Joe Robertson-Crusoe, from Viz issue 65, 1994
By now the idealistic Anti-Pop organization that had been such an inspiration for me and Jim was effectively no more. They’d lost a lot of steam with the departure of the Noise Toys, and now the label’s last remnants, Arthur 2 Stroke and the Chart Commandos, were also heading for obscurity. They were brilliant live and won support slots with touring acts like Ian Dury and the Blockheads and The Q Tips, but it was impossible to keep an eight-piece band on the road playing pubs and college gigs. Eventually they pawned their ambition on the local working men’s club circuit, and never got it back.
Changes were ringing down on the Quayside too. A man called Joe Robertson was in the process of transforming Newcastle nightlife with the introduction of wine bars such as Legends. Robertson had once been a swinging sixties’ DJ at the Club A-Go-Go. Now he was a successful businessman who, despite dressing like a Miami Vice drugs baron, was receiving plaudits from the police for ‘cleaning up’ the city centre. Heavy drinking and violence in and around the Bigg Market had been a huge problem in the 1970s, but now pubs and bars were going out of fashion and were being replaced by Robertson’s pseudo-sophisticated drinkeries. He’d buy a run-down pub, like the Midland Hotel for example, refit it with lots of fancy chrome and expensive lighting, and change the name to anything ending with an ‘s’. Berlins in this case. The bar would then reopen, and hundreds of young people dressed in skimpy frocks and no white socks would queue to get in and pay through the nose for fancy cocktails and bottled lagers. Robertson was shrewd, if not a slightly cheesy dresser. His genius was realizing that Geordies loved to flaunt their money. If there was a lass watching, then a bloke would much rather pay £2 for a bottle of lager than £1.20. So Joe provided £2 bottles of lager, and even costlier cocktails for the ladies. The punters lapped it up, Robertson became a millionaire and developed an accent to match the superficial refinement of his ‘hay clarse’ drinking establishments. Newcastle’s transformation into a party city had begun. By 1982 the first signs of the Quayside redevelopment were beginning to show, and it was announced that the Baltic was closing down for redevelopment. On the final night we all got pissed and drank Mackeson stout, because everything else had run out. It was the end of an era.
Viz’s reputation continued to spread, largely through word of mouth but also through the music press. We’d had entirely positive reviews in Zig Zag, Sounds and the NME, not to mention a two-page spread in the Loughborough Student. Jamming, a short-lived music magazine of the day, described the comic as ‘a fantastically irreverent load of shit’. In the twenty-two years since then I don’t think anyone has described it more succinctly than that.
Fanzines also provided an important method of spreading the word. By 1982 my untidy bedroom was linked to a dozen or so other untidy bedrooms across the land via a national network of fanzine editors. Many of them would ask if they could reproduce Viz cartoons in their own magazines and I’d always agree on condition that they gave the comic a plug. One such editor – a teenager in Leeds called James Brown – used a couple of Viz cartoons without permission in his magazine, Attack On Bzag. I granted him retrospective permission and in return he agreed to distribute Viz for me in Leeds. The editor of Real Shocks fanzine in Kent, a bloke called Roger Radio, also produced a comic called Cosmic Cuts. That was about the closest thing to Viz anyone else seemed to be doing, and Roger soon became a regular contributor to Viz, specializing in lazily drawn, poor-quality, one-frame jokes. Pilot: ‘Enemy plane at one o’clock!’ Gunner: ‘That’s good. We’ve got half an hour to spare then,’ for example.
By now the appearance of a new issue was so rare the event would be celebrated with a party. These ‘Viz Receptions’ began with an afternoon soirée at a hotel in Jesmond to celebrate the launch of No. 5. By the time issue 10 was published in May 1983 the venue had switched to Dingwalls, a nightclub in Waterloo Street where I’d previously had the pleasure of watching exotic dancers from Nottingham perform during a Friday lunchtime outing from the DHSS. I’d been having trouble shifting issue 9, and with 10 being a summer issue – the students were away on holiday – only 2,500 were printed. The most notable cartoon début was perhaps Billy the Fish, albeit on a rather small scale. His first strip took up only two lines at the foot of the second last page. I loved football adventure strips like Roy of the Rovers, particularly the disparity in time that always seemed to exist between the players on the field and the spectators off it. Time seemed to freeze as a shot was taken and members of the crowd would carry out lengthy conversations in the time between the ball being kicked and arriving at the goal line. The name Billy the Fish came first, a take on the Dandy’s Billy the Cat. It then occurred to me that if somebody was born half-man, half-fish, they would most likely be able to swim through the air and would therefore make a very good goalkeeper. There was a bit of a football theme to issue 10. Chris Waddle, a gangling youngster who had just broken into the Newcastle team, was a big fan of Arthur 2 Stroke and the Chart Commandos, and in order to promote their final record, a live LP, Waddle agreed to meet the band for a photo session at a pub in Gateshead. A few other players, including Terry McDermott, also turned up. I was the official photographer and took a couple of extra pictures, later making up my own story about Arthur 2 Stroke winning a music industry award after a penalty shoot-out.
Billy the Fish
Wavis O’Shave as The Hard
On the back cover there was a poster of former Anti-Pop artiste Wavis O’Shave posing as The Hard, his Tube TV character. To get the photo Simon and I visited Wavis’s house in South Shields where he lived with his mother. This was the first time I’d met him and he turned out to be a highly intelligent and articulate individual. Then he started telling us about the trouble he was having with the Greek god Pan, who had recently trotted into his living room (Pan was half-man, half-goat) through the wall next to the bay window. As Wavis explained this to us his mother came into the room with a tray of tea and biscuits. ‘Mutha. Tell them aboot Pan, how he come through that waaaall,’ he said. ‘Yes, that’s right, he did,’ said his mother, who then gave us her own description of the event, followed by the question, ‘Do either of you take sugar?’
Following Anna Ford’s Bum, Wavis recorded a second album under the name Foffo Spearjig and a single from that was released on Eccentric Records, ‘Tie Your Laces Tight’, with the brilliant B-side ‘You Won’t Catch Me on the 503’. I spent weeks designing a cover for the album, which would have been called Texican Raveloni, had it ever been released. The last time I saw Wavis was in the mid-nineties. I was sitting watching TV and suddenly there he was on Stars In Their Eyes, calling himself Callum Jensen and doing a terrific impression of Steve Harley. Unfortunately Mario Lanza won it.
The cost of printing 2,500 copies of issue 10 was £393, or around 16p each.