I preferred selling comics when there were two of us. Jim didn’t actually do much selling – he preferred drinking and watching the bands, and the women – but he provided physical and moral support. That could come in handy in the Students’ Union bars where every cluster of students contained at least one gormless twat just waiting for an opportunity to show off to his mates. Occasionally things turned nasty, like the time I foolishly walked into the ‘Agrics” bar at the University and some stumpy, little fat-necked student grabbed about a dozen comics out of my hand, tore them in half and threw them all up in the air above my head. Then he just glared at me as if to say, ‘What are you going do about it?’ I looked at him as if to say ‘Erm. . . nothing, I suppose,’ then sidled away like a coward.
I hadn’t shown the comic to anybody at work. They were all regular, working-class sorts of people. They liked drinking in the Bigg Market and disco dancing, so I thought it might be a little left-of-field for their tastes. But gradually they began to find out about what I was doing and started asking for copies of the comic. When I eventually took some in, to my surprise and delight they all liked it too. All except the old ladies, that is. People laughed out loud, passed them around, and asked for copies of the next issue. This was a revelation to me. Ordinary people found it funny as well as rebellious youths and student types.
As well as crossing socio-economic divides, the geographical spread of sales was also expanding. So far Viz was strictly a Newcastle, Bournemouth and ever-so-slightly Kingston-upon-Thames publishing phenomenon. There was a conspicuous lack of outlets in the capital. Luckily Arthur 2 Stroke had a brother called Tim who lived in South London and Tim volunteered to do some footwork, taking the comic to Rough Trade records and Better Badges. Both shops agreed to stock it. I’d also placed two more ads in Private Eye, one in ‘Articles for sale’, advertising issue 2 for 32p including postage, and the other in the ‘Wanted’ column, offering £1000 for a copy of the first issue. Eager to spread the message I’d also sent copies of issues 1 and 2 to the local newspaper, and this resulted in our first ever press cutting. On 10 April 1980, beneath the headline, ‘A comical look at Newcastle social problems’, the Newcastle Evening Chronicle described Viz as ‘a new comic which is not the usual light revelry, but more a social commentary’. According to their reporter Viz was ‘taking a wry look at society in the form of cartoon strips’, and he summed up by describing it as ‘Sparky for grown-ups’. It was all strangely flattering. They didn’t mention the shit drawings, the foul language or the violent and unimaginative cartoon endings. This was my first ever dealing with the tabloid press, and I’d soon discover how flexible their approach to a subject could be.
Celebrated television producer Malcolm Gerrie, who would later launch The Tube, was in those days producing a dreadful ‘yoof’ show on Tyne-Tees TV called Check It Out. Getting on ‘Checkidoot’, as it was known locally, was the height of ambition for many local bands who assumed that stardom would quickly follow. In reality it didn’t work like that. If they’d looked at the statistics they’d have realized that an appearance on this cheesiest of yoof shows would virtually guarantee them obscurity for the rest of their careers. But Check It Out seemed like an ideal place to publicize Viz, so I bombarded Malcolm Gerrie with copies of the comic and accompanying begging letters. Eventually he invited Jim and myself to his office at the City Road TV studios. Gerrie was a surprisingly geeky-looking bloke with buck teeth, fancy geps, wild eyes, a pointy hooter and ridiculous corkscrew haircut. As if one such face wasn’t bad enough, the wall behind him was plastered with photographs of himself grinning at the camera while clinging to the shoulders of various pop luminaries. Could this be Michael Winner’s illegitimate son I wondered. Jim and I were disappointed by what Gerrie had to say. He explained that he liked the comic very much but he couldn’t possibly consider it for his TV show because of the expletive nature of some of the contents.
By the summer of 1980 changes had taken place at Anti-Pop. Arthur 2 Stroke’s three-piece band had evolved into the eight-piece Arthur 2 Stroke and the Chart Commandos. Around the same time the Noise Toys had folded and Martin Stevens had gone home to Coventry, promising to keep sending me cartoons. I felt like it was time for a change too. At one of the Noise Toys’ final gigs I’d been chatting to a friend called Stephanie and she asked me how my job was going. I told her about all the money I was earning, the tea trolley and the Empire biscuits. ‘You should get out of there,’ she said, ‘before you get addicted.’ She meant to the money, not the biscuits. And she was right. I was getting too comfortable. My dad had told me that if I played my cards right the civil service would be a job for life, but that prospect appalled me. I still had no idea what I did want to do, but I decided to quit anyway and turn my back on the Empire biscuits and £170 cash every month. I handed in my notice and tempered the news by telling dad not to worry, I’d be going back to college soon. But my only real plan at the time was to sign on the dole and produce the next issue of Viz.
In the summer of 1980 Newcastle’s Quayside wasn’t the glitzy playground for footballers and fat slags that it is today. On the corner of Quayside and Broad Chare there now stands an estate agent’s office where river view apartmentettes are advertised for £250,000 and penthouse suites overlooking the Baltic Art Gallery and the landmark Egg-slicer Bridge sell for a million plus. On the same corner site twenty-four years ago Anti-Pop rented a derelict rehearsal room for £7 a week. Nobody wanted to live or work on the Quayside back then, largely because the river stank of shit. As you walked beneath the railway viaduct, along The Side and into what was once the thriving commercial heart of the city, it was like entering a ghost town. Beneath the north pier of the Tyne Bridge buildings stood empty, their stonework blackened with a century of soot. On the river front itself the Port Authority and a solitary advertising agency seemed to be the only buildings in use. The city’s party epicentre was much further north, and at night you could walk from The Side to the Baltic Tavern in Broad Chare without passing a single under-dressed, drunken woman staggering about in high heels.
The Baltic was a rough-and-ready pub with a reputation for violence dating back to an unfortunate shotgun and testicles incident that had taken place a year or two earlier. But there was cheap rehearsal space in the run-down buildings that surrounded it and the Live Theatre group had established themselves just up the road, so the pub had a pretty bohemian clientele. It was still a sailors’ pub too, with the odd naval vessel mooring nearby, and on Sundays it filled up with dodgy market traders. The Baltic was decorated in a half-hearted nautical theme with fishing nets and orange buoys draped above the bar, and there were a couple of token lifebelts hanging on the wall next to the tab machine. But this was no theme pub. It was a good old-fashioned boozer. The jukebox featured an eclectic mix of disco, soul and early Adam Ant records, and the wall behind it was a sea of posters advertising gigs, plays and exhibitions. In front