This week we journey to the home of Dennis The Menace with Derry Rumba, a rambunctious fanzine in favour of Dundee FC (the dark blue ones). Issue 4 covers Sept-Oct 1989 and has Keith Wright on the cover bemoaning the fact that a talented goalscoring career at Hibs, Raith and The Dee is not enough for Any Roxborough to give him a cap. Couple of things here..those are never before seen club badges and Keith’s tats seems to predict the future…he didn’t move to Hibs until 1991 (where he would win his one and only cap)

Anyway, the “Get it right up you” issue starts with a double page spread of an editorial reporting a beach holiday near Arbroath and suggests that the season is already over in September. Even by fanzine standards this is bleak. Mind you, reading the adjpoining match report from Dunfermline also suggests they might be on to something. In fact they werre dead right, they would finish the season relegated from the Premier division and dumped out of the Scottish Cup by their next door neighbours united. A fanzine has NEVER in recorded history been so bang on with predictions.

Never mind, they’d always have the early season 4-3 Derby win from August that season with Keith providing the killer triple to hang on to. (Converted into a league double at a later date)

There is an article that could be written today about pricing and the match day programmes…except with prices like £4.50 to get in today’s fans must be crying. There is also an ad for a fanzine called The Punter on this page. If anyone knows I’d love to see a copy because apparently it did an analysis of the 1990 world cup draw and the methods of Wing Commander and concluded that ‘if a team like Wimbledon can win the F.A. Cup then Scotland could win the World Cup’ We all know what happened next.

There is an extraordinary article written by “The Swansea Fanzine Editor”. Extraordinary because he isn’t named, nor is the fanzine, he’s taken an 11 hour train journey to watch Dundee, his surprise at the lack of violence and he seems to have mistake the names of the people he is with..Add to that the story of having his photo taken with Kevin Gallagher but not producing the photo and stories of cheating refs (has anything changed in Scotland!?) and you have a superb example of a fanzine article.

There is also a tremendous spoof ad about an 0898 “Punishment line” which they suggest contains full commentary of all Dundee United,s (Sic) matches.

They follow up their cover story with this further piece on Keith Wright and their hatred of AR. No stats or anything as pointless as that, oh no, this is 1989 and we are in proper fanzine op-ed territory with a comparison to Steve Bull.

There is merch which almost certainly broke copyright laws but if you still have one of these cherish it, it really looks the part.

There is more but this is a mini blog and the other stuff can go in an upcoming “Forgotten Tournaments” blog. This is a superb fanzine, very Heath Robinson, very opinionated and great fun, all for 50p.