In the late-seventies, it used to be said that everyone who wasn't in a band was making a fanzine. It was a spin-off from the punk ethos that reckoned "the kids" had just as much right to have their voices heard as all those bloated, professional hacks on the NME.
The kids claimed that right with alacrity. Home-typed, hand-written, cheaply photocopied, smudgy black 'zines were everywhere, singing the praises of bands you'd never heard of, were never likely to, but kind of felt you ought to. They generally cost about 30p, and you'd find them in backstreet record stores, or through mail-order small ads.
This was the background from which Limelight sprang. Oh yes, we were in a band as well, but it was very much a bedroom affair. Tupperware drums never caught on in quite the way we'd hoped. But, against the odds, it was the fanzine that took off.
The first idea we'd had - me and my school mate, Paul Badger, 15 going on 16 - was to make a fanzine. Any fanzine. Who or what it would be about was only the second question.
It just so happened that for Christmas 1979, I'd been given a copy of Drums and Wires by a band called XTC. I'd read loads of great things about this outfit in the music press, but I'd never actually heard them - at least, not until Making Plans for Nigel scraped into the charts. I knew if Santa Claus did his shopping in one particular record shop up the road, he'd still be able to pick up a copy of their third album with the free Limelight/Chain of Command single attached. And he did.
I was intrigued by what I heard, and when my family went on a British Rail winter mini-break to London, I took my Christmas cash to Virgin Records (still the rough-and-ready vinyl wonderland, not yet the ubiquitous High Street retailer), and I bought up all the XTC I could find. I got White Music, Go 2, the Life Begins at the Hop clear vinyl single, and possibly another 7" or two.
In the short space of the Christmas holidays I'd become a hard-core collector. Badger also liked the raw rhythmic energy of what he heard on my Dad's old mono record player. So when we asked each other what our fantasy fanzine should actually be about, XTC was the obvious choice.
To say we were naive is to understate the case. We knew virtually nothing about this band apart from what we'd heard on record. For all we knew they could have had a fanclub a million-strong already. And we had no idea about how you'd get in touch with them.
One of us thought of checking out the Swindon phone directory in the library. We wrote to any A. Partridge, D. Gregory, C. Moulding, and T. Chambers we could find. The band members were, of course, ex-directory. But by a bizarre coincidence, surely the hand of fate, the D. Gregory we wrote to just so happened to be a friend of Andy Partridge's mother. The letter was passed on in a Swindon hairdressers, and on March 11, 1981, Dave Gregory wrote to us saying we had "a lot of really good ideas . . . which would make for a great liason between ourselves and our fans, something that has been sadly lacking in the past".
The next thing I knew, I was talking to manager Ian Reid on the phone, babbling away about our plans. When I put the receiver down, my mum said it was the first time she'd heard me talking in whole sentences. Perhaps my enthusiasm persuaded him, or perhaps he just spotted a cheap way of catering to the band's growing fan-base, but Reid gave us the go-ahead. If we sorted out all the technical stuff, he'd foot the printing bill.
So we found out where one of the local Liverpool fanzines got their stuff typed and printed, bought a tin of cow-gum and some layout sheets, sent some questions off to the band, got my dad to write an article about Victorian architecture (in response to Towers of London), transcribed a couple of radio interviews, and knocked up a few pieces ourselves. In the spring of 1982, 1000 copies of Limelight Issue One rolled off the presses.
Helped along by a mention in Smash Hits magazine (which meant there was many a breathless teenybopper among the first readers), Limelight survived through nine erratically produced issues, plus a couple of supplements and specials, slowly but surely selling out of each 500-copy print run. It could have sold many more if the band hadn't stopped touring almost as soon as it had appeared, but it developed a keen and enthusiastic following all over the world, and I like to think it fulfilled its brief of being by and for the fans.
Of course, we could never have known back in the early-80s what a perfect band XTC would be to write about. The quality of the music they produced, the variety of artists they collaborated with, and their readiness to talk with wit, inventiveness and insight meant it was never a problem to fill magazine after magazine. Thanks to Bungalow, a wider range of fans now has the chance to read the best of the material we printed without me having to lick a single stamp, seal a single envelope, or send out a single order form - all the kind of irritations, coupled with the demands of work and family, that led to my reluctant decision to give Limelight a rest.
For the time being at least . . .
Mark Fisher, October 1997
