Imprinting The Sticks
Back in the 1990s, I did postgraduate research at Manchester Metropolitan University’s Department of Law and Popular Culture, supervised by a very supportive duo: Justin O’Connor and the late, much-missed Steve Redhead. My aim was to trace the history of Manchester’s alternative press – because even further back in time, I worked on many such publications, including New Manchester Review, City Fun, and City Life. I bought and read and collected many others. It was a world of publication that had, at that time, changed a lot since underground newspapers like Oz first appeared in the 1960s - and it was still changing. Its story needed telling. So I interviewed as many people as I could find, people who’d participated in the underground press, or community papers, or punk fanzines, or events fortnightlies. And eventually, my thesis was published as a book, called Imprinting the Sticks, which was available for a few years and then went out of print.
Previous issues of the City Fun fanzine, and my old articles.
View more photographs of my archive, recently donated to the John Rylands Institute, here.
Many people still tell me how much they’ve enjoyed reading it after tracking it down from libraries or from the internet. It wasn’t perfect, I have to admit – the design is questionable, and the photos, taken by me, in black and white, are not reproduced well. Never mind. I’m trying, right now, to republish it, and I’ll announce any news relating to this. The need for republication is clear – to me, at least. I don’t think there have been any other attempts to look at or analyse the way such magazines and newspapers operated outside London – and the one book that covered London, called Underground, by my friend Nigel Fountain, has long been out of print, too.
Best of all are the stories people told me about the struggles to get make a magazine happen and to keep it going. What interested me, especially, were the group dynamics – the mixture of relationships between the people who produced the publications in question. Not just the stories of co-operation and endless hard work – although many of those stories are joyous and inspiring. But by talking to them, I gained huge insight into the way working relationships frequently became fractious or conflicted, and sometimes deeply factionalised. I’ve witnessed or sometimes taken part in some terrible work-related rows, especially at the BBC, but I’ve never experienced conflict that hurt so much as the barnies and shouting matches we had, say, on City Fun fanzine, or New Manchester Review, because they were about our identities and our ideals.