Up Against The Wall VIII: Slates, Slags Etc.

Up Against The Wall VIII: Slates, Slags Etc., originally uploaded by mithering.

"Slags go Prestwich! haha", back seat of The Village Bus.

Male slags...
In the cold nearly old ska Jamaican dawn
Dead publisher's sons
Material hardship pawns
The Beat, Wah! Heat
Male slags...

The first Village Bus of the day runs past the bottom of my street at 7.55, the last one leaves Shudehill Interchange at 17.27. A single fare is more expensive than a single fare on the other buses which get me home, or into town, but a day pass is notably cheaper. Ho, and also Hum, you say, but the good thing about The Village Bus is that there's only one an hour, which takes a lot of the randomness and pain out of journeys into and out of town. I have to be in the Interchange at a twenty-seven minutes past the hour, or waiting on Heywood Road at five-to. Previously, when I took the 135, "Bus of the Stars", I would turn up at a bus stop and wait, sometimes for up to twenty minutes, whereupon one, two or even three would turn up at the same time and stutter into town, picking up and dropping off at virtually every stop along the way.

In more recent times, before I discovered the mono-glory of The Village Bus, I had started getting the 137, the 135's shorter, less glamorous cousin, from a stop near Blackfriar's Bridge. This runs every twenty minutes, which was good for organising my life, but less good when it didn't turn up. Which was often.

Now, I take The Village Bus as far as the site of the old Boddies Brewery cross Great Ducie Street and head onto New Bridge Street to stare at wildlife from the runtish bridge which crosses The Irwell there. It's a fairly deserted spot - most of the activity along there comes from cars heading towards the crofts of car parks - and I've been lucky enough to watch an American Mink climb up and down the bankside vegetation, searching for something or other, herons fishing, fish-jumping and bizarrely, but weirdly appropriately, a moorhen chasing a rat.

The Only Fun In Town

Cover of City Fun issue 20, originally uploaded by mithering.

City Fun was a fanzine published in Manchester in the late 70s and early 80s. At its height it was being published fortnightly. Having had to move from Salford to Grantham just as punk broke, and on the eve of Thatcher's rise to power, it was my talisman, my touchstone, my connection with the opportunities I'd left behind. Possibly. Stuck on a council estate on the edge of town in a family of non-drivers, in a place where the buses didn't run at night, and where there was literally zero entertainment for your archetypal bored teenagers, I had plenty of time to read. Initially the NME, from cover to cover, sometimes Sounds, and very occasionally The Melody Maker or Record Mirror.

It on one of my school holiday visits to my Gran's in Kipling Street that I happened upon City Fun, the magazine that opened my eyes fully to the possibility that you could, actually, Do It Yourself. I bought my first copy from England's Glory on Peter Street when I was in there to buy comics from their ever-bountiful, ripe with stale, damp, promise basement.

The earliest issue I now own is number five, but I may have bought that at a later date. The important thing is that they had an editorial policy to print all submissions. (I'm not convinced they printed 'everything', to be honest, as the content is, at worst, always readable, if sometimes dull). I longed for the day that I could contribute something meaningful and my chance came when I bought tickets for A Certain Ratio at The Derby Hall in Bury. I'd calculated that I'd be allowed to go on my own because it was in Bury not Manchester (therefore no chance that I would end up smoking the 'reefer' dreaded by my Gran) and that it was at the end of the 95 bus route, which ran late and along Great Clowes Street. And so it happened.

I took a pencil and made notes on the back of my ticket, planning to write the review I knew I had in me. Best of all, there were tickets on sale that night for the following Tuesday's appearance by hyped-to-the-Gods-by-the-music press Joy Division. It was a huge piece of luck as I was due to return to rural drudgery the day after the gig. Little did I know that the first piece of writing I had published anywhere (City Fun issue 21) chronicled a piece of bizarre rock and roll history that I would later see (badly) dramatised in 24 Hour Party People, and that would lead me into publishing and writing my own fanzines (over fifty at the last count), and to working as a music journalist for some years.

So, City Fun, thank you!

I've uploaded a complete scan of this issue in CBR format, which is a full-screen image reader usually used for reading comics and magazines on computer screens. CDisplay Comic Reader can be downloaded, for free, here: http://www.geocities.com/davidayton/CDisplay . This issue can be directly accessed at http://www.savefile.com/files/2054195

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.”

Round and Round.

Mmmm... meat, originally uploaded by mithering.

Five posts in and it's [MES]repetition repetition repetition[/MES]. The peregrines have either finished their peregrination or they never went away. I've spotted them twice in town this week. First, Monday morning, having taken a detour via Victoria Bridge (adjacent to the old Victoria Bus Station for Old Heads) to check out The Irwell for herons, I looked up and saw one doing a circuit round the old tax office and the cathedral. It then landed on the building (in Salford) I suspect they're nesting on. Being called Peregrine and living in Salford must be character-building. The avian equivalent of 'A Boy Called Sue'.

Then today, at dinnertime, walking up John Dalton Street on my way to Piccadilly railway station, up above moved that fantastic gliding t-shape. I looked around and nobody else seemed to have seen it. People just going about their business don't look up at the sky unless there's something terrible up there. (Which there is, if you're a small mammal, or a smaller bird, or a less aggressive bird (pretty much any bird, then)).

Second case of [MES]repetition repetition repetition[/MES] is a bus thing, harking back to my first post way back last month. If I could have any super power beyond the totally godlike ones, I'd have to go for one which guaranteed I arrived at a bus stop at the exact moment a bus arrived. I realise this is probably An Urban Power Fantasy, reserved for people who have a pretty regular bus service, but we all have our weaknesses.

(The photograph is one which I took at The Railway Inn in Hucknall, Notts, on an away trip to watch FC United. If I'd had a usable photo of a peregrine that would have pride of place, but I don't. When I do, it'll be here first).

Jumped In A Puddle.

Wet Shoes Are Dangerous, originally uploaded by iChris.

Some things in life are crying out for the legitimacy of a Proper Noun. That terrible thing that happens when you are scurrying through town in the rain and you step on a loose paving-stone and it flips slightly up, sending a jet of water into your path and you boot it full on, getting a shoeful in the process. That should have a name. It would have saved me a lot of typing and you a lot of reading if I had just been able to say that I was hurrying to the bus stop tonight and I ****'d.

And while we're on about bus stops what about when you see the bus at the stop, and you think you don't have enough time to get to it before it pulls off so you saunter casually rather than running only to find the bus actually pulls off just as you get to it. And if you'd bothered to run...?