Inane Prattling

My visit to insolent Inverness versus Elgin City...

I’ve got to say from the get-go that Inverness is a beautiful city, one that was a pleasure to visit for the reason of ticking off my 38^th current Scotch league ground. However, the legendary late 70s teenage punkers The Prats, who were actually from Edinburgh, were completely correct when they said of the place, “scenery is quite good. All the people they are rude,” as I’ve not come across such surly attitudes by staff in the hospitality sector since I was last in Slovakia. From the ten minutes it took me to catch the attention of the bloke on reception at my (very comfortable) guest house before I could check in, to the selective blindness and gruff insolence of the staff at each of the four pubs I visited, bar the last one and he was from Birmingham, I was subject to a haughty contempt that I probably deserved, just for being me.

Anyway, my first groundhopping adventure of 2025/2026 wouldn’t be complete without an element of farce courtesy of LNER, who still haven’t refunded me for the disaster that was my trip to Dingwall at the end of last season. “A faulty level crossing at Morpeth” meant my train arrived in Waverley the usual 20 minutes late, meaning I missed my 11.40 connection to Perth and subsequently Inverness and had to hang around, in the First Class lounge with a complimentary coffee and muffin for company, until the 1.30 service departed. It meant I arrived in Inverness at 5 and not half 3 as intended. No matter, it wasn’t the breathless race to the ground that Ross County v Livingston had been. On the plus side, I amazingly found my guest house without any hassle, suggesting my map reading is getting better. Well, it couldn’t get worse I suppose. After 10 minutes of invisibility at the entrance, I had an attempt at a freezing / scalding shower then, slightly refreshed, walked in the direction of the ground, though not in the nude in case you were wondering. Unlike the historic city centre, the Caledonian Stadium is a flat pack new build, reached by way of several industrial estates that border the River Ness and is snug beside the A82 on its way north to Wick and other such isolated places. It took me about 40 minutes to get there, keeping the water on my right at all times, so as to avoid getting lost. Surprisingly, there weren’t any midges around.

Other than The Prats, Inverness is probably only mentioned memorably in song as part of “The Ball of Kirriemuir,” so brilliantly updated by Aidan Moffat a few years ago. The four and twenty virgins in that song may well have been deflowered at the social event so memorably commemorated by that ballad, but I’d suggest it would be good for the similar number of teenage ultras and snare drums that make up the Inverness Casual Force, behind whom I was sat, if they get a chance to play Kirriemuir Thistle in the cup this year, with a post-match swally in the local Women’s Institute… You hear what I’m saying?

Being serious, Caledonian Stadium is not one you could fall in love with. Situated on the not so bonny banks of Loch Ness,  it only has 3 sides, two of which are identikit flat pack stands, with one shut and the other a third full of about 200 hardy zealots from Elgin. I was in the main stand, which was comfortable enough, sold moderate Steak pies and warm Pepsi Max for an exorbitant price and looks like a scale model of Chelsea’s East Stand, with a menacing cantilever structure overhanging most of the pitch. The crowd was 1,296, including holidaying Americans and Germans, out for a bit of local culture and colour and the vast majority were more than happy with the 2-0 win for the home side, that could have been 6 or 7, were it not for profligate finishing and desperate defending, though Elgin hit the post with a long range screamer and missed a simple 1 on 1 late on. The two goals came just after the half hour from McKay and Longstaff (no, not that one and no, not his brother either). The first was an astute tap-in after a goalmouth scramble and the second a well timed effort after an impressive move down the left. Inverness are no great shakes (their centre backs were terrible), but Elgin looked more than a division below the hosts.

Come full time, the ICF packed up their flags, put their sweetie wrappers in the bin and filed out in an orderly fashion. I caught a single decker football special back to the City Centre, having already completed 15k steps in the day, then drank Tennents in a few pubs. One of whom had a bladdered folk singer on, who kept forgetting the words to “All Along the Watchtower,” to the extent that 2 riders were approaching for 3 verses in a row. Come the witching hour, I drank up and soon fell soundly asleep in my single bed after watching a BBC News Special about those clowns whose chainsaws left a sizeable Sycamore Gap.

Next morning, I had breakfast at Tescos, courtesy of a couple of pretzels and a big bottle of water, then caught the train at Inverness’s incredibly chaotic station and snoozed to Waverley, changed, got the 75% empty LNER to Newcastle, ran slap bang into former MP Ian Mearns at Monument, then got the bus home, arriving the same time as if I’d been to work. Next week, it’s Inverness again, only this time they’re away to newcomers East Kilbride. Once the cricket season is over and Percy Main’s autumn schedule is confirmed, we’ll cast our minds towards Stranraer, Peterhead and Queen’s Park again, now they are at Little Hampden. The fun never stops round here, I’m telling you.

Freak Zine

TQ75b landed on my doormat this week. It includes an incredibly generous review of Scratch & Reflect Ensemble's performance at Dunston Staithes, as well as this article I wrote about my experiences of fanzine culture over the past 35 or so years...

I think I first heard the term fanzine in early summer 1977. To be accurate, I actually read the word in Sounds, which was my weekly of choice back then, rather than it coming out of someone’s mouth. No doubt it was used in relation to some DIY publication that had sprung from the burgeoning punk scene, where samizdat periodicals such as the epochal Sniffin’ Glue acted as the printed lantern bearers for this allegedly revolutionary musical movement. Of course, in retrospect, almost all of the bands who released music this side of the Atlantic in the cultural stunde null, characterised by safety pins and spitting, apart from the still vibrant Wire and admirable Buzzcocks, were bombastic tub-thumping pub rock pretenders like The Damned and The Clash who (Mick Jones’s contributions apart), I have always given a wide berth to. The less said about, for instance, The Cortinas, Chelsea, The Cockney Rejects, The Models and a thousand similar lame Oi! Oi! Oi! macho meatheads the better, despite Sounds (in particular the demotic Garry Bushell) venerating them.

While John Peel remained the sole source for radio exposure off all kinds of new music, regardless of validity, seeing scholarly written debate about bands I was unfamiliar with, was possible by browsing the stock of either in Virgin Records, which had recently opened in Eldon Square, or Listen Ear on Ridley Place (it became Volume in 1981), both of which had racks of dog-eared independent inkies you could read the covers off and nobody much minded that you didn’t buy them. In fact, living off pocket money and a paper lad’s wages, they were simply unaffordable if you wanted to buy records as well. Digesting the likes of the prohibitively expensive Creem, Rolling Stone, Trouser Press and Village Voice, exposed me to incredibly articulate pieces, not only about punk and afterwards but much good stuff that had gone before, by such journalistic Gods as Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus and Robert Christgau. Hence, I became aware that musical criticism diverged markedly between writers in the US and the UK. Admittedly Zig Zag was a thoughtful read, but most of the A5 English fanzines featured amateur doctoring of photos of the likes of Mary Whitehouse, Elizabeth Windsor, Hughie Green and Des O’Connor, with safety pins superimposed through their heads, alongside gig reviews based on how much cider the correspondent had imbibed and crass exhortations to buy Sham 69 or Lurkers 7” singles. This era left me cold.

Of far more interest to me was the music and the attendant cultural scene that began to appear from 1978 onwards, involving the likes of Gang of Four, The Mekons, The Raincoats, Delta 5, The Au Pairs, Clock DVA, Scritti Politti, This Heat, Cabaret Voltaire and a dozen other acts who took, as I discovered, their inspiration more from Can, Neu and Kraftwerk than Kursaal Flyers or Ducks Deluxe. These acts also had an ideological basis to their practice, often based on Marxism, Situationism and Dadaism, rather than scattergun nihilism or boorish hedonism. As you can imagine, this was right up my street, and these sounds still float my boat to this day. I changed from Sounds to NME, which I stuck with until I turned 30, and voraciously consumed dozens of indie magazines, mentioned in the small ads section in the back pages of NME. In a sense, buying words and music in this fashion was like drinking Real Ale; among the glorious successes, there were some fairly unpalatable disasters, but at least when you bought small press publications, you were sticking it to the man and staying away from the mainstream.

I first contributed gig and record reviews to various, long-forgotten fanzines in late 1979 and continued to do so until I got to university in 1983, when my horizons broadened, deadlines tightened, and briefs lengthened as the chance to write columns about politics, sport and books in a more nuanced publication were offered to me. I’m not name-dropping, but my first editor at Leeds Student was Jay Rayner, current Guardian and Observer food hack and son of Clare, the infamous agony aunt. He gave me free rein to explore complex, indeed arcane ideological concepts in live reviews of the likes of The Fall, Misty in Roots and Don Cherry.  

After graduation and back on Tyneside, I continued writing about music and books for regional monthly magazines such as Paint It Red, Boiling Point and The Crack, until the late 90s when printed publications stopped being a regular feature on the Tyneside scene, after the internet and the subsequent ubiquity of social media urinated on William Caxton’s grave, in becoming the accepted mode of spreading (mis)information. Admittedly, the latter publication is still going, though I’ve not read it in years, nor have I sought to contribute to it or narc.

However, from the late 80s until the present day, I found a whole new zine scene that took my standard of writing and volume of contributions, to a whole new level. It was only tangentially related to music in the sense that probably the first football fanzine in Britain was the general Scottish one, The Absolute Game (named after a Skids song), while south of the border, and still producing a monthly issue to this day, When Saturday Comes, its title taken from a track by The Undertones, sought to cover not just English football, but the whole global game. Like music zines, these were irreverent, independent, authentic voices, from the terraces rather than the mosh pit admittedly, but dogmatic, independent and uncompromising in their honesty. I bought the debut issue of Newcastle United’s The Mag on the way to an opening day 2-2 draw with Spurs in August 1988 then, inspired by both concept and content, wrote for every issue from 2-178 until it closed down a decade ago. Similarly, when travelling to away games, I hunted down opposition fanzines and later contributed articles to most of them about my experiences of away travel or players who had moved between clubs. I must have written for nigh on 100 different periodicals; some still exist, others only produced a couple of issues. I even edited my own Newcastle United fanzine, The Popular Side, for 15 issues. We were resolutely old school; A5, no adverts, no colour, no website, no merchandise and only £1 an issue, with anyone welcome to contribute. I loved doing it but selling it outside a freezing pub on a January evening in a gale isn’t the best way to prepare for a game. That, and having to write half the copy myself, was a reason to wind it down. Energy can only get you so far. What any editor needs is a good, strong stock of reliable supporting players.

I still write for a couple of fanzines (View from the Allotment End for North Ferriby and Mudhutter for Wigan Athletic), but the internet has largely destroyed the football fanzine movement. Indeed, many club don’t even publish a programme. Percy Main Amateurs do and I’m the editor. Like the Windmill Theatre, we will never close. I’ve written a book about the club; Village Voice. Anyone who fancies a free copy, just drop me a line.

While I’ve always regretted the fact that fanzines never caught on with my real sporting love, cricket, my other style of writing, namely short fiction and poetry, has been well catered for over the years by the litzine movement. I’ve got a magazine called Iconlatre, published in West Hartlepool back in 1965 or thereabouts, which includes a couple of Charles Bukowski poems. Now what are the chances of that? You may remember a few years ago that TQ came with a free literary zine, glove, which I edited. Sadly, after 10 issues I wound the publication down as I was struggling for a high enough quality of contribution and anywhere to sell it, other than online. From my experience, both football and free verse independent publications have only a short shelf life, unless you are part of an enthusiastic cohort producing the magazine. It isn’t all gloom though; publications such as Spinners and Tangled Lines, both from Kent, and Falkirk’s Razur Cuts act as conduits for modern, experimental writing in the genres of both prose and poetry. I am delighted to regularly feature in all 3.

So, what about TQ? Being candid, I love this magazine, and the arrival of each new issue makes my heart swell with joy when it lands on the doormat. The simple truth is this: other than The Wire, TQ is the only publication catering for those of us who wish to familiarise ourselves with the experimental, non-commercial and often improvised, underground music scene. Whether this consists of the pastoral, found sounds, ambient electronica, drone, grinding feedback or disturbing power electronics, a combination of all of these genres and sub-genres or none of them, matters little. What unites us all is purity of expression, honest of purpose and artistic integrity, whether in sound, word, artwork or deeds. Unlike The Wire, which is scholarly to the point of academe and informative verging on the encyclopaedic, TQ is resolutely amateur, totally enthusiastic, highly supportive of all artists, and always ready to embrace the new. New writers. New sounds. New venues. All of these are welcome in TQ.

I believe I’ve known Andy for about 4 years now and every conversation I’d had with him has taught me something fresh and vibrant, allowing me to come away an improved human being. His publication does that as well. TQ is the living embodiment of the fanzine ideal; 60s idealism meets 70s radicalism with contemporary enthusiasm for the experimental. Long may it continue.

Anyone who is interested swapping zines or anecdotes, get in touch via iancusack@blueyonder.co.uk