“Devious, Truculent, and Unreliable” - winged eagle tattoo design, based on Judge Weeks’ appraisal of Morrissey’s behaviour during The Smiths’ royalty trial. Printed on 300gsm recycled card stock.
I did it! I finally did it. I opened a proper website to showcase my fucking art.
JOHNTUCKER.CO.UK
Squarespace, obviously.
In other news:
- My new zine, Handsome Devil Tattoos - a collection of Smiths/Morrissey themed tattoo designs (that the above is taken from; there’s a real nice photo of it in a frame on the site in the gallery!) is going to be available this week! There’s a hundred copies and I’m offering custom Smiths tattoos on the inside of it.
If you happen to work for the Swansea NHS Laboratory Medicine service: Halloween night out is back. Details to follow. If you don't: Stranger Things was good, wasn't it?
Coming soon: "Handsome Devil Tattoos", volume one, a collection of Morrissey/Smiths themed tattoo ideas (see previous posts for examples). My first zine in a year and my first ever full colour, professionally-printed outing. As always, it will be available online for free, and in limited edition print copies. Look forward to it, and to the other things in your life that are good.
Morrissey tattoo design for an upcoming thing ("Vauxhall & I", 1994). Get this tattooed on your body for lifetime free zines and certified dipshit status
Trying to draw different poses and experiment a bit with shading so here’s a fifteen minute drawing of what I’ll do every goddamn Hallowe’en if I ever have a kid.
As I prepare to return to my university city (to run the Manchester 10k, since you ask) and also release my first zine in four years, I cannot help but think back on how I got into the foolhardy business of drawing things for free, printing them out on my own dime, and then giving them away for nothing, knowing they may well be glanced at and discarded (or, worse, not given a second look). It’s a peculiar drive, but luckily, I can pinpoint exactly where I got it from.
It has been a long time - almost six years - since I submitted my last piece of work to PULP Magazine, the student magazine run by Manchester Metropolitan University students. However, I think about it often. I look back on my time as a PULP Magazine staffer (credited solely as “writer”) with great fondness, as it allowed for some of the best experiences of my young life; I am also perpetually miffed that it no longer exists in the form I knew it, and likely never will again.
PULP - apparently an acronym of Polytechnic University Literary Publication (“polytechnic” was the term given to “new” universities before they could call themselves universities in 1992) - began in the 1970s, when MMU was Manchester Polytechnic. It took many forms, adapting to fit the student body and the small groups of peculiar souls who assumed its stewardship, and enjoyed success at the student Pulitzer’s, the Guardian Student Media Awards (best publication, 1985, for Phil Korbel’s squad). It was funded by MMUnion, the university’s student union, and remained editorially independent of same, run by a student on a sabbatical (much like other student union positions were). It carried on in this manner until 2010, when MMUnion decided it was no longer worth the effort and killed it stone dead mid-run, citing budget cuts (despite the fact that PULP broke even or turned a small profit on ad revenue, every year it existed, until the union took over the advertising arm in 2009/10). Student Direct took it on as a subsidiary some time later, and - besides a laudable but abortive 2011 attempt by a group of students to bring it back in house - it has, to my knowledge, remained a University of Manchester property ever since. Which is to say, it operates as their main paper does - with a larger editorial team, a larger budget, and a very different ethos to the PULP Magazine I knew in 2008/09. God bless them for keeping its rich legacy alive when my alma mater decided to garotte it in a railway siding and leave it for dead, but... it ain’t PULP, you know what I mean?
Which is a genuine shame, as 2008/09 was probably one of the best years of my entire life, and PULP Magazine - as it was then - was a huge reason why. My best friend Paul and I arrived in Manchester for university in the same year, and decided that - of all the societies on offer (circus skills, pole dancing, etc.), and all the ways to get involved in our new city - the magazine could be for us, not knowing quite how right we were. We toddled along to a meeting (which we nearly missed) to see if maybe we could possibly help out if that’s alright thanks. Before we knew it, our university studies (or at least my university studies) largely took a back seat in favour of working for PULP Magazine. Run by a charming and anxious soul whose general physical wellbeing seemed inextricably linked to the magazine’s success, PULP was run on virtually nothing besides the force of her personality, a DIY spirit, and the sheer white heat that was generated at every editorial meeting by our steadfast minority (to contextualise how small the team was - if the student body was a UK parliamentary constituency and a candidate received only the votes of the entire PULP staff of 2008/09, not only would they lose their deposit, but they would likely both hang and shoot themselves in quick succession).
This is not to say that PULP Magazine was this perfect bastion of radical student journalism; it could be hit-and-miss, and - besides the occasional Timehop post of a memorable moment, or the odd rant about Brian Harvey - I don’t think any ex-PULP staff actively point people to their work of the time, still proud of the content of their sophomore efforts. The actual product itself has, at least to me, over time, become secondary to the experience that PULP allowed. If it wasn’t for PULP Magazine, my first year of university would have been far poorer an experience, I would have felt far less like a participant in my new city, and I would have learned a lot less about what can be done with virtually nothing if you surround yourself with good people who give a shit, and give a shit hard. PULP Magazine was understaffed, under-resourced, and was practically a photocopied zine compared to the slick operational prowess and superior budget of University of Manchester’s Student Direct - but it was what it was, and we could either wait for better things to simply turn up (they never did), or we could do them ourselves. We almost always did them ourselves, and thank fuck we did, because even though it could be stressful, and difficult, and tiring, I don’t think anything I’ve ever done has felt as rewarding as working on PULP. We were not the best people for any of the jobs we assumed, but if not us, then who? Paul and I would stay awake until the early hours in his halls room (mine was too messy for anything but sleeping in) or conversing on the internal phones, often planning or working on future content for the magazine. We would stay in the PULP office for hours after university, hashing out the trajectory of future editions and making wild pitches to our perpetually enthused, starry-eyed editor, before then having to go away and figure out how we would do such things. I would quit my job, happily, for any job that made me feel this way again.
Woodpigeon, performing in our conference room, 2009, because we asked them to. Visible at 2:55 - virtually the entire PULP Magazine editorial team, including a younger and slightly fatter John Tucker.
This all culminated in the autumn of 2009, when some of the core team (and myself) were invited to the Guardian Student Media Awards in London; Paul and I were invited on the ticket of Best Website (the magazine received two nominations that year, the other for its stellar art direction). The category came around, and PULP Magazine was announced as the 1st runner up. Paul and I practically stomped our way to the stage, stayed up there far too long, and returned to our elated table with a red envelope. The winner was then announced (Warwick, if I remember correctly), and if ever there was a better image that represented PULP Magazine’s driving ethos, it was our “web team” (Paul and I, though the actual website was Paul’s work alone) walking off the stage to be replaced with the winning web team, which comprised no less than a dozen people. Warwick’s website had archives going back years; PULP’s website had yet to see a birthday.
Having claimed a significant win at a prestigious award show, it was a terrible shame to hear - less than six months later - that MMUnion was closing PULP indefinitely, citing budget as the reason. As we all know, if anything is ever cut for budgetary concerns, it seldom comes back; the union is unlikely to find £20,000 lying around. And if they do, they’re unlikely to want to spend it on something like a student magazine, despite MMU now being the largest university in the world, to my knowledge, without an official student paper. That money seemed earmarked for a redress of the union’s comically deserted bar (that the perennially understaffed PULP Magazine was axed in favour of the creation of a perennially underpatronised bar was no small irony).
PULP’s closure never directly affected me - it would never have felt right to return, as lightning seldom strikes twice and my degree actually started mattering in the years after I departed the magazine’s creative team. I had a full, rich experience with PULP. The thing that continues to burn after all these years, and the reason I still hate MMUnion as much today (some three years after I left the university) as I did in 2010 is that nobody else is going to get that opportunity ever again.
And perhaps, for the most part, they didn’t want or need that opportunity; PULP’s 2008/09 team wasn’t small due to Bullingdon-esque selection criteria; if you wanted to work for PULP, you could, and you most likely did. Tens of thousands didn’t, nor did they seem to want to. Maybe that’s why they chose to kill it. But I often wonder what a 2015 John Tucker would do upon arrival at Manchester Metropolitan University at the age of 20. I’m sure such a person exists. He arrives in his ill-fitting clothes, looking like a prototype Ignatius J. Reilly, having only laid down the first inch of garbage on his halls floor, and wonders what Manchester is, or should be to him. Perhaps he dabbled in writing/art/photography/whatever a little bit but was dismissive of it, convinced that while somebody out there could do it better, he was best off keeping his work to himself. He isn’t sporty, so won’t be joining in the games of soggy biscuit on the rugby team tours, and none of the other societies really appeal either. ‘Now what’, he wonders. I wondered that. As did all the other people that, for whatever reason, kept showing up to editorial meetings no matter how much extra work you would walk out with.
Such people are tailor-made for something like PULP - a blank slate to make into what they see fit, with no selection committee or exclusion. An honest-to-goodness labour of love that is precisely as good or as ambitious as you make it. And from that, they can springboard into endless other avenues. Or at least they could, if the university thought it at all worthwhile to provide a platform for them. And this is coming from a biomedical scientist, for whom PULP was a diversion - a diversion that consumed the entirety of my energy and attention for a full year, but a diversion nonetheless. Its closure seems particularly rancid when you consider how proud MMU is of its prestigious art school, and the thousands of students who now turn up every year to find no official, university-sponsored outlet for their work.
I would hope that 2015 John Tucker would find a zine or something else to do; I hope he would maybe create something himself, though I doubt he would. I wouldn’t have - PULP Magazine gave me that. I don’t know what 2015 John does instead - he still has a good time, I’m sure. He will probably get involved in something that ensnares his interest (particularly if he crosses paths with 2015 Paul, whose 2008-2012 counterpart was responsible for approximately 98% of the enjoyment I had at university) but honestly, he doesn’t know what he’s missing.
In his sign-off (since removed, leaving PULP Magazine’s online presence largely as it was when we all signed off in 2009), Paul wrote something that I come back to often:
If you want my honest opinion, I’d suggest you get together with a few mates, come up with some ideas, and start your own website or zine. Sure, Manchester’s got plenty, but you can never have too much creativity. If you like, get involved with one of the existing ones you find at Piccadilly Records or Trof. But have a bash at starting your own. It’ll make you feel incredible. It’ll piss you off at times, and wear you out. But I promise it’ll be worth it.
So I’m sorry there’s no PULP any more. But it’s not my fault. Just take my advice and go and make something amazing. Do it today. If you don’t do it, no one else will. And that’s how things like PULP wither and die.
On that note, I’m going to bed. I’m going to Manchester tomorrow (well, later this morning), where I’ll see Paul, run around my favourite city, and then print something I made before giving it away for nothing. It’ll be good to go back.
From the archives, my 2009 PULP Magazine piece on Brian Harvey running himself over with his own car. This was, apparently, one of the most frequent search terms that drove traffic to PULP Magazine in the years after it was folded up and destroyed by Manchester Metropolitan University.
Small Mint-Chicksy Ruban Nielson piece, as I’ve been obsessed lately with both The Mint Chicks and the excellent Pantograph Punch oral history of same, the excellent “Start Your Own Fucking Band”.
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