I Was A Teenage Fanzine Editor: Hail Hail Rock 'n' Roll

(extract)

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Part One: How Brian Molko Tried to Score Drugs From Me Once When I was Fifteen

This is a true story, as all stories are. I was fifteen when it started. I had been reading the NME for just over a year. I lived in a village with one pub, five highland cattle and a number of old ladies who I enjoyed playing carpet bowls with once a week. We had sherry in our tea at half-time in the winter months. It was nice. I'd watch the smooth, wide curve of the ball uncurling across green felt, loosely reaching the near end of the carpet in an apex of lethargy, all the while holding my breath waiting for it to stop. I always liked to hold my breath. I would hold it hard, caught tight and close in my fifteen-year old still under-developed chest underwater in the bath for whole minutes at a time. Listen to my heartbeat booming out loud in the silence of the bath water's lukewarm embrace. I would go to gigs at Newcastle Riverside and hold my breath standing next to the speakers, which towered above my fifteen-year old five foot five and given up growing frame. Holding my breath I would watch Deus or Gene, or Luscious Jackson or Frank Black and the Pixies or Urusei Yatsura or whoever ply their trade in the swirling, dancefloor lights. And, on occasion, I would faint outright and crumple into a heap on the floor because the beauty of that music was making me hold my breath so hard that I would forget, minute after minute, to breathe.

I was fifteen and this was living: catching the train straight after school and changing out of my olive-grim green all girls church high school uniform in the station toilets while thinking of questions to ask the band. Starting a fanzine had been easy because the NME made me. After a year of reading it I was sick and bored of the crap, bad writing, as well as the people who wrote it (who were old enough to be able to write and patronise me better but obviously had enough trouble just spelling their own names). Out of fifteen-year old disaffected desperation I was forced to staple six double-sided photocopies of A4 scribbles together and sell them to people at gigs. There was no why or wherefore. I just couldnít live in a world where the drivel the NME and MM published was being happily bought without doing something to object. So I did. I declared a one woman war against the national music press and so began my campaign.

Initiation was found in the pages of my dreaded enemy, the NME itself. Boxed at the back, under a random selection of guitars for sale, singers wanted and all amps bought dirt cheap I came across an advert for "Fantasy Y-Fronts", a 'zine written and produced by three sixteen year old girls from London who called themselves "the pants posse". Sending off for issue 3, subtitled 'the fucking blinding one', I found myself introduced to a like-minded threesome of female editors, who variously described their mission and themselves as "we are here to kill all your frogspawn if you don't buy tons of copies . . . We consist of Melissa "no hair" Harriss, Sally "more hair" Hurworth and Maria "silly hair" Egan, we are small, furry and we like fish". Correspondence between Maria and myself began, with tips on the best staple guns, photocopy machines and how to stop your glue from drying out too quickly flying my north-eastern way. Forewarned and forearmed my first issue of Bedsprings Unite, with the magnificent print run of twenty, blasted its way into our local independent record shop, in fact our only independent record shop, and sold four copies in a week. Within three weeks it had sold out and I began spending disproportionate amounts of time hanging out at photocopy shops, arguing with assistants over suitable reading material for fifteen year old girls. The war had begun.

Oh yeah, and one time I went to interview Placebo and Brian Molko asked me if he could score some coke from me and I said no, even though I had some, because he was a wanker and looked really bad in eyeliner too. Hail, hail Rock 'n' Roll huh?

Part Two: On Falling in a River After Drinking Cripple Cock Cider with Nine Lads from Wakefield and a Guitar

Apart from the obvious pitfalls of living in a small village: enforced strawberry cream teas in the village hall; getting run over playing spot light blockie at midnight on the road, or the cattle truck severing your telephone line, the major disaster as an elite member of the underground fanzine agents network was the limited access I had to bands and their gigs. My nearest indie venue was Newcastle Riverside, pantheon of all things dark, sweaty and preferably in tights. It had two floors; the main arena downstairs and a stage upstairs the size of my bed for that 'intimate' gig experience where unknown bands would play to crowds of six mildly bored students and a representative of the 'local' press. Resplendent in its arena of industrial warehouses and disused factory buildings, the Riverside was an indie kids wet dream, in its halcyon days boasting the likes of Nirvana and Mudhoney as headliner acts. It was my job to make it here by 5:30pm of the school day in order to have time to interview the band (inevitably after they'd soundchecked but before they'd eaten) before watching the gig while making notes. My village was five miles from the town, Durham city. Durham city was fourteen miles from Newcastle. I was fifteen, had no driver's licence, and was the child of a single parent who not only hated driving, but also refused to leave the house after dark unless bribed. And so the bribery began.

The first transport hurdle was making it out of Shadforth into the town. In the summer this wasn't too hard, as long as you recognised that just because there was an out of date bus timetable it didn't mean that any out of date buses would actually turn up. In the winter it was demonstratively better for your wealth and health if you just stayed in. For it was not unknown, in the depths of winter slush, to be picked up at the bus stop only to find yourself back there, minus your bus fare, after an aborted attempt at driving up one of the three hills that got you out. The Herculean task of exit from Shadforth having been achieved, it was then a train and metro affair to the venue itself, and once you were there, there was no turning back, for the last train to Durham always left hours before the end of any gig. On school nights my only difficulty was getting out of lessons early enough to catch the 5pm Durham - Newcastle train, in order to make it to the interview on time, while bribes in the form of a bottle of wine a week ensured a return car ride, at around 1am.

I had been writing, photocopying and selling my fanzine now for just under a year. Stealthily inserting itself behind classified enemy lines, with ads in the NME, MM and Q magazine, as well as a series of flyers depicting my baby sister's arse and the title "Lots of barefaced cheek", Bedsprings Unite garnered its first plaudit of international success with a subscription from Switzerland and a postcard from Bombay asking if "Bedsprings United can furnish me with further details of competitive ROTW subscription rates or the appropriate number of chocolate bars." Prontaprint in Durham had banned me on the grounds of taking up too much of their time, and with circulation rates soaring I decided it was time to go to print. Alex, a seventy-two year old printer who ran his own firm on an industrial estate, was my first port of call as a friend was doing work experience for him. Enamoured by the "Bedsprings Unite Top 50 Wankers Cards - two free with every issue, buy the next 25 issues to complete your set!" he agreed to print the fanzine at a not for profit rate which found me with two hundred copies of issue five to flog in approximately twelve weeks. Selling tactics included pretending it was part of the official Ash merchandise at a gig at Newcastle Mayfair, which got fifty copies sold to unsuspecting twelve year olds, as well as the limited edition cut-out-and-keep versions of "Kenickie-on-a-stick", suggested uses of which were "hold Emmy-Kate in front of your face and scare your friends into thinking they have been in contact with Kenickie or use Emmy-Kateís head to relieve that terrifying itch between your buttocks". It seemed to work. Within two months of the first print run there were a mere thirty copies left bouncing around in my school bag, and most of my GCSE Latin class (fellow subversives it turned out) were helping to cut out and staple the backs and fronts of four hundred Top 50 Wankers cards, during lunchbreaks, to glue into the 'zine.

Oh yeah, and one time at the Leeds Heineken Festival '94 I got mashed on twelve bottles of Cripple Cock Cider with nine lads from Wakefield who spent the next seven hours playing bad tunes on a guitar. I then decided it was a good idea to go for a walk. By what looked like a river, but on unintentional closer inspection turned out to be a sewage outlet. Hail, hail rock 'n' roll huh?

Originally published (a version of) in the anthology Rock (Pen&Inc, 1999)