Chris Donald - The Inside Story of Viz - Rude Kids

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 the Baltic one lunchtime around 1981. ‘They’re fucking brilliant,’ he assured me. He’d assured me A Flock of Seagulls would be fucking brilliant too, so that meant nowt. But the Comic Strip sounded promising so Jim, Simon and myself went along to see them, and thank God we did. Never in my life have I laughed so much and I doubt I’ll ever get close to it again. I was rocking in my seat, aching in the ribs and on the verge of wetting myself. Jesmond was full of social workers in Citroën 2CVs yet I’d never heard anyone (with the possible exception of my dad) make jokes about them. Alexei Sayle and 20th Century Coyote (Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson) were the highlights. I didn’t know people could be so relentlessly, pant-pissingly funny. After the show we hung around the stage door and I pressed a copy of two Viz back issues into what looked like the hand of Jennifer Saunders. It was a very chaotic doorway.

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.