Читать книгу The Inside Story of Viz: Rude Kids - Chris Donald - Страница 12

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.