The Inside Story of Viz: Rude Kids. Chris Donald

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      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 СКАЧАТЬ