Beginning of The End

IF we define nostalgia as a yearning to travel back, then anyone who was in Liverpool, at the time, will not be too surprised if the rocket ship zapping into its past does not linger at Planet 1980s.

It is the oversized dying star that is the 1960s - the Cavern and the Iron Door - which continues to envelop the Mersey mists of time – at least if you look through the viewfinder of our tourism mandarins and our local radio and newspapers.

Its authors didn't dress like the cast
of Brideshead Revisited. Instead, they
tied their Adidas laces, looked at you
hard and gleefully took the piss

Apart from the Eric's blip, it has always been thus. And so that star will faintly pulse until all who remember it, like the last fighting Tommy, are no more.

Click to enlarge
But back to the 1980s. If you had just left school, Liverpool was no wondrous place. The city had stuck two fingers up at Thatcher and had been left to repent with leisure.

And yet for the utterly clued up who didn't have two pennies to rub together, there was no other town to be.

There are plenty of people still living to tell the tale. But among those who chronicled it are Phil Jones and Peter Hooton who brought us The End: the first fanzine to combine football and music, paving the way for Viz, championed by John Peel and inspiring Brown and his lad-mag culture a few short years later.

Now every edition of The End has been bound together and published as one loaded volume.

Click to enlargeIn fact, ex-Loaded editor James Brown's Sabotage Times has taken the gamble, which is already paying off. The £20 compendium thumped onto the shelves only a week ago and is already as rare as hens' teeth. At an initial print run of 1,000 it could well become a collectors' item and provide a tidy little profit for its founders who ran it from a corpy house in Steerscroft, Cantril Farm.

The End was what you went and spent 25p on after you had cashed your Giro. If you were a girl or boy in the know, you also picked up Merseysound and Breakout at the same time, from Probe or 69A.

All these music publications had their devotees, but then they had rich pickings as subject matter. The first was blessed with great writers, like our own John D Hodgkinson, and it acted as a showcase for the work of young photographers like Gary Lornie, Francesco Mellina and John Stoddart.

No, The End was different. Its band of authors weren't in the trendy Armadillo/Pickwicks/Cafe Berlin loop. Nor were they after the WH Smith shilling, like the out-of-town ex-students who ran Next 14.

They most certainly didn't dress like the cast of Brideshead Revisited. Instead, they tied their Adidas laces, looked at you hard and gleefully took the piss.

Peter Hooton, frontman with The Farm, claims he got the idea after travelling around Europe with his beloved Reds and also becoming part of The Clash's entourage in Paris. He came back with the idea for a fanzine that combined his two passions and talked Jones into it after “plying him with drink ”.

Flicking through the book, it's interesting to observe how The End's confidence grew over time. They weren't in it for the money, that's for sure (a quarter page ad was a tenner), and yet its following was huge.

The End reflected everything in a city that was, as ever, living on its wit and its wits.

Topical times in 1983The In's (sic) and Out's (sic) column was the first page you turned to, designed to confuse the style conscious. For example, In: “Pierced Eyelids” and “Mad cats that attack mad poodles that attack mad staffs”. Out: “The Armadillo staff” and “The Echo Leisure Guide”. 

Then there was the championing of those bands that generally didn't get a look in (Come In Tokio, Cook The Books, Afraid of Mice), who remained outside the foppish fold of “beauts”. It was the other side of the Pool and anyone who dared come from beyond the M57 was jeered as a "wool".

As time went on it got kudos. Massively, massively long transcriptions of interviews filled the pages with the likes of the "millionaire" pop star Pete Wylie. When it was Alan Bleasdale's turn, 11 of them turned up. “Bloody hell, have you brought a football team?” he said. 

“Yeah, and you're getting the ale in,” they replied, which he did.

Kenny the Warehouse bouncerThen there were the irreverent, hugely politically incorrect reviews. One, about the old Macmillans club, in Concert Square, which was frequented by a mixed gay-straight clientèle, has Phil Jones holding his hands over his eyes when I quote bits from the original, unexpurgated facsimile.

Oh God, they would never do it now, he says, older and wiser.

“We admit we were - certainly I was - young foolish and immature. I haven't even re-read it at all due to my fears of seeing that exact type of thing. I cringe just thinking about it. But we decided to release it, warts and all," he says.

"I would hope that people would still be irreverent, and slightly offensive - but, as we said, times have changed and certain terminology is, rightly so, not accepted now."

It's one of those books where you "had to be there", and reading The End again after 25 years, as many a hitting-50 dad is going to be this Christmas, reminds me of every nuance of my teen life away from town. It's a time capsule that it's been interesting revisiting, but I don't want to hang about too long.

The Grants get in on the actNevertheless, Billy Bull's column and curious one-off features such as a double page spread on Bootle dogs still raise a smile. They weren't remotely slick pieces. They were littered with typos and spelling mistakes. But that wasn't the point.

I bought my volume,  it was seemingly impossible to extract a review copy from the publishers.

That's not how journalism works but, in the spirit of the subject, that's not how The End worked either.

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