The Fanzine Podcast Ep. 25: 40 Years of Football Fanzines
Featuring When Saturday Comes, City Gent, and The Gooner
Fresh off a 22-hr travel day back to the States, and in lieu of a wide-ranging Midweek Update, I’m happy to share out a new episode of The Fanzine Podcast. Listen below, or on any of the podcast platforms, which you can find a direct link from here.
For over 40 years now, football fanzines have run parallel to music fanzines in the UK, growing out of the same alternative pop culture as did the punk and new wave zines of the 1970s, as evidenced perhaps by the fact that the best known and longest-running of the non-denominational zines, When Saturday Comes, took its name from a song by the Northern Irish new wave band, The Undertones. At their peak in the late 1980s, it’s estimated there were at least 300 such football zines publishing regularly in the UK.
Where the football zines differ from the music ones is in loyalty. If When Saturday Comes is like an alternative to the glossy football magazines the same way that a long-running music fanzine like The Big Takeover, which was featured on Episode 21 of the Fanzine Podcast, can be seen as a more authentically independent voice than a Spin or Mojo, the majority of zines serve more like alternatives to their stated club’s official program.
In this context, the Arsenal fanzine The Gooner, whose Kevin Whitcher joins us on this episode, is like a Taylor Swift fanzine, economically removed from the subject it is writing about but passionate about it all the same, while Bradford City’s City Gent, whose Mike Harrison also joins us for this episode, would be more comparable to a zine dedicated to a cult band that refuses to go away – Guided By Voices or Teenage Fan Club, perhaps. Even as football fan culture moves largely online, to YouTube channels and podcasts, there will always remain a dedicated, if “discerning” audience, that is willing to read articles and opinion pieces that bring the banter of what we once knew as the football “terraces” to print.
Kevin and Mike are joined here by When Saturday Comes’ co-founder and ongoing editor, Andy Lyons, for a conversation that discusses the various zines’ origins, their rise to influence and prominence, their engagement and effect on the game they support, and how they keep going after four decades and several hundred episodes a piece in the face of the younger fans migration online.
The episode also discusses the tragic fire that took place at Bradford City’s ground in May 1985, at which City Gent editor Mike Harrison was in attendance. While we don’t get into any horrific detail, I do want to let listeners be prepared.
For the record, the football film entitled When Saturday Comes has nothing to do with the football fanzine, though the fact that it chose that title perhaps speaks to the effect that WSC had on the culture in the 1980s and 90s especially. The episode was recorded while I was in the UK, me sat at my mother’s dining table without my usual hi-tech gear. It’s been edited a little for time, and I offer one voiceover to cut down on what American listeners might understand to be “inside baseball” waffling. And per Andy’s comments near the end, I couldn’t find an Alan Playter poem called When Saturday Comes, though that doesn’t mean it was not written. If you’re here for the music, do stick around, because fanzines takes many forms, and I can only think of the sci-fi zine scene that has outlasted the soccer zine scene – other than the music ones of course - for longevity and consistency.
The Fanzine Podcast theme music is by Noel Fletcher. The logo is by Greg Morton. Thanks to Richard Edwards and Pete Mountford for help with the contacts on this episode.
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Next episode, I’ll be talking to Matthew Worley, author of this exceptional new tome: