Someone once said to me that a true fanzine shouldn’t have any adverts in it as that meant they weren’t truly independent. I disagree with this fundamentally, we’re not talking some big corporate titan selling their latest unnecessary crap here, we’re talking about local businesses or simply a mate, willing to bung a few quid to the local fanzine to help barely cover printing costs and maybe a bit of beer money for the sellers.

So today we’re going to cover just a small sample of the ads that appeared as I leafed through some fanzines recently. Some were spoof, some were not but could have been, but looking back adverts in fanzines served up their fair share of classics and in a subject we keep coming back to, provide a rich source of social history.

Nottingham namecheck

First, we travel to the midlands city where taking the mickey out of Derby is de rigeur. This spoof Dumbo kits sponsor ad from Nottingham Forest’s Garibaldi issue 1 might have landed them in trouble with Umbro if they had a wide enough circulation but they folded after 4 issues anyway.

The fanzine wasn’t just abut spoofs however, this “luxury” coach travel ad screams anything but luxury but in the days of simple dot matrix graphics this was about as good as you could expect and the passengers do seem happy anyway.

Dahn Sarf

Pick up just about any fanzine over the years and you’ll find some form of ad. Moving on to London take issue 62 of QPR fanzine In The Loft from 1992 for example we have a collection of classics, a whole page of great local ads; a school of motoring, a TOP DJ!, 3 hour happy hours, 10% discounts and a 99p pint!! My favourite perhaps is “Best Greek restaurant on the Green’ . Could have been a bit more ambitious lads, how about best in Shepherds Bush, even West London perhaps? I checked the address, it’s not actually on the green and is now a Korean dining establishment.

I know I said ads weren’t selling unnecessary crap from big corps but later in The Loft comes the breathtaking opposite of these lovely little sighters into 1990s Shepherds Bush as Teamtalk comes crashing in.  Teamtalk also ran a line for American Football, eugh!

Teamtalk, in case you’d forgotten, was the main competitor to Clubcall which was run by rapacious privatised BT in just one of their many money grabbing initiatives luring desperate fans to premium rate hotlines with pre-recorded news, gossip and statistics. Outside of fanzines, the best way to access vaguely reliable information about your team was now the telephone, the ones connected to walls. Of course, any nugget of even vaguely interesting information was only revealed at the back end of a 10-minute call… and the whole thing cost 50p a minute. It’s estimated that Clubcall alone was receiving 12 MILLION calls per season!

It’s incredible to think that in it wasn’t until late 1992 that the first text message was sent but before that we had the rip offs that were Teamtalk and Clubcall (even with a FREE wallet card and fixture list!) This was the peak of technology at the time but happily ads of this type were few and far between in fanzines.

Liquid Bullion

Volume 1 issue 5 of Rotherham United’s Windy & Dusty from August1991 (just number them sequentially for the love of god please lads)carried what we think might have been the only advert for a Formula 1 magazine in a football fanzine. This Cobra ad appears making their dislike of Nigel Mansel clear.

Why? How? What? I’m not sure, Cobra was “The ultimate formula one spectator’s magazine” but I can’t imagine that the subset of RUFC/F1 fans was a huge market demographic.  Looking around I see that the editor of W&D at the time lived reasonably near the Brabham HQ and the guy who wrote Cobra so who knows, perhaps he was moonlighting.

Staying with Windy and Dusty, this quite superb pub ad’ appeared in the last ever issue of the classic Rotherham fanzine in 1993. At first I assumed they marked it as an advertisement sarcastically, but as we’ll see the ad itself is very much a reflection of provincial pubs of the 1990s

The beer choices from the Old Mill Brewery in the Kingfisher are eye catching, bitter, mild and bullion, no fancy continental lagers like Madri from Madrid, oh no. Bullion was a pale ale normally brewed with a single malt, the equivalent today would be called Blonde Bombshell and have a fancy 50s style logo to match.

There was a quiz with a tantalisingly unspecified jackpot PLUS a gallon of beer! And finally, Chuck Fowler offering live entertainment as opposed to dead or slightly muted entertainment? You can enjoy three minutes of the Chuck Fowler experience here.

I checked up on the Kingfisher and Camra mournfully informs me “Please note this pub is closed as of 01/05/2015 and became permanently closed 26/05/2015. Demolished.” A quick look on google maps confirms this and judging by the last review I could find of the pub from 2014 that’s no surprise. “Inside there is a single square shaped room, I could not see the seating because the pub was too dark, but there were loads of fairy and flashing lights, with music blasting out. The pub was empty at 7.30 on a Saturday night. There were two pumps on the bar, both had Old Mill bitter clips on them showing, so I asked for a half of Old Mill bitter, the barman said “we don’t do that beer” so I said “but you have two pump clips facing” Barman “WE DON’T DO THOSE BEERS” not to be beaten I then asked for a half of Guinness, “we don’t do halves of Guinness” I then said “I only want a quick half of Guinness” barman “WE DON’T DO HALFS IN THIS PUB but we do bottles from the fridge” I gave up and for the first time ever walked out of a proper pub.” Fabulous stuff, the sort of interaction very familiar to those who drank in the provinces in 80s and 90s but would be all over the socials like a rash nowadays.

Mysterious distribution networks

During the 80s this mysterious advert appeared in more than a couple of fanzines, Brentford’s Voice of the Beehive Hib’s The Proclaimer, and Newcastle’s Jim’s Bald Heed being just a few of the many examples that I’ve seen.

A search for AFN on google today will reveal links to the  Association for Nutrition, Anti Fascist networks and even more exciting, news of the AFN+ networks, working to “outline our strategy to help the UK agri-food system transform for net zero by 2050”.

Was it as simple as A Fanzine Network? Well, little remains of this operation today, but the author Neil Forsyth of The Gold, Guilt, and Bob Servant fame did reveal more in an article in Nutmeg magazine. Apparently Neil “blew my paper-round money on fanzines from Dundee’s legendary Groucho’s record shop and AFN Distribution, the UK’s biggest (only?) fanzine distributors”

AFN was run by the same people that edited Never Say Dai, the Newport County fanzine”^[1] Many fanzines were unhappy at this enterprise, feeling it went against the ethos of fanzines as largely nonprofit “organisations”. For example, this warning ran in the summer 1992 edition of Brian fanzine.

A company trying to make money from fellow zines that were rarely breaking even does seem a bit much but it’s very much the way the country was developing with the Loadsa money geezers and Thatcherism beginning to take hold. It’s also very interesting that there was a market for this sort of scheme, an indication of just how popular and dare we say even relatively mainstream fanzines were becoming by then.

The missing ink

As we’ve said some adverts were spoofs such as this very creative and fantastically bitter piece that appeared in issue 2 of Motherwell’s Wherever You May Be in 1989 demonstrates.

Fraser Wishart, now chief executive of the footballer’s union PFA Scotland and FIFPRO global board member, was sold to Falkirk at a fee set by the tribunal after the clubs couldn’t agree a fee. Though £285,000 was still the record fee the ‘well had received for a player at the time, so angry at the perceived knockdown prices were our heroes that didn’t consider their spacing properly and ran out of space for the L at the end of tribunal.

Final Whistle

Adverts appeared in fanzines from the early days, organisations that were almost always borderline or loss-making endeavours were part of the local community it’s only natural that they should help out local businesses in town or near the ground in return for discounted pints or top DJ’s performing.

Lovely little vignettes that record long-forgotten businesses that existed, remind you of the way things were and tell you much about life in the 80s and 90s. Many of these things existed long before the internet and so aren’t recorded for posterity anywhere else. Another time we’ll look at how fallible the internet is for that anyway.  

The adverts also represent a great example of the impressive if varied levels of creativity that existed in fanzines. Long live print!

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[1] https://www.nutmegmagazine.co.uk/issue-4/floating-in-a-sea-of-staples-meandering-font-sizes-and-murky-photocopies/