The Inside Story of Viz: Rude Kids

A far more conventional way to start a fight was for a bully to say, ‘Are you lookin’ at me?’ But this gradually became less effective as victims developed clever responses, like ‘No’. You had to watch your eye-line very carefully if you were in the presence of potential aggressors. Any look adjudged to be ‘funny’ could be punishable by a severe kicking. You also had to make sure there was nothing the matter with you. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ they’d ask aggressively. ‘Nothing,’ you’d assure them. Occasionally they’d up the ante by asking the rather ridiculous question, ‘Are you calling me a puff?’ despite the fact you hadn’t said a word. ‘No,’ you’d say. This inane line of questioning would go on and on until your interrogator finally felt he’d received sufficient provocation to hit you, or got bored and let you off with a warning. Over the years the nature of bullying changed as the hard kids developed more sophisticated opening gambits. ‘Do you fancy wor lass?’ for example. This was check, in one move, as the answer ‘Yes’ would be clear justification to hit you, while the answer ‘No’ could be followed up with, ‘Why not like? Is there something the matter with her?’ Checkmate.

My dad worked as an oil salesman and brought home piles of Esso Blue calling cards and invoice pads which I’d turn over and use as drawing material. In the privacy of my bedroom I did a series of pictures featuring ugly monsters – globular piles of fat with tiny arms and big faces – being chopped up on bacon slicers and mutilated in similarly macabre ways. I amassed dozens of these drawings, called them my ‘mut cartoons’, and kept them neatly filed away in a drawer in my bedroom. I never showed them to anyone but Jim. ‘What if somebody saw them?’ he once asked. It was a worrying thought.

Jim studied art O-level at school but I dropped the subject as fast as I possibly could. The art teachers, who both had beards and suede shoes, would scribble a title for a painting on the blackboard and then fuck off out of the room. You wouldn’t see them again until the end of the lesson. In their absence the art class would deteriorate into a massive paint fight and I’d usually spend the last ten minutes or so crouched under my desk sheltering from flying paint. The following week you’d turn up and the title for the painting would still be the same. The idle bastards hadn’t even bothered to think up a new one. It was strange to think that at the same school twenty-five years earlier my mum had produced the most wonderful watercolours, but in her day Heaton had been a grammar school where teachers followed antiquated teaching practices, like wearing capes and mortar boards, caning pupils for misbehaviour, and remaining in the classroom during lessons. I used my other lessons for art practice, scribbling away in the back of my exercise books instead of paying attention to teachers. By 1976 my ‘mut’ drawings had evolved into something that I deemed suitable for a wider audience. Using my dad’s invoice pads, ballpoint pens and coloured pencils, I put together a series of comic books which began circulating around the classroom at school. These starred my old friend Scottie as a dour and boring schoolboy who could transform himself into a caped superhero. Whenever his pals were being bullied the Fat Crusader would appear on the scene, rounding up the troublemakers, cutting them up on bacon slicers or sharpening their heads with giant pencil sharpeners. It was still a tad on the morbid side, but the Fat Crusader books became very popular at school. Each little booklet would first circulate around my classroom and then around neighbouring classes. As soon as I finished one, people would start asking for another, and I got requests from people wanting to appear in the stories. I did thirteen Fat Crusader books in all, each one numbered of course, with titles like The Fat Crusader Takes the Sunderland, The Teds Are in Town and, as a Christmas Special, The Fat Crusader versus the Staff Aggro. That one got as far as the staffroom and was never seen again.

The Fat Crusader

While I was drawing the Fat Crusader Jim was leaving school, aged sixteen, and getting himself a ‘scheme’ job in an architect’s drawing office. I stayed on into the sixth form studying Geography, Biology and Woodwork A-levels. The people around me wanted to be mountaineers, caterers, doctors, dentists, nurses and quantity surveyors, but I hadn’t got a fucking clue what I wanted to do. At my first careers interview I said I wanted to be a train driver. The careers adviser didn’t look too happy and came up with a story about needing three A-levels, including Maths and Physics, and a degree in Engineering, to drive trains. I’d seen plenty of train drivers in my time, and none of them looked like engineering graduates to me. After that I lowered my sights a little. In fact I lowered them about as far as they would go and said I wanted to be a geography teacher. The reasoning behind this hugely important career decision was quite simple. I like drawing maps. Unfortunately I’d never heard of cartography at the time, and neither had my careers adviser, so I was duly lined up to go to Aston or Loughborough University and do a degree in Geography. Fortunately my A-level results weren’t good enough. I hadn’t understood a single word in Biology from day one, and although Woodwork was my best subject I failed the exam on a technicality (using panel pins to hold a panel in place). So I left school in 1978, aged eighteen, with six O-levels, a Geography A-level and a perfectly good but technically incorrect panel desk.

Jim’s work experience job had run out by now so we were both on the dole and spent the summer of 1978 hanging out, playing pool and drawing cartoons. By now I’d got a set of Rotring pens for Christmas and my drawing had been transformed. I undertook my first commercial venture, doing line drawings of local tourist attractions such as Bamburgh Castle and the Tyne Bridge, and selling framed prints to tourists. A sixth-form colleague called Baz was now working behind the bar in a city centre hotel and we’d developed a neat little scam. I drew the pictures and got them printed and framed, and Baz talked drunken Norwegians into buying them for £15 each as he plied them with alcohol. It all went well until Baz left the hotel and a drunken Scottish night porter fucked off with all my money.

Having left school I no longer had an audience for my cartoons, so in July 1978 I suggested Jim and I print a few cartoons in a magazine and sell it to people we knew in the pub. I say ‘magazine’. . . The Daily Pie was actually a single sheet of paper, photocopied on one side only. The miniature cartoons included Tommy’s Birthday, a five-frame strip in which a young boy tries to blow out the candles on his birthday cake, and his head falls off. There was a brief horoscope – Your Stars by Gypsy Bag – that read, ‘Today you made a bad decision and bought something crappy.’ And there was Jim’s first ever Rude Kid cartoon, a single frame in which a beaming, wide-eyed mother drags a reluctant child by the hand. ‘Come to the shops, dear,’ she says. ‘Fuck off!’ says the child. Despite its flimsiness I managed to sell most of the Daily Pies in our local pub, The Brandling, by offering substantial discounts on the strategically high cover price of 90p. I printed twenty copies, at a cost of £1.13, and I sold sixteen of them for a total of £1.43, giving me a profit of 30p. By this time I’d more or less kicked my train-spotting habit but I was still very much anally retentive, so I kept a detailed record of every Daily Pie sale. Its significance was then, and remains now, a mystery. But here it is anyway (with the amount paid in brackets): Nicholas Clark (10p), Simon Donald (10p), Phil Ramsey (10p), Peter Chamley (10p), Fenella Storm (10p), Vaughan Humble (10p), Jeremy McDermott (10p), John Reid (10p), Bobby van Emenis (4p), Janice Nicholson and Lyn Briton (10p), Christine Hopper (10p), Kerry Hastings (9p), Dave Hall (10p), Pam Lawrence (10p), Marcus Partington (10p), Claire Beesley and Janet Davison (still owe me 10p). The Daily Pie was well received, so the following month I printed a hurriedly produced follow-up, this time calling it Arnold the Magazine. Mercifully I didn’t keep a detailed record of sales.

If nothing else, peddling these papers in the pub gave me an excuse to talk to girls like Claire Beesley. She was the sizzling school sex siren, and when Claire was in fourth year and I was in the lower sixth we exchanged notes through my brother Simon who acted as a messenger. Claire would write telling me what music she was listening to – Lou Reed’s Transformer I seem to recall – and how hot and sticky she got when she thought about me. Everyday teenage stuff like that. We’d never actually spoken, Claire and I, but she occasionally smiled at me as we passed in the corridor. One day I plucked up the courage to call her only for the phone to be answered by Mark Barnes. It turned out that Barnes, leader of the local chapter of 50cc Hell’s Angels, was her new boyfriend. I felt humiliated, but not nearly as humiliated as I was the following weekend when Barnes swaggered past me in the Brandling pub armed with a note I’d written to her weeks earlier and read it out loud to all his hairdryer-riding motorcycle mates. Now at last I had a new opportunity to impress Claire and the other girls with my cartoons . . . although why girls should be impressed by cartoons about a young boy whose head falls off, and a drawing of a dog shitting on a dinner table, I hadn’t really stopped to consider.

As the summer of 1978 drew to a close I started looking for a job. I had no career ambitions but fancied working for a year, then perhaps going to college. I applied for twenty-seven vacancies in all, but my solitary A-level meant I was ‘over-qualified’ for most of them. I went for one interview at a bus depot in Gateshead, hoping to get the job of clerk. An oily foreman in overalls interviewed me. ‘You’d have to make the tea, you know,’ he said, as if such a menial task was below someone with a Geography A-level. He was clearly looking for someone with fewer qualifications and bigger tits. But I persevered and thought I was still in with a chance until the final question, ‘Why do you want to work in a bus depot?’ I thought about it for a second. ‘Because I like buses,’ I said, with a hint of rising intonation. I didn’t get the job.

By the time my interview for Clerical Officer in the DHSS came around I’d given a lot of thought to the ‘Why do you want to . . .’ question. It seemed to crop up at every interview. This time I was ready with an answer. ‘And finally, why do you want to work in the civil service?’ asked the chairman of the panel. ‘I don’t particularly,’ I said. ‘I’m just looking for a steady job that pays well in order to fund my hobby, which is railway modelling,’ I told him, trying to look as nerdy as possible. It worked an absolute treat. All four members of the panel smiled simultaneously and I was told there and then that I’d got the job. You had to be pretty fucking thick not to get a job at the Ministry. Even Mark Barnes had got in the year before me. In those days the Ministry was a safety net for school leavers who couldn’t get anything better. The Department of Health and Social Security Central Office Longbenton, to give it its official title, was a massive complex of huts and office blocks spread over several acres, housing upwards of 10,000 clerical staff. It had its own banks, post offices, at least five canteens, a hairdresser’s, and running through the middle of it was the longest corridor in Europe. I spent the first few weeks in a classroom learning about the history of National Insurance, which I found quite interesting, then I was posted to Unit 4, Overseas Branch D1, Room A1301. This was a huge open-plan office, about the size of a five-a-side football pitch, where over 100 people sat stooped over desks, writing letters and filling in forms. My specific area of responsibility was dealing with people whose National Insurance numbers ended in 42 (C or D), 43 or 44.

I loved having my own desk, my own ‘in’ and ‘out’ trays and my own stationery items, but what I liked most was all the forms there were to fill in. In the DHSS you had to fill in a form before you could go to the loo, and if you were having a shit you’d have to send a requisition slip to Bumwipe Supplies Branch at least three days in advance. I liked filling in forms and I enjoyed the daily routine too, although it wasn’t particularly healthy. Stodgy fried food was available in the canteens all day long, and there was a tea trolley serving hot drinks and Empire biscuits. These consisted of two big, sugary rounds of shortbread stuck together with jam, covered in icing and with half a cherry on the top. The tea trolley came every day, morning and afternoon, and with almost the same frequency someone in the office would have a heart attack and fall backwards off their chair. From our window we could see the main gate and the constant flow of ambulances going in and out, carting heart attack victims off to hospital. Life expectancy wasn’t high in the Ministry, and neither were the levels of job satisfaction. You were in big trouble if you stopped to think about what you were actually doing. The majority of the work was putting right other people’s mistakes. For example, an oil worker would write in from Saudi Arabia with an enquiry and some daft sod would send him a leaflet which clearly didn’t provide the information he wanted. So he’d write back, repeating his query. This time he’d get a stock reply asking what his National Insurance number was. So he’d write back a third time telling us what his National Insurance number was. But in the meantime we’d have lost his file, so the person who received his third letter wouldn’t have a clue why he was writing in and telling us what his National Insurance number was. So we’d write to him a third time, this time asking why he was sending us his National Insurance number. And so on. Mix-ups like this occurred every day, in their thousands, because all the filing systems were kept manually by people, the vast majority of whom didn’t give a toss. So the whole place was in effect a self-perpetuating human error factory.

If you could take your mind off the work, and say no to an Empire biscuit, the Ministry was a great place to be. The social life was brilliant and there was a wonderful mix of characters, from Joe the Trotskyite union rep to John the racist nutcase who refused to urinate in pub toilets on the grounds that he’d paid good money for the drink and he’d be damned if he was going to piss it straight back into their toilets. One of my favourite characters was a bloke called Dave who sat at a desk behind me. Dave was the best swearer I have ever known. For some reason only working-class people can swear properly, and Dave was a master of the art. His swearing was never aggressive, it was always done for emphasis and comic effect, and when he swore I found it pant-pissingly funny. Every day I’d find myself scribbling down little things he’d said and expressions he’d used. I didn’t know what I was going to do with them, I just felt an instinctive urge to record them for posterity.

I put my name down for the office football team, but unfortunately the manager was an early pioneer of the squad rotation system, and he tended to rotate me from one end of the substitutes’ bench to the other. I couldn’t get a game, so to pass the time I started writing reports on our matches which I then typed up at home and took in to work the following day. Like my Fat Crusader books these match reports caught on, circulating around the office and causing much sniggering and laughter. But the office audience contained a broader spectrum of public taste than I’d previously been used to, and it wasn’t long before one miserable old bat took offence at some of the language. I’d faithfully quoted our captain telling our centre forward, ‘You couldn’t score in a brothel with a ten pound note tied round your chopper.’ Pretty harmless, you’d think, but this was the civil service and a complaint was made to the Higher Executive Officer. Sending non-official circulars around the office was an offence in itself, but including the word ‘chopper’ was a definite breach of civil service protocol. I was summoned to HEO Frank Redd’s office and was still cobbling together a garbled excuse involving helicopters as I opened the door. Fortunately he didn’t give me a chance to use it. Mr Redd said my football reports showed imagination and initiative, but he felt my journalistic skills could be put to far better use. He wondered, in no uncertain terms, whether I’d like to apply for the voluntary, unpaid job of assistant editor at The Bulletin, the monthly magazine of the DHSS Central Office Sports and Social Club. The job had been vacant for some time, and he said he would use his considerable influence to make sure I got it. At last! I had my first break in journalism.

The next few months were a whirlwind of excitement as I dashed about the DHSS, notebook in hand, reporting on the thrilling activities of the Horticultural Club, the Carpet Bowls League, the Philatelic Society and the Wine Making Circle.

CHAPTER TWO

The Gosforth

From the age of sixteen or seventeen Jim and I began to rendezvous in pubs instead of railway stations. We were still loners to a large degree. We’d sit in the corners watching people and pass cynical remarks on their behaviour and appearance. The fact that good-looking girls were going out with other blokes and not us gave us a shared, nerdy sense of injustice. In terms of cultural identity Jim and I were hovering somewhere between being hippies and punks. We both had long hair and wore denims, and sometimes we’d go to the Mayfair Ballroom for the legendary Friday Rock Nights. But neither of us played air guitar. We were only there to gawp at the hippy chicks with their tight jeans, cheesecloth blouses and supposedly liberal attitudes towards sex.

In our schooldays Jim had displayed a fondness for Steve Hillage, which I could never quite understand, and he once went to Knebworth to see Rush. I was a bit of a Seekers fan myself. Them, the Beatles and Abba. But if anyone asked me I always said I liked Thin Lizzy. I tried to broaden my tastes but most contemporary music didn’t grab me. A friend once suggested I try lying down on the floor, in the dark, and listening to a Pink Floyd album. I did, but it still sounded shit to me. Punk, when it came, was an absolute godsend. The fashion was a trifle severe, but I loved the spirit of it and particularly the fact that Radio 1’s Mike Read didn’t like it. Jim was more a connoisseur of music than I was. He introduced me to The Buzzcocks and The Stranglers and we started going to see New Wave bands. We were still dithering, going to see Judas Priest one week and The Jam the next, until one night our loyalties were put to the test. It was a Friday at the Mayfair and we’d gone to see a mod-revival package tour, Secret Affair and The Purple Hearts. A battle broke out between the Mayfair’s native rock fans and the visiting mods and punks. As chairs started to rain down from the balcony Jim and I instinctively found ourselves running towards the mod end of the room for shelter. It was a defining moment.

The Two-Tone Ska revival was happening at the time and in Newcastle a new record label had been set up, clearly inspired by Coventry’s porkpie hat-wearing fraternity. The name of the Newcastle outfit was Anti-Pop, and on Monday evenings they promoted bands at a pub called the Gosforth Hotel. Jim discovered the place and suggested I come along the following week. Jim’s musical tastes were still a lot broader than mine so I didn’t hold out much hope for the entertainment, but he’d also mentioned that there’d be girls from Gosforth High School there, and to a couple of likely lads from Heaton Comprehensive the prospect of a room full of high-class teenage totty from Gosforth High was a major attraction.

The Gosforth was a typical two-storey, brick-built Victorian pub, situated next to a busy road junction in a fairly well-to-do suburb. There was a traditional old codgers’ bar downstairs plus a lounge, and upstairs there was a very small function room where the bands played. The function room was dark, with blacked-out windows, a corner bar that looked as if hadn’t been used since the 1950s, a big round mirror on the wall above a fireplace, and beneath that the band’s equipment taking up about half of the overall floor space. Most of the crowd who squeezed into the other half of the room – and some of the musicians – were under-age, so they’d sneak in the side door, dash upstairs and dart into the function room before the red-faced ogre of a landlord could catch them. He was an obnoxious, drunken git who didn’t approve of loud music and alternative fashion, or under-age drinking on his premises. Every now and then he’d storm up the stairs in search of under-age drinkers, threatening to set his dogs loose in the function room if he found any kids inside.

Anti-Pop admission stamp

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.