned their ambition on the local working men’s club circuit, and never got it back.

Changes were ringing down on the Quayside too. A man called Joe Robertson was in the process of transforming Newcastle nightlife with the introduction of wine bars such as Legends. Robertson had once been a swinging sixties’ DJ at the Club A-Go-Go. Now he was a successful businessman who, despite dressing like a Miami Vice drugs baron, was receiving plaudits from the police for ‘cleaning up’ the city centre. Heavy drinking and violence in and around the Bigg Market had been a huge problem in the 1970s, but now pubs and bars were going out of fashion and were being replaced by Robertson’s pseudo-sophisticated drinkeries. He’d buy a run-down pub, like the Midland Hotel for example, refit it with lots of fancy chrome and expensive lighting, and change the name to anything ending with an ‘s’. Berlins in this case. The bar would then reopen, and hundreds of young people dressed in skimpy frocks and no white socks would queue to get in and pay through the nose for fancy cocktails and bottled lagers. Robertson was shrewd, if not a slightly cheesy dresser. His genius was realizing that Geordies loved to flaunt their money. If there was a lass watching, then a bloke would much rather pay £2 for a bottle of lager than £1.20. So Joe provided £2 bottles of lager, and even costlier cocktails for the ladies. The punters lapped it up, Robertson became a millionaire and developed an accent to match the superficial refinement of his ‘hay clarse’ drinking establishments. Newcastle’s transformation into a party city had begun. By 1982 the first signs of the Quayside redevelopment were beginning to show, and it was announced that the Baltic was closing down for redevelopment. On the final night we all got pissed and drank Mackeson stout, because everything else had run out. It was the end of an era.

CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_c25c8036-1fdf-54fd-9485-3fe2c2f5a269)

Lunch in the Penthouse Suite (#ulink_c25c8036-1fdf-54fd-9485-3fe2c2f5a269)

Viz’s reputation continued to spread, largely through word of mouth but also through the music press. We’d had entirely positive reviews in Zig Zag, Sounds and the NME, not to mention a two-page spread in the Loughborough Student. Jamming, a short-lived music magazine of the day, described the comic as ‘a fantastically irreverent load of shit’. In the twenty-two years since then I don’t think anyone has described it more succinctly than that.

Fanzines also provided an important method of spreading the word. By 1982 my untidy bedroom was linked to a dozen or so other untidy bedrooms across the land via a national network of fanzine editors. Many of them would ask if they could reproduce Viz cartoons in their own magazines and I’d always agree on condition that they gave the comic a plug. One such editor – a teenager in Leeds called James Brown – used a couple of Viz cartoons without permission in his magazine, Attack On Bzag. I granted him retrospective permission and in return he agreed to distribute Viz for me in Leeds. The editor of Real Shocks fanzine in Kent, a bloke called Roger Radio, also produced a comic called Cosmic Cuts. That was about the closest thing to Viz anyone else seemed to be doing, and Roger soon became a regular contributor to Viz, specializing in lazily drawn, poor-quality, one-frame jokes. Pilot: ‘Enemy plane at one o’clock!’ Gunner: ‘That’s good. We’ve got half an hour to spare then,’ for example.

By now the appearance of a new issue was so rare the event would be celebrated with a party. These ‘Viz Receptions’ began with an afternoon soirée at a hotel in Jesmond to celebrate the launch of No. 5. By the time issue 10 was published in May 1983 the venue had switched to Dingwalls, a nightclub in Waterloo Street where I’d previously had the pleasure of watching exotic dancers from Nottingham perform during a Friday lunchtime outing from the DHSS. I’d been having trouble shifting issue 9, and with 10 being a summer issue – the students were away on holiday – only 2,500 were printed. The most notable cartoon début was perhaps Billy the Fish, albeit on a rather small scale. His first strip took up only two lines at the foot of the second last page. I loved football adventure strips like Roy of the Rovers, particularly the disparity in time that always seemed to exist between the players on the field and the spectators off it. Time seemed to freeze as a shot was taken and members of the crowd would carry out lengthy conversations in the time between the ball being kicked and arriving at the goal line. The name Billy the Fish came first, a take on the Dandy’s Billy the Cat. It then occurred to me that if somebody was born half-man, half-fish, they would most likely be able to swim through the air and would therefore make a very good goalkeeper. There was a bit of a football theme to issue 10. Chris Waddle, a gangling youngster who had just broken into the Newcastle team, was a big fan of Arthur 2 Stroke and the Chart Commandos, and in order to promote their final record, a live LP, Waddle agreed to meet the band for a photo session at a pub in Gateshead. A few other players, including Terry McDermott, also turned up. I was the official photographer and took a couple of extra pictures, later making up my own story about Arthur 2 Stroke winning a music industry award after a penalty shoot-out.