Creativity comes from all sorts of people and places. A man once said “We wanted to make it funny and it was a despondent time and we wanted to take the piss. We didn’t want to sit there and be miserable about it and if you’re going to focus on the trauma that was taking place let’s do it in a funny way”

That man was Phil Jones, co-creator of The End with Pete Hooton and Mick Potter so this blog looks at the creativity it came from and the huge influence the fanzine exerted which persists. It is perhaps the best example of how fanzines still influence protest, creative processes and the media today.

I am very grateful to Knowsley council, John Grant and the brilliant volunteers of the Kirkby gallery for their fantastic exhibition and help with the majority of the pictures in this blog.

Side 1; Altogether Now.

Kirkby gallery is a lovely little spot, run by Knowsley council with the help of fantastic volunteers they put on an array of shows with a local theme. Made on Merseyside (MoM) has been a brilliant example of this type of work, done locally, the sort of thing that goes under the radar with people mesmerised by shallow, money crazed influencers dominating the media landscape with click bait content. It shouldn’t be that way, and it wasn’t for a time.

MoM covers some brilliant, important pieces of creativity from Merseyside. Amazon studios, where Echo & The Bunnymen, Wah!, China Crisis, the Smiths and Dead or Alive recorded, the creation of the cult classic ‘Letter to Breznev’, Alan Bleasdale’s ‘Boys from the Black Stuff’ and most importantly for this blog, the classic fanzine, The End.

Side 2; The beginning of The End

The End was a love letter to the city of Liverpool and all aspects of it, the good, the bad and the ugly. The idea came to Hooton when he saw an anarchist fanzine lampooning the royal wedding. [1]

A fanzine about “music, beer and football” said John Peel who heavily supported Hooton and the fanzine despite them writing to him to berate his music policy. Hooton said “We attacked every sacred cow in Liverpool, we were just trying to reflect what people were saying in conversations”

Phil Jones wasn’t sure about getting involved, he had his own Mod fanzine, Time For Action and told Hooton no one would buy the proposed format “You’ve got to do something that caters for punks, mods, or people into reggae otherwise people won’t buy it, the lads at the match would never be interested in a fanzine because they’d regard it as a student rag.” How wrong he was!

Jones obtained early interviews with the B52s, UB40, Human League, Elvis Costello and The Jam, corresponding with the bands and often receiving advance copies of their records for review. 

Hooton was also making music connections and a big break for the fanzine came with an “interview” with the Clash. This is perhaps the perfect example of a fanzine interview, Hooton ‘invited himself’ into the changing room at a gig involving the Clash, The Beat and Wah! (what a lineup!) and volume 2 ran an “interview” that he carried out for The End “I said it was an ‘interview’, but really I just sat in on an interview and took a few notes and a couple of extra photographs,” 1

Side 3; What’s It All about?

Created for “Lads from council estates who went to football matches and occasionally to gigs” it became a template for what was to come in other fanzines, a limited amount of content about actual football but lots on the culture of football supporters; fashion, music, football, poetry, drink and drugs, politics, protest and whatever else they could think of or were doing at the time. Sound familiar?

Loaded came along years later and to a lesser extent, When Saturday Comes was an imitator of sorts. (creator Mike Ticher an early contributor to The End) Features like ‘In and Out’ lists were later copied in many many fanzines, newspapers, magazine and supplements across the country.

They weren’t averse at having a pop at other cities and supporters, Leeds came in for particular attention but the fanzine (and The Farm after it) became hugely popular in Leeds as people appreciated the humour and empathised with another northern culture being torn apart by Tories. Anyone and everything were targets for satire, Sunday footballers up and down the country to this day were described perfectly in this early cartoon.

Punk ethos went deep in The End, instead of paying writers they would give contributors a stack of copies that they could sell and keep a large portion of the money from. It provided a voice for ordinary fans and had a surreal sense of fun, telling readers that hats made from cornflake packets were fashionable for example. It had a poetry corner, something unexpected for a fanzine at the time and here is a great example of the type of verse it contained, deservedly “eulogising” Thatcher in precisely the way you’d expect.

The right trainers, already a cult endeavour by the 80’s, played a central role in the DNA of the fanzine, serious business for contributors and readers. A 1981 trip to Paris to watch Liverpool play Real Madrid in the European Cup Final didn’t lead to a search of the cultural influences you would expect, most of the trip was spent hunting trainers. Hooton relates the tale “Instead of looking round the Louvre or going on a trip to Versailles we ended up looking for what I now know to be a mythical Adidas centre. People in our entourage were convinced that you could find the rarest form of Adidas trainer known to man” [2]

Side 4; Don’t Buy The Sun

As mentioned, Pete Hooton also formed the fantastic band The Farm who still make brilliant music and also continue to contribute to protest culture in various projects to commemorate and raise funds for the Hillsborough disaster.

You can see them here playing perhaps their biggest hit, Groovy Train. This official video has a special guest appearance from another Merseyside icon, actor Bill Dean who played the iconic grumpy character Harry Cross in Brookside way before the BBC got in on the schtick with Victor Meldrew. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFgnaogJ9EI&list=RDRFgnaogJ9EI&start_radio=1

As we all should be they are still involved with the Don’t Buy The Sun campaign (please sign up here https://dontbuythesun.co.uk/site/ ) and the fanzine still “exists” on X  https://x.com/theendfanzine and Facebook https://www.facebook.com/theENDfanzine/?locale=en_GB promoting causes and bands in Liverpool.

Unfortunately, the exhibition closes tomorrow (sorry, I made 3 abortive attempts to get there only to be thwarted ironically by another great tory legacy, the appalling transport network of northern England) but retrospective exhibitions keep popping up over the years so watch out. It’s fitting as The End was great example of how fanzines and fanzine culture would change the face of published media and attitudes in the UK and it should be celebrated again and again.

In 2011 a compilation of all the End fanzines was made into a book edited by James Brown of Loaded (published by his company, Sabotage Times) it’s a brilliant read. At the time it sold for £20 and was the Christmas best seller in Liverpool. If you search for a copy of the compilation now on eBay prices go as high as £150.

Run-out groove

Fanzines came in all shapes and sizes, our list now has 1,765 fanzines catalogued with a rich and varied history that we’ll keep delving into in further blogs. It’s arguable though, that not many had as much influence as this little ragged pamphlet, Made on Merseyside. The End was one of the earliest and most influential not just because of its music connections but because of the way many publications have copied it’s ideas, Poetry Corner, Ins and Outs lists, pub and other guides, fashion, music culture, design, all served up in an irreverent chaotic style…the model for Loaded magazine.

It went much further than that though, think about where Thatcherism would have gone without protest, think about culture and the media today. Sure, everything might have happened anyway, but they wouldn’t have been the same without the irreverence and can-do ethic of fanzines like The End.

In the exhibition there is a great quote and the perfect way to end this blog;

“We had some great nights out after selling The End at the match and met some very famous people, some of whom became good friends, but you know in all honesty the best thing about the whole experience was seeing people in a pub reading The End and laughing their heads off, now that is a feeling money can’t buy!”

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[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-end-peter-hooten-fanzine-interview/

[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/press/all-together-then-how-the-fanzine-the-end-gave-liverpool-its-voice-6256353.html