In the summer of 1982 I had a fling with a girl called Sally. I’d known Sally since our schooldays and I’d always fancied her, as had every other boy in the school, and most of the male teachers (I remember one teacher in particular loosening his collar, wiping his brow and mouthing the word ‘Phewf!’ after she’d walked past the classroom window). But Sally was unobtainable, way out of my league. She was the stuff of legend. She spent the night in hotel bedrooms with bass players from top punk/mod revivalist three-piece bands (two words, both one syllable), not nerds like me. So imagine my surprise when Sally rang me up one day completely out of the blue and asked whether I fancied meeting up for a drink
Sally was small and stunning with reddish brown hair, and eyes that had always reminded me of Angharad Rees out of Poldark. She was also extremely intelligent, and fluent in Russian which she’d been studying at University for the last three years. We went out a few times to pubs and to the local art house cinema to see Macbeth, but nothing remotely sexual happened in the back row. In fact I fell asleep halfway through the film, which was in Russian, and I missed the last two hours. I guessed she just wanted me for my intellect. Then one evening I walked her to the bus stop and instead of saying goodnight as she usually did, she kissed me . . . and we boarded the bus together. I boarded that bus – a Leyland Atlantean, I seem to recall – a boy. But when the sun rose the next morning, I was a man.
I was also struggling to get my trousers on in a hurry. Like me, Sally was living with her parents at the time and had been a little tipsy when she invited me back. When we woke up she was a different person. ‘Quick, get out before my dad finds you!’ she whispered loudly. I could hear that her father was already well advanced with his morning ablutions in the bathroom next door so I unscrambled my clothes and threw them on as fast as I could, then tiptoed down the stairs and dashed out the front door, fastening buttons as I went. Once I got round the corner and out of sight I slowed down to a cocky stroll and started to smile. Not only had I shagged the best-looking girl in our school, but I’d also gained valuable anecdotal material by having to flee from her father in Robin Askwith style. What a result.
My sexual dalliance with Sally may have put a spring in my step but, together with my burgeoning design workload, it seriously affected production of the magazine. Our summer romance ended in the autumn, rather appropriately, and had it lasted any longer there may never have been an issue No. 9. The new comic finally emerged in November 1982 and new cartoons included the debuts of two Tyneside-based characters, Simon’s Sid the Sexist and my own Brown Bottle. The Brown Bottle was a variation on the traditional superhero theme whereby Barry Brown, a quiet newspaper reporter, transformed himself into an incoherent, foul-mouthed, alcoholic tramp whenever he drank a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale. That character was partly inspired by Davey Bruce, the drummer with the Chart Commandos. Davey was a Geordie ex-council workman, not the college type like most of the musicians I knew. He was the only person in the Baltic who drank ‘Dog’, as Newcastle Brown is known locally. It took more than one bottle for Davey to make his transformation, but once it happened, by hell, what a transformation it was. The inspiration for Simon’s Sid the Sexist was another friend of ours, Graham Lines. In fairness to Graham he was nothing like Sid, but he provided the spark for the idea with his hilarious sexual bravado and endless chat-up lines, none of which he ever appeared to use on girls. Graham was always inviting you out ‘on the tap’, to ‘pull a bit of blart’ and to ‘get a bit lash on’. If you took him up on the offer you invariably ended up having a few quiet beers, sausage and chips from the Barbecue Express, and then it would be back to his flat to get stoned and watch Laurel and Hardy videos into the early hours of the morning. No girls were ever involved.
Getting stoned was something I rarely got the opportunity to do following an unfortunate experience in the Anti-Pop office. I’d been up all night working on a poster for Andy Pop and hadn’t had a thing to eat by the time I arrived at the office. The minute I walked in the door someone offered me a joint. I took a quick drag, just to be polite, and the next thing I knew my head was spinning, there was a noise in my ears like the start of the music at the cliff-hanging end of a Dr Who episode, and all the voices in the room were suddenly distant echoes. I blacked out and smacked my head on a bench as I went down. When I came to I was lying on the floor with someone frantically loosening my collar. ‘I think he’s dead,’ said one voice. ‘Quick, call an ambulance,’ said another. ‘Nah, don’t be silly. He’ll be fine,’ said Andy. My dramatic collapse became the stuff of legend, and from that point onwards whenever there were drugs about people made a point of not offering them to me, so drugs played no part whatsoever in my creative processes. People often asked whether cartoons were drug inspired, but I didn’t even use alcohol for inspiration. Occasionally I might scribble down an idea while I was drunk, but you could bet your arse once I was sober that a good ninety per cent of what I’d written would be absolute shit.
The Brown Bottle
I never tried any hard drugs. Apart from dope the only thing I was ever offered was a little blue tablet which someone once suggested I take to help me stay up all night and finish their poster by the following morning. I believe Andy referred to it as an ‘upper’. The very sight of this tablet scared me stiff and I imagined swallowing it and being found dead in my swimming pool the next day, even though I didn’t have one. I wasn’t brave enough to say ‘No’, so instead I accepted the tablet and then threw it away.
Drugs may have been off the menu but rock ‘n’ roll was still an important ingredient in the comic. Another highlight of issue No. 9 was a Dexy’s Midnight Runners exclusive. Kevin Rowland and Dexy’s were due to open a wine bar in Newcastle and I’d been recruited to orchestrate the event. I sub-contracted my brother Steve to make a wax champagne bottle for use in the ceremony. Following spells at art college and film school Steve was now hoping to get into the special effects industry. On the day of the grand opening a large crowd was in attendance. Posing at the door of the wine bar, Kevin Rowland said a few words then turned and smashed the bottle of champagne over the head of drummer Seb Shelton. The crowd gasped before realizing the bottle was made of wax. I’d explained the stunt to Shelton in some detail, but being a drummer he hadn’t fully understood and didn’t seem to have any idea what was happening. I used a photo of the incident in Viz but made up my own story to go with it. Dexy’s were famously teetotal under Rowland’s strict fitness regime, so our scoop was that he’d caught his drummer drinking a glass of wine and reacted by smashing him over the head with the bottle.
Anti-Pop were now promoting touring bands in Newcastle in an attempt to subsidize the activities of their only remaining act, Arthur 2 Stroke and the Chart Commandos. As a result I got unrestricted press access to various popular artists of the day. One of my first interviewees was Clare Grogan out of Altered Images, whom Simon and I visited backstage at a club called Tiffanys. For me ‘interviewing’ someone simply meant getting some sort of evidence that we’d spoken to them, usually a photograph, then I’d go away and make the words up later. I wasn’t at all comfortable asking questions, but as you were entering the dressing room on the pretext of being a journalist saying something was pretty much unavoidable. Our pop coverage was supposed to be ironic, which is easy to do in print, but trying to be ironic in the flesh is a lot harder, especially if you’re talking to Clare Grogan and you fancy the wee Scottish minx something rotten. We asked her: What’s your favourite colour? Your star sign? Your favourite cheese? That sort of thing. Clare cottoned on immediately and answered every question with a smile, but the band’s lanky guitarist wasn’t getting the joke. He was expecting an earnest interview with a hip fanzine and got more annoyed with each question. ‘What sort of a stupid question is that?’ he snarled when we asked about the band’s favourite biscuits. We persisted, and so did he. Eventually it got a bit embarrassing so I took my obligatory photograph, then we made our excuses and left.
Another act Andy brought to Newcastle was a group of comedians called the Comic Strip. I’d never heard of them until I saw Andy putting up a poster in