We’ve mentioned the rich history of people starting out in fanzines before moving on to “bigger” things. The A side of this 7” blog covers a largely unknown fanzine that was followed by an extraordinary roller coaster of a ride in music and the tabloids for the young editor.

Don’t Look Back Into (or buy) The Sun

In previous blogs on fanzines, music and the media today (https://footballfanzineculture.blog/2025/05/22/football-fanzines-and-the-media-today/  and https://footballfanzineculture.blog/2025/06/26/the-list-playlist-side-3/ ) we mentioned that a QPR fanzine All Quiet on the Western Avenue (AQOTWA) was written by a certain Pete Doherty Jnr.

Proof of this came in a remarkable twitter post from When Saturday Comes back in 2018[1]. Looking back through their archives they came across issue 1 of AQOTWA including a lovely handwritten explanatory note by the then 15-year-old Pete Doherty Jnr claiming to be the “Youngest fanzine editor in the country” (We’ll be the judge of that – Ed )

Yes, THE Pete Doherty. Born in Northumberland, brought up in various garrisons across Britain and Europe, a man who has had a long, successful and revered career in music, the beau of Kate Moss for a long time and at 15 living in an army barracks near Coventry started a QPR fanzine, a mighty fine one at that by all accounts. This alone is quite something, what happened next is something else!

A Literary Career Beckons

Only 5 issues of this well thought of fanzine appeared and because of this scarcity and his later fame they are highly sought after, the last one we saw on Ebay went for £50.

Featuring a very nicely designed cover the contents were quite serious, apparently young Doherty was a bit of a statto based on old colleagues and copies. He was interested in journalism but didn’t get much response to enquiries with newspapers so “I thought I’d start my own.” The words of fanzines editors across the land.

The young Doherty spent a lot of time in his youth moving between barracks and his grandparent’s houses in Liverpool and London and has admitted that he “wrote obsessively to the players” and hung around QPR’s training ground. This led to fanzine interviews with Les Ferdinand, Gerry Francis and Ray Wilkins but in true fanzine style issue four describes manager Wilkins as “very friendly but hardly quotable… talk about cliched and uncontroversial”[2].

Another QPR fanzine IndyR’s, covered a great story about AQOTWA and early trouble for young Pete, this time not of his making though. Written by Chris Tenner and originally published in German language fan magazine 11Freunde it is a story that is worth repeating in its entirety, a story which typifies the chaotic style of fanzines, what their publishers endured and how Pete Doherty was once just another teenager scared to death of his gran.

Chris takes up the story; “In 1995 there was a famous British TV advert for a well-known ladies sanitary product called ‘Bodyform’. In the advert it showed a group of beautiful women playing football on a sandy beach.

My article came in the form of a rant about women not knowing the rules of football as, when one of the women scored a goal, she was actually in an offside position. The next five or six lines contained literally every swear word known in the Oxford English Dictionary in the form of puns.

Pete printed it verbatim and even had the comedic nous to add “we have given Chris’s details to the Police” at the end of the article. As usual, Pete sent me a copy of the fanzine by post. About two days later I travelled up to Anfield to see QPR play.

On seeing me, Pete came running up all apologetic and very red around the face as he begged me to forgive him. I was perplexed as to why he would apologise but amused to find the reason. In his magazine, he had tippexed out EVERY swear word I had used after they had been printed.

It turns out he was staying at his grandmother’s house in Liverpool when he had collected the magazine from the printers. He proudly showed one to her and, on seeing my article, she became very angry.”[3]

One Man Went too far?

Young Doherty was also apparently already into music, one article criticising Chelsea’s terrace favourite, ‘One Man Went To Mow’ as in his opinion “It’s got nothing to do with football, it’s sung out of tune, and half of ’em don’t know the words.”

This is a bit rich based on the lyrics Doherty admitted writing to a ska ditty in a 2005 Grundiad interview. Before we get there some history. The Doherty song was written in response to composer Michael ‘I’m a very self-conscious, postmodern composer’ Nyman being asked to write a run out “song” for QPR. You can read about this extraordinary story in the article “Composing the QPR suite”[4] I encourage you to read this, mainly for a laugh as it contains lines such as “I maintain that the best writing about QPR – and possibly about football – was a piece I commissioned from Tilbury for Vogue. It was a musicological analysis of the descending minor third in the “Rodney!’ chant that QPR fans of the early 70s sang for Rodney Marsh, based on the differences in the chant when QPR winning and when they were losing. Magnificent and if that wasn’t bizarre enough, Doherty states that in response he has written a song for when QPR win the FA Cup Final.[5]

Our hero states “My song is a ska number. It goes like this: I’ll be, I’ll be there/And just before I hit the bar/With the ghost of Rodney Marsh in his pre-smug pundit days/ Before he sold Rangers down the Swanee/With Gerry Francis‘s offshore money/ It’s a toss-up between Mick Jones/And a consortium from the Middle Eastern equivalent of Barrett Homes /I’ll be, I’ll be there/With blue and white ticker tape in my hair/Up the Rs/Up the Rs/Up the Rs/What a life on Mars”

Thankfully QPR haven’t made it to the cup final since but song apart this is a really lovely interview about how central to Pete’s life QPR have been. He goes on to say “When I was a boy, I couldn’t imagine anything other than going and living in Ellerslie Road or on the White City estate, near Loftus Road, where Rangers play. That’s how central to my existence QPR was.” Fanatic and fanzine editor, the two go hand in hand.

In further proof of his love of and suitability for running a fanzine Doherty has since attracted considerable attention for his love of the NHS after landing in hospital for treatment to stave off the ill effects of an infected hedgehog spike. [6] It was reported at the time that the injury forced him to cancel an appearance on BBC Radio 5 Live with Nihal Arthanayake…worse things have happened but if you’d put that story in a fanzine people would assume that you were making it up.

Run-out groove

In the NME interview Doherty also reveals, “My fondest memories involve things that happened off the pitch. I would climb into Loftus Road in the summer when the stadium was empty and sit there with my little book and pen, smoking a spliff behind the goal. One time, my girlfriend and I got into the dressing room and I stole a pair of shorts. That was one of the most romantic days of my life – snogging in the dressing room at QPR.”

I can’t help feeling that this is perhaps a little tongue in cheek, but it does describe very well a lot of people’s feelings about football, fanzines and how central they are to their lives. From this nascent passion hundreds of fanzines flourished and though many like AQOTWA died after just a brief burst of life, their imprint lives on and should not be forgotten.

This is just one of the connections with music and fame that we have researched that came about at least partially because of fanzines. Join us in later blogs and twitter/insta/Bluesky/facebook posts for more sights and sounds from The List of all football fanzines that ever existed on the British Isles, currently standing at 1716 fanzines, if you have a particular story or fanzine you’d like us to cover please get in touch with Football Fanzine Culture at one of the following

Email; FanzineFC@gmail.com

Twitter; @FanzineFC

Bluesky; ‪@fanzinefc.bsky.social

Insta; https://www.instagram.com/fanzinefc/

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[1] https://x.com/WSC_magazine/status/1123207405695840256

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5059062/2023/11/14/pete-doherty-qpr/

[3]  https://www.indyrs.co.uk/2016/02/pete-doherty-when-it-was-all-quiet-on-the-western-avenue/

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/music/2005/oct/21/classicalmusicandopera.newsstory

[5] https://www.nme.com/news/music/babyshambles-322-1367293

[6] https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/may/01/pete-doherty-hospitalised-following-hedgehog-injury