The 1970s and 80s saw a publishing revolution in Leeds. People felt emboldened to start their own newspapers and magazines, to rival the mainstream press. We interview some of the writers and editors who were desperate to get their voice heard.
Introduction by Peter Slater
Interviews by Pater Slater, Lorraine Harding and Tom Bailey
In the 80s there wasn’t much to do in a rural village beyond riding over hill and dale, sci fi from the library and the music of the John Peel show and of course, football. Access to games came through travelling home and away to every game we could with a friend’s dad in his “reliable” Austin Princess, winter Tuesday nights in Oldham, Blackpool, Hartlepool and Rochdale…I read Shoot avidly until that wasn’t a cool thing to do at university. And then football fanzines arrived. Fanzines in print are now a bit a niche in a world of social media, online presence and instant likes. However, without fanzines much of what we see today might not have formed as it has, for sure it would have had a much different style. Print fanzines were the social media of their day.
Fanzines started in the realms of science fiction. The Comet from 1930 is acknowledged as the earliest ‘true’ sci fi fanzine, and Leeds involvement was announced when the first Sci Fi fanzine convention happened in Leeds in 1937 at the Theosophical Hall with non-other than Arthur C Clarke in attendance.
It was the 1980s when the “big bang” happened with the arrival of huge numbers of independent music and football fanzines. What was the different that allowed fanzines to breathe and prosper? What really changed was the ‘anyone can have a go’ mentality; As the 60s “swung” people began to realise that there was more to the life than working in a bank and that mentality really exploding in the punk era of the late 70s. Punk itself was a short-lived phenomenon, and its musical long-term influence can be debated elsewhere but the change in mindset it engendered has endured.
Self-publishing was enabled by changes in “technology”. The printing and copying devices now available created a sort of 2nd Gutenberg moment, publication became “free” again. The move from Mimeographs to Letraset, Gestetners, risograph printers and Roneo machines, then onto photocopiers was a huge shift and played a massive part in enabling scores of ‘proto’ writers to live out their dream without worrying about publishers, costs and in some cases too many strictures around grammar and spelling.
Leeds contribution to this switch was huge. In music you had fanzines like Attack On Bzag by James Brown, Kvatch by Clare Wadd, The Expression She Pulled by Paul Ritchie, Ablaze! by Karren Ablaze and Raising Hell! by Ben Cooper all leaders in their field (indie, postpunk, Riot Grrll, punk) and with readership that spanned the globe, all from (sometimes poorly!). There were many more, all self-published pamphlets made in the city. In football two hugely influential fanzines were born, Marching Altogether and The Square Ball with the The City Gent in nearby Bradford all three would become leaders and trendsetters. Marching Altogether fought and defeated NF racism at Elland Road and the later two are still published today. Before that came Leeds supporters club publications like The Fullerton Park News and Crossbar, if not quite fanzines, then proto zines, supporters expressing critical views of what was happening at their club even if they did belong to official supporter’s clubs.
It wasn’t just fanzines though; Leeds Other Paper was published for 20 years from 1974 with no political alignment but rather to “try to support groups and individuals struggling to take control over their own lives” born out of a frustration with the failure of mainstream papers to reflect the diverse stories and struggles of working class people the paper would champion the cause of ordinary citizens and provide a vivid insight into Leeds life.
Consider these names; 606 (or any football phone in), Irvine Welsh, Neil Forsyth, Trainspotting, TalkSPORT, Danny Baker, Loaded, James Brown, 5Live, Alan Pattullo, GQ. If you are even vaguely familiar with literature, radio, magazines and the entertainment industry over the past 40 years you will know these names, shows, magazines and brands. Most of them have at least a part of their origin story in fanzines and Leeds has a central role in the history of self-published print.
INTRODUCTION
Peter Slater
In the 80s there wasn’t much to do in a rural village beyond riding over hill and dale, sci fi from the library and the music of the John Peel show and of course, football. Access to games came through travelling home and away to every game we could with a friend’s dad in his “reliable” Austin Princess, winter Tuesday nights in Oldham, Blackpool, Hartlepool and Rochdale…I read Shoot avidly until that wasn’t a cool thing to do at university. And then football fanzines arrived. Fanzines in print are now a bit a niche in a world of social media, online presence and instant likes. However, without fanzines much of what we see today might not have formed as it has, for sure it would have had a much different style. Print fanzines were the social media of their day.
Fanzines started in the realms of science fiction. The Comet from 1930 is acknowledged as the earliest ‘true’ sci fi fanzine, and Leeds involvement was announced when the first Sci Fi fanzine convention happened in Leeds in 1937 at the Theosophical Hall with non-other than Arthur C Clarke in attendance.
It was the 1980s when the “big bang” happened with the arrival of huge numbers of independent music and football fanzines. What was the different that allowed fanzines to breathe and prosper? What really changed was the ‘anyone can have a go’ mentality; As the 60s “swung” people began to realise that there was more to the life than working in a bank and that mentality really exploding in the punk era of the late 70s. Punk itself was a short-lived phenomenon, and its musical long-term influence can be debated elsewhere but the change in mindset it engendered has endured.
Self-publishing was enabled by changes in “technology”. The printing and copying devices now available created a sort of 2nd Gutenberg moment, publication became “free” again. The move from Mimeographs to Letraset, Gestetners, risograph printers and Roneo machines, then onto photocopiers was a huge shift and played a massive part in enabling scores of ‘proto’ writers to live out their dream without worrying about publishers, costs and in some cases too many strictures around grammar and spelling.
Leeds contribution to this switch was huge. In music you had fanzines like Attack On Bzag by James Brown, Kvatch by Clare Wadd, The Expression She Pulled by Paul Ritchie, Ablaze! by Karren Ablaze and Raising Hell! by Ben Cooper all leaders in their field (indie, postpunk, Riot Grrll, punk) and with readership that spanned the globe, all from (sometimes poorly!). There were many more, all self-published pamphlets made in the city. In football two hugely influential fanzines were born, Marching Altogether and The Square Ball with the The City Gent in nearby Bradford all three would become leaders and trendsetters. Marching Altogether fought and defeated NF racism at Elland Road and the later two are still published today. Before that came Leeds supporters club publications like The Fullerton Park News and Crossbar, if not quite fanzines, then proto zines, supporters expressing critical views of what was happening at their club even if they did belong to official supporter’s clubs.
It wasn’t just fanzines though; Leeds Other Paper was published for 20 years from 1974 with no political alignment but rather to “try to support groups and individuals struggling to take control over their own lives” born out of a frustration with the failure of mainstream papers to reflect the diverse stories and struggles of working class people the paper would champion the cause of ordinary citizens and provide a vivid insight into Leeds life.
Consider these names; 606 (or any football phone in), Irvine Welsh, Neil Forsyth, Trainspotting, TalkSPORT, Danny Baker, Loaded, James Brown, 5Live, Alan Pattullo, GQ. If you are even vaguely familiar with literature, radio, magazines and the entertainment industry over the past 40 years you will know these names, shows, magazines and brands. Most of them have at least a part of their origin story in fanzines and Leeds has a central role in the history of self-published print.
Gordon Wilson, Tony Harcup, Angharad Thomas
Leeds Other Paper was set up by a collective to be the alternative voice for Leeds. It ran from 1974 and sold thousands of copies on a regular basis, first as a monthly, then fortnightly and from 1980 as a weekly. After a name change to the Northern Star, the Paper closed in 1994.
Beginnings
Gordon: It goes back to the 1960s, there was a huge radical scene. Graduates of the university who'd stayed in Leeds, they produced a paper called The Other Paper. I do remember helping to sell that in the middle of Leeds on an afternoon and I used to be pleased that I managed to sell four copies in an hour. It only lasted six months. That germ lived on through the early 1970s, and a group of us who had been on the fringes of the previous version started thinking about learning from the mistakes that the previous one had made, and setting up a paper again. There were long discussions about what name we would give it. Some were really weird, like Black Snow. In the end, we decided to keep Other Paper, because that's what we were. The basic idea, we were differentiating ourselves from the standard press. So we decided to call it not just The Other Paper, but Leeds Other Paper. The first edition was in 1974, which would have made me 27 years old then.
Tony: Leeds was dominated media-wise by the Yorkshire Evening Post and the Yorkshire Post. The company that published them was called Yorkshire Conservative Newspapers Limited! It was quite right wing. They did certain things fine. If you want the football coverage, you want the details of court cases, that's all there. What wasn't was a critical questioning edge about power, nor the voices of ordinary people. Ordinary people on a housing estate organising against damp. The black community largely was largely absent from the pages of the Evening Post. It was a very blokey tone. Then we had Yorkshire Ripper years and the way that that was covered in the mainstream press was very different to how we covered it.
Gordon: My first degree was in textile chemistry. But I did rather fancy myself as a writer. I'd written one or two plays with a strong political edge. During this period, a notice had been served that our houses were going to be demolished for slum clearances. This was in the Ebors [in LS6]. I just put out some leaflet calling a public meeting about it. A large number of people turned up and I was quite amazed. Everyone would come together. It was quite incredible just how much there was a positive energy there. What we were talking about [in the Paper] was supporting people's struggles in their everyday lives in Leeds. To take some more control of their lives. And so that's what we were going to support. I don't know how we got the money together to get a printing press of our own. It was housed in a small shop near the Royal Park pub. We called it Leeds Community Press. And I remember well the very first issue. There was me and one other person, a guy called Des Miller, he certainly was more on the graphic artist side of things. He was going to be the printer. We managed to get together this lightbox, because you had to photograph it, and then to create a plate to go through the printing press. And we were working with ordinary typewriters, pretty crap typewriters as well. I remember we spent about three or four hours on a Sunday night trying to get the whole thing flat enough [to go] on this light screen. It ended up with every book he had in his flat, his television and everything, all on top of a blanket on top. Eventually, at around midnight, we actually managed to get a plate that was good enough to print. That was in January 1974.
Tony: I came to Leeds to go to university. One of the first things I did was to buy a copy of Leeds Other Paper, which I'd never heard of. 5p from a newsagent. The reason I bought it was because I was already slightly tuned into alternative things, as an 18-year-old who wanted to change the world. In the first issue that I bought there was a bit of a blurb which explains what the paper is, and says if you're interested in it, if you like it, you're welcome to get involved, come along, send us some stuff in. I sent them one or two things. I can't remember if they used anything. Long story short, I later dropped out of university. But by that stage I'd got involved in community activities, so I stayed on in Leeds. And I continued reading the paper. But gradually through community activities and things, I got to know one or two people who were around the edges, so I started going along to meetings. I'm guessing this would have been probably 1976-ish.
"What we were talking about [in the Paper] was supporting people's struggles in their everyday lives in Leeds. To take some more control of their lives. And so that's what we were going to support"
The Collective
Gordon: The main challenge was people not getting burnt out. We met that challenge by trying to pay workers. If you're having to make a living and you're just doing it voluntarily, you'd burn out. We paid our own people. The Community Press would print for community groups and trade unions, and the money made for that would subsidise the wages of working on the paper. We did take advertising in the paper, but the sales and the advertising would not pay for wages. We were unique among the alternative press that had sprung up. I was the second paid worker there. There was a guy called Keith Lomax who founded it with me [alongside Matt Hill and some others]. Keith was the first, and then I was the second, and then Tony [Harcup] was the third. I was treasurer of it for ten years. Sometimes, it was a choice being able to buy a stock of paper to print the paper or paying the wages. We weren't good employers on ourselves, but at least it was a collective decision.
Tony: I was working as a paid worker for ten years, from 1978 to 1988. But I was involved before that, and to an extent after that as well. So ten years as a paid worker - and with low pay. [Keith Lomax was] the first paid worker. But he definitely wasn't the editor, and he wouldn't have wanted to be called the editor. The Paper was fiercely independent There was never an editor. And for most of its existence, it didn't even give bylines to people who wrote the articles. At first it was an entirely informal grouping, informal cooperative. We then became a formal workers' cooperative.
Gordon: Every Monday evening, we had an editorial meeting. We went through all the articles. Some went through, others required some discussion, and some that we'd often get from community groups. Keith, myself and Tony, we were journalists on the Paper. It was our job to hunt out the relevant news. And I think there was something about there being a milieu of people. There are lots of different things going on. [For example] The Women's Liberation Movement was in its infancy.
Tony: What was educational was you were in a room of people, intelligent people, interested people, many of them active in community issues. Probably none of them trained journalists, but interested in producing news, news that was useful to people. You'd have that critical readership there in the room. Saying, “I don't understand this article.” Or, “There's a really interesting story here somewhere, but you've buried it right at the bottom.” Or, “You haven't got anything from the people who live on this estate - we need to hear from them, we can't use it unless we get their voices.” Some people were prolific writers; some people never wrote anything, but they still came along and participated; some would be maybe cartoonists, like Harry Hammil and John Quail, they're interested more in picking one of the stories and sitting in a corner and drawing a cartoon to go with it. That was the spirit of the paper: if you're interested, you can get involved.
"Despite the lack of social media and the internet, these stories could spread. We had to support people's grassroots struggles."
The Stories
Angharad: [The Paper] was about wanting to give a voice to ordinary campaigns and grassroots movements. People who have mould growing in their kids' bedrooms and that sort of thing. And also opposing… in the 70s there was such a lot of demolition and development in Leeds. I mean, a lot of central Leeds would have gone. Boar Lane was one of the very early campaigns.
Gordon: We did take up some causes of individual people, and they ended up winning their cases. I remember taking one up from a woman called Rose, who'd got a kind of nickel poisoning from working in a factory. She couldn't use her hands and she'd split up from her husband. A homeless charity in Leeds took up her case, and she won a tribunal. There was a guy who'd got bladder cancer. He'd worked in a dye factory, and there was a strong case to come from that. Despite the lack of social media and the internet, these stories could spread. We had to support people's grassroots struggles.
Tony: The stories we were attracted to were where ordinary people were doing something for themselves. I can remember the anti-damp group in Osmondthorpe. We were always covering more community focused cultural things going on. It may be the dance studio in Chapeltown or the Chapeltown carnival. Now, mainstream media is all over that but they weren't that interested to begin with. Campaigns about some wrongful arrests or perhaps allegations of police brutality. Or ongoing campaigns for years like the miners’ strike. Simultaneously in the 80s, there were real fears amongst many of nuclear armageddon. with Reagan and Thatcher. We published a leaked version of the Protect and Survive pamphlet - what to do in a nuclear war. The government was keeping it secret. It came through in an unmarked brown paper envelope, somebody put it through [the letterbox] one night. It was all quite scary at the time. We did conduct the occasional readers’ survey. A comment that stuck in my mind was, “it's so depressing my mum won't look at it. It seems to be bad news. It's all about problems!”
Getting the Paper Out
Tony: One of the jobs for every issue was physically folding the paper. On a Wednesday late afternoon, people would be called to somewhere with a very long table or bench. And there'd be a big pile of the individual pages. And you'd walk along, you'd gather those pages together. And you'd fold them and you'd make a nice pile. Quite labour intensive.
Angharad: It was pretty do-it-yourself, I mean, it was pretty tight. Monday was editorial, Tuesday was writing and typesetting, printing Wednesday, Wednesday afternoon folding, physically. And then Thursday, taking one of the cars round delivering. Our kids were at high school. They used to wander down after school and fold for a penny a copy. They were really stroppy. One of them was really bad at it and all the others used to shout at her. And then we used to go and have fish and chips.
Tony: We’d have a number of different newspaper rounds. City centre shops were big sellers. There were a lot more newsagents in those days. You'd take the new paper and you'd see how many they'd sold of the previous one. They'd give you the money. Further out from the city centre, you know, people with access to vehicles would have to drive out there. You're spending more probably on petrol than getting in [through sales] But nonetheless, we felt it was important to get out. Then there were your specialist shops, the Corner Bookshop, food shops, whole food cafes. The White Stag on North Street (which is no longer there) used to have some behind the bar, because one of our people used to be a regular there. The University Union.
Gordon: We knew we had a basic captive audience of people that would buy the paper. We used to print 3,000 copies, I think at its very maximum, it only sold about 2,400. We sold them on sale or return to newsagents. I think we definitely punched above our weight in terms of our circulation. It probably got read by a lot more people [than bought it].
Angharad: One of the challenges was circulation, [it] was never really big enough to support the production. We never really cracked the circulation problem.
Gordon: Later there was the What’s On guide. We ourselves wanted to find out what was going on. We realised that we weren't alone in this. Everything went in. We decided it had to be comprehensive. So it provided that service.
Tony: I don't think we should underestimate the cultural impact as well. The coverage of all that activity that was going on, the theatre, the gigs, all that kind of stuff that was happening, that gave serious coverage to all sorts of arts and cultural activity that really didn't get a look in. It's hard for people to think back to when there was no internet. Mainstream publications didn't do free listings.
I don't think we should underestimate the cultural impact. We gave serious coverage to all sorts of arts and cultural activity that really didn't get a look In [otherwise]. It's hard for people to think back to when there was no internet.
Endings
Gordon: I think I have to say why I left. I did burn out. Because of the miners' strike, where I'd be getting up every week to go on the picket line to report on it. In some ways, it was the first time I felt part of a heavy defeat. I suddenly just felt I didn't have the energy for it anymore. I just realised I was worn out. I could hardly bring myself to go out of the office. I was relying more and more on people's press releases, rather than investigate myself. It's a physical thing, but also a mental thing, I think, just how you can't be bothered anymore. Because you've spent all these years fighting and you just lost. You end up feeling as if you've been banging your head against a brick wall. You have had some victories, but we were part of a protest movement, and not really getting things going forward. It was just so difficult.
Tony: In 91, it became the Northern Star. The main impetus in the change of name was to try and sell more copies to people who were maybe the outside Leeds. When Leeds Other Paper started, it was floating on this tidal wave of activity, of stuff going on. But the 90s were different. And that tide had, to an extent, gone out. To cut a long story short, it never really worked in terms of boosting sales. Sales were always never enough. And I think by the end, they were just running out of money. They were running out of energy. Now, we had run out of money at various times before, but there'd always been enough people around and enough energy to say, “We've got a bit of a crisis coming up. We need to fundraise. We need to put on a gig.” But I think people at the end didn't really have the energy or the heart to try and get through. I think they printed the last one and they decided, “That's it. That's the last straw.” They quickly put together the last issue. First I knew was when I got my copy that week. I can remember going into the office, I bought a bottle of whiskey and a bunch of flowers and took it in and said, “This is for you, for whoever's left.”
Gordon: [The Paper} had an impact on the people we covered. And I think it had an impact, especially on people in the mining communities during the miners' strike, because we were the only ones telling it like it is. We were the ones who reported on how way of life were vanishing before our eyes. I know that we had impacts on Leeds City Council, because for a time they banned the paper inside it! When you look back a lot on it afterwards. And a lot of these, you know, these impacts aren't quantifiable.
Tony: I think it did give people a voice, a large group of people [could] express themselves by actually getting involved in writing and cartooning and photographing. To an extent, it demystified the publishing process. It said, this can be for anyone. Anyone can get involved, really, because you are invited. You can come in, you can have a go at writing. It had a huge impact on me because it got me into journalism. [It was] a way of doing journalism that was about the people at the bottom - it was bottom up. It equipped me with sufficient skills to manage to go out and survive in the journalistic world beyond the alternative media. [Subsequently] I did work for the straight provincial Press; I then became freelance, where I was doing stuff for news agencies, some of the nationals, and some magazines. It gave me enough confidence to be able to do that. But I still took with me the ethos that I'd had at Leeds Other Paper, which is what you really want to do is to hear from the people most directly involved in the story, not just what the experts have to say. Sometimes the real expert is the person living through this.
Clare Wadd
I was 16 when I started my fanzine. I was listening to Kid Jensen on Radio One and he started talking about fanzines. I'd never seen one at that point, but it sounded really interesting. I just decided there and then that I was going to write one. It just seemed to pull together the two things I really cared about. I loved music and I loved reading and writing. The original idea was that a couple of my friends were going to help me, which quickly turned out not to really be the case. So I did it on my own.
My mum was a librarian and she kept bringing me these careers books home from school and there were all these tedious sounding careers. I thought, what I want to do is manage bands - how I can achieve that? I ended up managing bands for a while, and wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy, really, but, you know, when everyone's teenage and angry… I wanted to be a part of something.
I started writing off for other fanzines to get a grip on what these things were, listened to John Peel and heard addresses of fanzines. Can't remember what the first ones I got were, but Attack on Bazag was certainly an early one. Fairly soon I wrote to James Brown and said I'm putting together a fanzine, can you kind of give me any tips and he very generously gave up a half day, walked me around Leeds and showed me how to do paste-ups and how to put a page together and stuff like that.
You start finding your own style as you go. It's quite a male world. I think there's something about being a 16-year-old girl that gave me less confidence than others might have had. I don't think it crossed my mind that I couldn't, at that point I think I hadn't really been discriminated against enough, I'd been quite shielded to realise this was going to be slightly difficult. When I then set up a record company with another Fanzine writer in Bristol (Sarah Records in ’87) we got a lot of bullying by the music press, for being girly and effeminate. A sense that this wasn't really something girls should be doing. But as a 16-year-old it hadn't really occurred to me that I was entering a really male world. I just ploughed on in there without giving it a moment's thought. I was a massive fan of The Alarm. They were always available to talk to anyone after gigs and you certainly never felt threatened by talking to them. They were also very political, they did that thing of treating your fans as you would want to be treated, which was very much an attitude I took into running a record label.
Someone suggested to me “print it on the school photocopier”. So I had this meeting with the headmistress in the summer holidays after O-Level. She said yes, I suppose that should be all right, you could do 50 copies or something and pay cost price. I said oh no, I want to do 500 copies! I moved on to this printing college in Sheepscar, where they did very, very cheap printing.
I always had an interest in politics and music. I did this article on Greenpeace, who I'd just discovered, and I did an article on why people shouldn't be smoking - all of this kind of stuff. I'm pleased I did that and things haven't changed very much. I did standard interviews for bands who were coming through Leeds, who I interviewed after gigs, hanging out outside stage doors at gigs. I remember interviewing The Pogues. I think they were just all different degrees of drunk… but they were nice and decent. But how could they be bothered with a kid standing at the door? We were trying to be smart, we were trying to be funny, we were trying to be clever, and we were probably doing those things, but probably in a young and foolish way.
I remember ringing the wedding present up. I interviewed them in summer of ‘86, and then I went and met them in the Hyde Park pub, it was really noisy. My first gigs were in the refectory at Leeds, Irish Centre, Refectory and Riley Smith Hall at the University. And then I really liked the Poly as a venue. Went to the Warehouse a few times. I remember sneaking someone from school's 15-year-old little brother into the warehouse one night when I was probably 17! But we got away with it.
"We were trying to be smart, we were trying to be funny, we were trying to be clever, and we were probably doing those things, but probably in a young and foolish way."
Back then I went to see The Alarm, I went to see The Cramps and The Pretenders - trying to queue up and get to the front - all of that kind of excitement. Trying to get to speak to the band. Then you're at school the next day and your ears are ringing for 36 hours - you're feeling a bit grown up and smug, aren't you? Leeds was the big, exciting metropolis and really the place to be.
I did a few weird things. For some reason, I was quite interested in the Teletext music pages. I went and interviewed the chap who edited the Teletext music pages at his office in London, and he gave me a copy of a Music Week directory, a little book of names and addresses of record labels. I could then start ringing up record labels. I remember getting very ticked off by my mum for the daytime phone bill for doing that.
I interviewed Ivor Cutler at the York Literature Festival in 1986 and I remember getting home from the pub and there was a note on the kitchen table from my mum saying Ivor Cutler called, because I'd sent him a copy of the fanzine. I just remember being absolutely terrified that he'd just hated it, and he'd rung up to complain, and when I talked to my mum in the morning, he'd just rung up to say, “Please tell your 18-year-old daughter, well done, she's done a really good job of this”. He was an ex-teacher and they'd had this nice little chat, and he sent me [some] little weird stickers with slogans on and a picture he drew for me.
When I first started writing my fanzine, the University Union was quite a useful place to hang out if you were in Leeds in the day and didn't really know what to do with yourself. [Or if you didn’t] have any money and were a girl on your own. I quite enjoyed reading Leeds Student News. I think I by hanging around in the university, I could kind of pretend to be a grown up. Jumbo Records was a bit of a place to go and they'd sell fanzines for you. They were always really, just really nice, really supportive [Some record shops] prided themselves on being obnoxious and rude to anyone who walked through the door, whereas Jumbo was never like that.
Running the record label very much came out of two fanzine writers meeting each other. We'd both done flexi discs with our fanzines with the same band - they became the first band on our record label. We continued to put fanzines out through the duration of the record label, that were numbered as if they were seven-inch singles. [A] huge influence from that whole DIY ethic - value for money. How can we deliver the best possible music at almost the lowest possible price? That was very much our record label ethos.
I feel really proud I did it. I look back at my 16-year-old self and think it was a bit weird - having the idea, never having seen one and just deciding to do [it]. But having the follow through: writing it, printing it, selling it, getting the money back to do the next one - I feel quite proud about it. I'm sure there's probably lots in there that's mortifying and then some other bits that you think, oh, that's quite good. It sounds a bit trite, but it changed my life. I went from fanzine writer to record label. My first 10 years of employment were music industry. I’m quite pleased I didn't just do my maths A levels, my economics degree and become a child accountant at 21.
Whatever decision you make sends you on a path, doesn't it? I think that outlet for creativity and being part of something that's bigger than yourself. I still go to quite a lot of gigs and friends, and social group almost entirely come from that music world. Its influence continues…
John Peckham
I first saw my name in print, I was nine years old, in the Cross Flatts County Primary School magazine. I always loved Leeds United. We were looking about improving communication within our branch of the Supporters Club, and that's how the idea [for a publication] came up. [Fullerton Park] was a one-man band. Apart from myself and a young lady that did the printing, the first issue was literally all my own work. In the first issue, we were encouraging members to contribute so that it would grow and it wasn't just going to be one person's viewpoints.
Our branch of the Supporters Club was quite a big branch. It was based at Elland Road in what Jack Charlton used to call the Old Wooden Hut. Our branch started about 1961 and it's still going now. The site where we met used to have a speedway track, which was called Fullerton Park – which is why the branch was called that. There were 18 issues of Fullerton Park. The contributions got a bit more diverse.
Fullerton Park came to an end, because in the summer of 1979, some of us left. And Griffin Branch was formed, hence Crossbar. That that ran for 39 issues; I was involved with about 36 of them. We had some regular contributors. It was like a permanent job, badgering people. I was selling copies in other branches of the supporters’ club. The senior officials that oversaw the whole supporters club, they were getting copies. Even one of the directors was getting a copy. My father used to say to me, “You've got to have a certain standard of journalism because it's getting read by people in high places.” We saw it also as a means of helping to promote the Supporters' Club. During the 80s, there was a lot of hooliganism associated with Leeds. We were fighting to keep things going - the FA was even threatening to shut the football club down. So [the magazine] was to promote, help promote a responsible image for the Supporters' Club. But it gradually evolved.
Every year, the Supporters Club used to have an annual dinner. At the time, Don Revie, after he'd left Leeds United, became the president of the Supporters Club. Someone had hit on the idea of getting some sort of contribution from “the Don”. Eric Carlyle, he was secretary of the Supporters Club for 50 years, from 1958 to 2008. Well, Eric knew everybody. So, he took me and I had a little chat with Don Revie. All I had to do was send Don Revie some questions, and Don Revie posted back replies. That's how we got a one-off contribution from Don.
When we started the magazine, the only way to communicate with anybody was either by phone, or if you wanted to send a document, it had to be faxed. In the early days, somebody in the branch put us in touch with somebody and we managed to get an old duplicator. And that did the job for quite a long time. You typed onto, like a wax-backed sheet. But things evolve, shall we say.
[I wrote about] the things that I thought were important, like the information about the grounds we were going to visit. In the March of 76, we had a friendly at Celtic. So I wrote a two-page report on the trip up to Glasgow. Chris Miller used to write on the current bands that were going at the time. It was all about different things. Leeds would have to go to hearings and the chairman of the supporters’ club would go. We would make our points [in Crossbar], but we used to make them diplomatically.
Eventually the magazine stopped. I think it was about issue 39, I think, was the last one. I can't believe we did it, but it was very time-consuming. It was a lot of work!