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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.

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.