Boy’s Own (issue ?) YEAR: 1989 CREATED BY: Terry Farley, Andrew Weatherall, Cymon Eckel and Steven Hall LOCATION: London SIZE: A4 WHAT’S INSIDE…. A zine from the last month of the last year of the 1980s…. By this time a gazillion fanzines had been published in the UK since the start of the punk rock explosion, covering a multitude of musical styles that had emerged in its wake. Football fanzines had also established themselves as an integral part of our national game. Boy’s Own was started in 1986 by a group of young clubbers who were friends with DJ Paul Oakenfold and right where they needed to be as acid house began to take off in the UK. One of their inspirations was Liverpool fanzine The End, which irreverently mixed up music, football, poetry, fashion, humour, booze, drugs and politics (some of the zine’s writers also ended up in indie-dance band The Farm). Each issue of Boy’s Own contained a list of “uppers and downers”, just like The End’s list of “ins and outs”. After sampling the club scene in Ibiza and discovering a new euphoria-enhancing drug called ecstasy, the Boy’s Own crew became associated with London’s first acid house clubs. Andrew Weatherall DJed at Danny Rampling’s Shoom, and Terry Farley DJed at Paul Oakenfold’s Future night at Heaven. They soon began hosting their own outdoor raves, helping to start a movement that would inspire any number of “Shock! Horror!” headlines in the tabloid press. They eventually formed their own record label and (if I remember correctly) also invented the phrase “it’s all gone Pete Tong”…. And in a similar way to the first punk zines, Boy’s Own reflected the enormous changes in Britain’s youth culture and fashion that were driven by house music and ecstasy in the late 1980s. This issue of the zine even includes the acid house equivalent of one of the most iconic expressions of the punk ethos (a picture of some badly drawn guitar chord charts accompanied by the words “THIS IS A CHORD - THIS IS ANOTHER - THIS IS A THIRD - NOW FORM A BAND”) that appeared in the first issue of Sideburns fanzine in January 1977 (although the Boy’s Own crew wrongly attribute it to Mark Perry’s Sniffin’ Glue). The acid house/ecstasy/rave scene was every bit as seismic as punk had been a decade earlier and also inspired a new generation of bands who were influenced by dance music (something that New Order had already pioneered since the early 1980s), the best of which were based in and around Manchester - which became known as Madchester at the time - and was also home to the Hacienda night club, which many people regarded as the epicentre of acid house. Some existing indie bands decided to completely change their sound and join the smiley/baggy/indie-dance revolution - most notably, Primal Scream. Andrew Weatherall’s production work on their album “Screamadelica” helped the band to create an influential blend of rock and rave music, especially on the iconic “Higher Than The Sun” - a track that perfectly captured the mood of the era. This issue of Boy’s Own features Flowered Up, a London band who managed to make a couple of half decent records while attempting to be the southern equivalent of Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses. Looking through the records in the Boy’s Own charts, most of them would sound a bit lame today, with the notable exception of “The Sun Rising” by The Beloved. New releases include “Madchester Rave On - The Remixes” by Happy Mondays, which features a remix of “Hallelujah” by Paul Oakenfold and Andy Weatherall, and a remix of “Rave On” by Paul Oakenfold and Terry Farley. There’s also cartoons, readers’ letters, lifestyle tips, bouncer horror stories, girl’s own nightmares, moody flyers, Viz comic, the Kray twins and much more. It’s often true that the pioneers of a scene end up getting pissed off when it goes mainstream, and in an article titled “Paradise Lost”, the Boy’s Own crew also reminisce about the halcyon days of clubbing before the riff raff started jumping on the bandwagon. Click on the title above to see scans of all the zine’s pages…. Andrew Weatherall was one of the greatest DJs of all time, and after his death in 2020, a group of fans created The Weatherdrive: a Google Drive folder containing hundreds of hours of his studio mixes, live recordings and radio shows. The complete collection of Boy’s Own fanzines was published in a book called “Boy’s Own, The Complete Fanzines 1986-92: Acid House Scrapes And Capers” but it’s been out of print for years and I’m not prepared to fork out a fortune for a second hand copy…. my box of 1980s fanzines flickr
