Under The Boardwalk.

utb, originally uploaded by mithering.

The latest issue of Under The Boardwalk, the FC United fanzine, has just been published. After nineteen issues of a magazine centred around a non-league football club you’d think that they’d run out of things to say. You’d be right to wonder how many barrel-scraping facts or cliquey pieces of gossip such a magazine would fuel itself with after three years and seven months in the back of the back of the footballing beyond. Instead, that hasn’t happened. Mostly because Under The Boardwalk isn’t really about FC United the football team.

Instead, it’s about a Universe which has FC United at its centre, and all else spins off it, like a clichéd ripple from a clichéd stone in a clichéd pool of water. This issue, surfing the wave of positive vibes from a great day trip to Kendal Town (every other club at this level is called Something Town), tells you why you don’t need a car in a metropolis (a clue, they're big, they begin with ‘B’ and this blog reflects a minor obsession with them (although not in a spottery kind of way)), the surprising origins of a perennial MUFC song, and who are the Top Ten Wilsons.

There’s also room for reviews (Reblochon cheese and Luvdub get two thumbs up), a politicised (with a small ‘p’) look at Premier League football, and a brilliant assassination of The Cult of The Casual which made me laugh out loud on The Village Bus on the way into work the other morning. In the words of ‘MancMouth’, and in tribute to anybody ever chased by Perrys, “Our history has been rewritten by the pseuds of Face, Football fanzines and the weekend fashion supplements… The school bullies who thought music and fashion were queer have been elevated to a lionised version of working class cool that never existed.”