A Short History of 'The Northern Light'

In the late summer of 1987, the man who was briefly to be known as 'Boo Boy' and who now writes under the sobriquet of 'Major Marcus A. Reno 7th Cav. (retd.)' but who is really Dave Watt, phoned me from somewhere in the North Sea. The purpose of the call wasn't for the usual waffly bullshit session about this and that (but mainly football) it was about a couple of "magazines" he'd read just been reading on the survey boat where he was working at the time. The first one was something called 'When Saturday Comes' and the other was a slightly obscurely named photoprint of 'The Absolute Game'. Boo Boy was quite inspired by these groundbreaking fanzines and wanted to do an Aberdeen one. I was all for this, having always fancied producing an hysterical propaganda sheet about the Dons and suggested 'The Northern Light' as a working title. The rest, as the clichés say, is history and here it is, briefly, for the uninitiated.

The time was right. It wasn't long ago that we'd lost the greatest manager in the club's history and our beloved Dandies were evidently taking a turn for the boring under the cautious management of Ian Portaloo. The press were being hunnish as usual and the football writers at Aberdeen Journals were far away from fighting our corner. The fans needed an outlet to release the bile and frustration that gathers up whilst participating in the world's most irritating league and we were the men to provide it; our fate was set in granite kippers.

The first issue was a sixteen page effort that unleashed a whole bunch of clever ideas from Boo Boy, tied in with some wittily captioned photos and the spiffiest cover TNL ever had - a silhouette of Pittodrie with the famous Flossie grinning maniacally at you from the corner. Old Beach Ender, for it was I, contributed a few bits and pieces and did all the typing and layouts. Martyn Henderson, who also helped out a bit on the editorial side, introduced the tartan rug waving idea in his first article, and Bloo Toon bunged in his debut article (which he continues to re-fashion in the

pages of TRF from time to time). It actually took us ages to put that first issue together as we hadn't a clue what we were doing, but it's amazing what can be achieved with access to a photocopier, a pair of scissors and a Pritt Stick, and at last I ran off a few photocopies (at a secret location and at risk of my sanity) which Dave and I added a finishing touch to by stapling them together and hand colouring Flossie's red and white scarf. It got a bit strange at this point because Boo Boy would have nothing to do with selling the damned thing, but I hawked a few round the office where I worked and then, rather daringly I thought, some more, surreptitiously on the terraces at Parkhead (September '87, 2-0).

At the outset we had thought that few people would be interested in our fledgling efforts, but over a period of twelve months I photocopied for all I was worth and produced upwards of 1,000 duplicates of that first issue and we stapled them and hand coloured all those bloody scarves between the two of us (never again).

By the time we put the second issue together, my confidence in TNL was higher and having no wish to go through all that photocopying again, put it to a professional (and very expensive) printer. 'Let's have 2,000 copies,' I proposed to Boo Boy, who still fancied the idea of continuing at the photocopier (at no risk to his own heid standing by such primitive electronic machinery), and who responded with a diplomatic 'You've got to be fucking joking, we'll never sell that many!' type quip. Well, we both proved to be right; we were left with a few hundred copies after the first burst of sales, but over the next few years, it continued to sell slowly to new recruits and by the time TNL was laid to rest the last of issue two had found its way into the hands of the great Rudolph public.

This was the time when we started gathering a loyal group of shops that helped us take our 'foul mouthed' scribblings to the people who matter most - the Dons' fans. We even found two significant outlets in Glasgow as well as others in Dundee, Perth and Edinburgh and built up a subscription list of over four hundred, from Holburn Street to Hong Kong. A couple of the supporters' clubs took us on, but most totally ignored our offer of discounts if they wanted to sell the fanzine on to their members. "I've seen that thing, it's shite." Jean Sandison, Aberdeen SC, outside Dens Park, 1988.

The cover of that second issue had a prominent picture of Portaloo on it and when the Winnit and I were hawking it outside Dens Park at the Cup semi-final in April '88 quite a few people refused to buy it, not having noticed the sketch of a Dons' fan doing himself in at the news of Portaloo signing a five year contract, they thought TNL was supporting Mr. Tedious.

The third TNL brought us our Good Taste Consultant in residence, Gordon Reid, whose cartoons gave the fanzine a much needed shot of graphic (in every sense) input. The print run had been cut back for this one, but with the cover celebrating the fifth anniversary of Gothenburg and reproducing Johnny Hewitt's famous leaping celebration, this was the one that took off and made TNL something of an institution; consequently, TNL 3 is a rarity and many avid readers probably never saw it. By issue four the Ferryhill Oracle was astounding us with his diary and Gio Alzapiedi started slinging in his pointed cartoons with issue five. Not much later, the zany Ally Ross was penning his own warped viewpoint and Serif brought a further dimension with his distinctive cartoons. This gave us the hard core of TNL contributors who stuck with the fanzine till it finished in 1992. Of course other talented people chipped in with contributions, too numerous to mention, that added to the quality of our efforts and helped to make the Northern Light the popular success it was.

I can't remember how the print run built up over the next few issues, but from number 4 (when we changed to a much more reasonably priced and infinitely more helpful printer - Rainbow Enterprises Fergus and Jean have now sadly retired) onward we never produced less than 2,000. At the peak were printing and easily selling 4,500 copies, mostly on the streets around Pittodrie, on match days, but also through the loyal group of shops scattered around town, not least One-Up (recruited by Martyn) and Parker's Comics, where they shifted hundreds of copies. The staff in these stores had to put up with punters demanding to know when the next one was coming out within days of the current one hitting the streets.

Newspapers began to take a bit of notice, although we were carefully ignored by the football 'writers' at the P&J and Evening Express, until we closed down operations in 1992, when the fearless and porkulent ex-postie slipped a twisted obituary onto the back page of his fast deteriorating paper, thinking that he would be safe from retaliation. Little did he realise that in no time at all the first TRF would bounce bleating and gouging onto the streets, dubbing him the Calorie Alien - who ate all the pies?

One of the shops that helped us early on was Boomtown Books on King Street, but we quickly managed to fall foul of them for being 'sexist' by printing a picture of a real Flossie, apparently wearing stockings and suspenders. Once Gordon Reid took the wraps off some of his early cartoons, they were driven to distraction and after a polite debate about freedom of expression, Boomtown told us to never darken their enlightened doors again. Quite a feather in our cap that, our fist ban, we were delighted and Gordon exacted revenge by featuring some of the staff of the shop in one of his strip cartoons.

There was always a huge satisfaction in seeing each completed issue of TNL in print, but it has to be said that there was a great deal of frustration too, with constant squabbling behind the scenes (mainly between Boo Boy and myself). It was a bit reminiscent of the old swimming duck cliché, with all calm(ish) on the surface but arguing like fury underneath. On the whole, though, I felt that the arguing helped the fanzine's success.

One of the great compliments paid us by contemporary fanzines, was that many of them ripped off ideas that first appeared in The Northern Light. This was especially true of the well produced but entirely unoriginal 'Final Hurdle' produced by Dundee (now hundee) United followers for the small clutch of people who chose to wear the burnous. Their plagiarism lead to a long running and enjoyable feud with their editor within the pages of the two fanzines and in the letters' columns of 'The Absolute Game' and 'When Saturday Comes' - utterly childish of course, but they started it, so there.

TNL's greatest achievement was,in my view, that it gave our fellow supporters a voice that reinforced in print what many of them were thinking - reinforcing their prejudices, if you like and never more so than when it came to the removal of two managers.

Certainly we were instrumental in the departure of Ian Porterfield, with an editorial stance that decried the negativity of his management. We printed the words of a ditty we heard on the terracing one day: 'His name was Porterfield, he had eleven men, he marched them up to the halfway line, then he marched them back again.' There was no better summary of the guy's Pittodrie career. Of course he was helped on his way by his own private life which managed to hit the headlines often enough to embarrass the club. He had stopped the rot that had set in towards the end of Fergie's reign, but was never going to be able to turn us back into a seriously challenging, exciting side and away he went.

Then came Alex Smith, the man whom articulacy forgot was and is a buffoon, with his bizarre prognostications and timidity on the park. He gradually eroded the fighting qualities of AFC's players, a calumny whose benefits we were still reaping in season 94/95, and whilst we did have some success under his management (while Jocky Scott was there) it has to be wondered how much part he really played in it.

Bear in mind that our decision to go on the offensive against the managers was never taken without heart-searching and reluctance. In this case, we held off for a while, settling for highlighting some of the laughable statements uttered at far too frequent intervals. The winning of the League Cup and Cup helped him of course, but the 11th of May 1991 sealed his burbling fate once and for all.

From that moment on, Smith was finished as far as we and many others were concerned. Deteriorating performances from the team, some of them humiliating, soon saw the beginning of the Pittodrie Street demonstrations and the covers of TNL focused on the need for his sacking. Jocky Scott went first, although I can't recall anybody wanting him out; maybe he saw the way the wind was blowing. But Smith stuck it out week after week, with the board showing as little bottle as he had had at Iprix and procrastinating about sacking him. Instead of the type of stuff we wanted to put in the fanzine, we became deeply involved in the need to remove Smith - it was really only for three issues of TNL, but since that covered a period of about five or six months it seemed a hell of a long time and of course there were all those demos to go to.

At last Smith went, sacked by Ian Donald, and theoretically the first of the Dons' managers ever to suffer that fate. The way the press still go on about it, anybody would think that Smiffy was and is a great manager, but none of us have overlooked the fact that he has never been offered another Premier Division management job, even though there have been plenty vacated since he left Pittodrie.

With Willie Miller's appointment to the hot seat, despite reservations about the wisdom of the choice, we hoped that he'd do the business and TNL could get back to the more enjoyable pastime of sticking it to the opposition, but events got in our way. Boo Boy, sorry, Marcus A. Reno, thought he was going to work abroad, I got married and a bit preoccupied, the Oracle wanted a break from it all and the others seemed a bit indifferent (except Gordon Reid whose appetite for cartoon drawing is insatiable). We didn't want the standards of our fanzine to decline through neglect, so we chose to kill it off - whilst it was still at its peak.

Some people chose to interpret the finish if TNL in different ways for their own reasons, but for most fans it remains a fondly remembered champion of Aberdeen supporters and the Dons and as Tina Turner put it in song, it was simply the best, better than all the rest.

Old Beach Ender

[The perpetrators:
Dave Watt - Writer/Co-Editor/Occasional Artist
Chris Gavin - Writer/Co-Editor/Dogsbody/Salesman/Distributor
Martyn Henderson - Writer/Occasional Co-Editor/Salesman
John Stephen - Writer
Gordon Reid - Cartoonist/Writer/Ideas Man
Bob Harper - Writer/Artist/Salesman
Gio Alzapiedi - Cartoonist/Writer/Co-Editor(after a while)/Salesman
Ally Ross - Writer/Salesman
Iain Cameron - Cartoonist/Writer
The Winnit - Salesman and Chief Banner Wearer
Honourable mentions: Under the Cameras;Wing Wizard(Iron Mike);A. Sheep Farmer, Mintlaw; Subtly Red; The Red Eyeball; A. F. Ross; Wooly Willie; The Phantom Carpet; Bomb the Bas; Red Rosa II; The Man in Red and many many others.]

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