Chris Donald Remembers The VIZ Comic and Meeting The Uk’s First Surrealist Comedian At The Globe Gallery North Shields
peep:
This is an interview for Peep Magazine. We’re joined with the original editor Chris Donald the Viz, and we’ve finally caught up with him at the Globe Gallery in North Shields. Chris, I finally meet you. I’ve been looking at the Viz comic for some years now back in the day, so how’s things.
Chris Donald:
Not too bad. I’ve not had anything to do with the alternative comic now since about 1999 – 2000. So it’s been 24, 25 years since I did all that, which is a bit strange, and I’ve been mooching around doing work in a bookshop. I worked for BBC Radio Newcastle for a while and that’s about all. I keep asking at ASDA if they’ll let me round up the trolleys in the car park and I’ll be a trolley cowboy. Maybe they’re looking for somebody younger, or I’m not sure.
peep:
Or, someone with a bit less experience and not Chris Donald the Viz editior
Chris Donald The viz
That’s it Yeah, because they think oh, you’re overqualified, you’re going to want more, you’re going to move on.
peep:
Am I right in thinking Chris Donald the Viz worked at Barter Books.
Chris Donald:
That’s right. Yes, I was at Barter Books from about 2000 until 2004 – 2005, something like that about five years working on and off. Started off just as a part-time salesperson on the counter and stocking the shelves, and I ended up as assistant manager, which wasn’t nearly as much fun as just being a staff member.
peep:
A bit too much admin for you maybe.
Chris Donald the Viz
Well, not the admin so much. Just the kind of the politics of having to be the boss and so people aren’t. You know, you can’t be, you can’t skive, basically, and if you see somebody skiving you have to tell them to stop skiving.
peep:
Not the kind of role for you.
Chris Donald the Viz
Yeah, of course Not the kind of role for everyone, is it?
peep:
How do you feel when people talk about the Viz? Are you sick of hearing it or do you like thinking back? Do you like having a bit of ‘memory lane’ about the Newcastle Viz comic?
Chris Donald:
No, I like a bit of nostalgia. I’m not so keen when you see people sometimes come up and say, oh yeah, I used to buy the Viz and talk about it very much in the past tense, because I mean, obviously to them it is in the past tense and to me, it’s in the past tense, but it’s still very much published. It’s still a successful magazine. It still comes out every, I think it’s 10 times a year now, and they still do books, and it’s the people that I work with and um, who I took on in the first place, who are now running it. It’s doing very well. But yeah.
Chris Donald:
The demographic of the audience is like older now, because I remember at the start we would be selling the comic to kids in record shops and they would be14, 15, 16, and they thought it was really risky and cutting edge.
Chris Donald:
And then it got to a stage where you do book signings on Northumberland Street Newcastle and instead of the kids it was their parents coming in asking you to sign it for their kids for Christmas, and so suddenly, it had become like a legitimate thing that parents would give to their kids. I thought the time I thought, oh, that’s significant. I’ll have to apologise as my voice squeaks. A bridge fell out my mouth, a tooth, a crown, so I’m going to do a bit of a squeak. I just noticed it there, yeah, but he realised it had gone. It had gone legitimate and it didn’t have that kind of, it wasn’t the you know, it was like legalised and people. It wasn’t quite as exciting. Basically, we had a million people buying it in them days, back in the day, and they’re all. They were 20, 25 then and they’re now 55, 60, like me.
peep:
Yeah, because I’ve done a bit of research on it. When the Viz actually sold, did a guy called James Brown buy the magazine?
Chris Donald:
Yes, james Brown. He used to do a magazine in Leeds I think it was called Attack on Bazaar or something like that. It was a music fanzine and he would send me copies of his magazine and he would send me copies of his magazine and I would send him copies of the VIz Comic. That was in the very early days when we were just DIY, and he went on to work for the NME magazine. He’s a bit of a pushy tw*t ! . He ended up with his own publishing company, because he got into the sort of the london 1980s cocaine businessman scene and I’m not suggesting for one moment that he took ‘Gear’, but he bloody did, because I went on holiday with him once.
Chris Donald: 4:33
Well, we went to watch a cricket match in Barbados, me and the Viz publisher, john Brown, and we got to the hotel and he booked a room. The island was full because of the cricket being on, and the guy on the counter says “I’m sorry, but your room’s taken. You’ve already taken it, you’ve checked in. And John said well, I haven’t checked in.
Chris Donald:
“We are a twin room under the name of Jay Brown. He said no, well, there’s a Jay Brown that’s just checked in and got that room and I said to John, as a joke they sent us to the bar. And I said to John I said I bet it’s the other Jay Brown. I know James Brown. And we walked through the bar and sitting in the bar was James Brown and I said you fucking bastard, you’ve got our room, but no, on that holiday he didn’t out but smoke, dope and misbehave. He was terrible.
peep:
I have heard a little rumour about James Brown, but I don’t know if it’s true. I read a few years ago that James Brown I can’t think of the magazine, but I think you may have touched on it but before , before he put it out, he grossed more than a million quid in ad sales in the first week.
Chris Donald:
He was very, very much the talk of the town in publishing. Anything he touched would turn to gold. And he did. I think it was LOADED magazine that he was involved with. That was very well known ‘Lads Mags’, and all that. He then went kind of haywire. He’d come up with a really weird magazine and he invited me down to London. He says I’m having a secret meeting to introduce my new magazine and i’m going to show it to people top secret, you don’t tell anyone. And he produced this magazine with a lion on the cover and basically it was National Geographic. He didn’t realise there was already a magazine full of things about animals and that geography. So that didn’t work very well. But I think it was the Gear that had made him think that was going to work. I don’t know. I mean he should have stuck to football, and that you know, because he was good at football and music.
peep:
Well done, james Brown. I know we haven’t met, but if you want to have a chat with peep magazine, I’d be more than happy to have a chat with you.
Chris Donald:
I’ve not seen him for a while now.
peep:
Is it true that your influencers were Monty Python and Spike Milligan?
Chris Donald:
Well, yeah, the Goons and Monty Python.
Chris Donald:
When we were kids my dad had some Goons records which we would listen to, so we were influenced by the Goons and I think we had a Goons book. And then when we started using a record library around the corner, we’d take out Monty Python albums, because we didn’t have a telly when we were kids because my dad couldn’t afford it or he thought it was bad for you or something, but for a long time, so we didn’t see Monty Python all the time. But, yeah, Monty Python, the Goons and Tintin comics. I never subscribed to the Beano and the Dandy and that, because if you were a fan of something like that, you’d be too kind of intimately, you know, knowledgeable and enthusiastic about it. My view was always a kind of distant one and just sort of, I imagine the Beano is like this and the Dandy’s like that, and that’s how you can take the piss out of something, if you’ve only got a vague idea.
peep:
I take it that you used to do some of the illustrations.
Chris Donald the Viz
In the comic? Yeah, well, I did about half of them to start with. I’m not very good at cartoons. Well, I took people on who were better illustrators, the likes of Simon Thorpe and Davy Jones who’s here actually tonight – who are just geniuses, when it comes to drawing stuff. Graham Durie as well. He came on in leaps and bounds the lad from Nottingham. So basically, I was writing and editing more writing the news stories, things like that. We wrote cartoons as a group, just sitting around a table and I would hold the pen and people would chuck ideas in, people would take offence if you didn’t write their idea down. So you had to develop the art of pretending to write down somebody’s idea. But that’s the subtleties of editing.
peep:
I’ve always wanted to ask you were you ever a fan of 2000 AD? Because I used to illustrate years ago and I always wanted to draw for 2000 AD and I wanted to ask you what was your take on 2000 AD?
Chris Donald the viz
The early stuff well, I had a newspaper round, so I read all sorts of stuff. And 2000 AD I didn’t like American sort of comics. I didn’t like the, what’s it called, the, the Freak Brothers and stuff like that. I found that a little bit. But no, 2000 AD. I was a fan of Dan Dare and stuff like that in the past, and the Eagle and that was just carrying on from that and it seemed fine and I liked it. My brother was more of a comic aficionado than me, Simon Donald, but no, I was OK with 2000 AD.
peep:
And then I’ve also got to ask, because we’ve interviewed him. Did you ever cross paths with or feature in the Viz magazine ‘The Hard’ ‘Felt Nowt’. peep actually Yeah, him and he gave us an exclusive. He went, I wouldn’t say underground, but he moved away from Newcastle because he used to do the Channel 4 ‘The Tube’. I think he went to Lincoln. He moved away from Newcastle.
Chris Donald the Viz
I think he went to Lincoln. He, yeah, the two guys who are here tonight, Arthur ‘Two Stroke’ and Andy Pop. They set- up a record label in 1978, 79 and they brought out his album, ‘Anna Ford’s Bum’. I knew him through them, yeah, when he was ‘Wavis O’ Shave’, because he kept changing his name. And you know, he kept saying what is his real name? What is his real name? Oh, it’s ‘Rod Stewart’. Just changed all the time.
Chris Donald the Viz
But me and Simon Donald, actually, he appeared on the back cover of Issue 10. We needed to take a photograph of him as ‘The Hard’ because he was getting quite well known from ‘The Tube’. So we went to take a photo and, um, he lived in a house in south Shields, Stoddart street, and we turned up at his door of his house and, um, his mother opened the door, and she was this old lady and she says oh, there’s a couple of lads here to see you. And she went at the kitchen to make a cup of tea and we sat in the front room with him. He’s a very intelligent bloke, and he can be very sort of, you know, talkative, and all that. But he’s also strange, very strange.
Chris Donald:
He was obsessed with the Greek God Pan, for some reason, who’s half man and half goat, and he says – “The other night the Greek god Pan visited the house and his mam comes in with a trolley with tea on it and biscuits and she says mam. He said mam, what was it like when the Greek god Pan comes through that wall, right by the window? And she says yes, that’s right, he comes through the wall and we’re just oh fucking hell Bad. But I think it was his ma’am’s coping mechanism just to say, yeah, the Greek god Pan came through that wall.
peep:
I think. Well, we’ve done two interviews with him now and I marketed it as the first UK surrealist comedian.
Chris Donald:
Yeah, I mean, he’s brilliant at what he does. He’s like a band who every now and then, they get onto something really good, but then they’ll do, like, you know, three not-that-good albums, but I don’t know what he does for the rest of his life. He was convinced that the lost city of Atlantis was somewhere underneath Yorkshire or something at one point, and he seems to go through phases of being interested in different things. I still hear from him sometimes. I’m not. I’ll see their whatsapp or something. I’ll just get something from ‘Fofo Spearjig’.
peep:
So Big Up the Hard, ‘FELT NOWT’. I didn’t realise you were kind of a Patreon of the Globe Gallery. So how did that come about Chris? Was this in the Viz comic times?
Chris Donald:
yeah, Rashida, who runs the Globe Gallery, she met Colin, who’s a viz photographer. He was our photographer. Well, he didn’t work for us. Well, he did work for us, but only on Sundays when we were doing the Viz photo stories and we’d have to go around getting people to star in them and what we generally did was went to a pub and said to whoever was in the pub on the bar can you find us three women or two blokes and one woman. Blokes with different colour hair, so they would look different, and can they be at the pub at like 11 o’clock on Sunday and we’ll pick them up and do the photo story.
Chris Donald:
So they would find students, usually who were about the right age. And one day we were struggling, and we went to the Barley Moe and the barmaid agreed to do a photo story, which was Rashida, so Colin took the photographs and she was in the story and they seemed to click a little bit, and next thing you know, they were going out and then they got married. So she decided that she wanted to open a Gallery in North Shields, and I borrowed her some money or or I sponsored it or something, and we agreed to do the first exhibition with his artwork, so that’s just been going ever since.
peep:
I think we’ve got a mutual friend as well, because didn’t you have something to do with the Trent House with Tom Caulker?
Chris Donald:
Yeah, Tom Caulker. Well, there was three Caulkers that I knew. There was Steve Corker, porker Corker. I shared a flat with him for a couple of years. Tom Caulker ‘Talker Caulker’ and Clive Caulker who was ‘Walker Caulker’ , because he just walks the streets. He goes for walks a lot, but yeah, Tom Caulker was a big part of this, because he was incredibly enthusiastic about things, the way he is and yeah, he would sell it in the pub and stuff like that. Happy days. They were at the Trent House about 1984 or 85.
peep:
Are you still doing or wanting to do your Soul radio show. Is it the Soul Comeback?
Chris Donald:
The Imaginary Soul Club. Well, I did. I used to listen to this. I’d be in the car a lot on a Sunday or a Saturday when the BBC Newcastle Soul programme was on and the guy who had done it. I don’t know who it was had stopped doing it and they had a woman doing it, Sue Sweeney, and she wasn’t very good, to be honest, but they only rotated about 200 records, I think it was.
Chris Donald:
And I knew the guy who ran BBC Newcastle because he used to work for Five Live and he’d interviewed me once, so I stayed in touch with him, because we had a mutual interest in a band from Birmingham called ‘The Bureau’.
Chris Donald:
I used to keep sending him messages saying that your soul programme’s were crap !, you want to do this, you want to do it like that. And eventually he just said, do you want to do it? And I went, ooh God, that’s not what I meant. And he said, well, give it a try. So I did it for BBC Newcastle for a few years, probably three, three and a half years. But then Covid came along, and I started off with a playlist of 200. I kept adding to it until it got up to 2,000 and stuff. I had to do all the paperwork myself, though, just to play a record that’s not on their playlist. You’ve got to fill in forms and stuff. But I did all that, I went through all the hoops for them, but nobody listened to it.
Chris Donald:
Basically, the viewing figures were quite low because radio is just on the way out. And also a friend of mine was stopped in the street by the people who would do the survey, because they work out your listenership just by asking random people what they listen to. Someone I know was stopped in the street and said would you fill in a form for a couple of weeks saying what you listen to on the radio? And they said oh yeah. I’ll take another one and I’ll get my son to do it. And um, and they said to me I was given two radjar forms to fill in, so I’ll be saying I listen to your program every week. And um, me listenership for that month or for that quarter went up from zero, which it normally was, to 35 000 because, because two people were filling in the form. But then the following quarter it went back down to zero. So anyway, radio the BBC local radio has changed. Now they don’t have locally produced stuff in the evening.
Chris Donald:
People don’t listen anymore. I did it on Nova Radio for a while. It used to be NE1, and I was doing it for now, but Nova’s in a state of disarray. They’re not on FM and they’re not on DAB anymore. The app isn’t available on Apple anymore. It’s not very well run sort of thing, and I had 12 listeners and I’m sorry to let them down, but I stopped doing it earlier this year.
peep:
Before I forget, chris, just the last question on the viz. I was down. It was about two years ago. I was down at the, do you know, on the Newcastle Quayside, where back in the day they used to have stalls and all that and you could buy magazines and you could buy records. It’s starting to pick up again now, but I haven’t been for years. Such a strange thing happened. I was just browsing the comics and you know, looking at the old 2000 AD comics and what not, and there happened to be a absolutely monstrous collection of Viz comics, there would have to have been hundreds in a crate, and I was just looking through them and the guy says are you interested? I was like, oh no, mate, I’m just having a look. As soon as I said this, someone appeared behind us and I’m thinking have you got a son?
Chris Donald the Viz
Yeah, I have. Yeah, I’ve got two sons.
peep:
Right. So because what struck us was someone appeared behind us and he kind of looked like you. He said how much for the lot? The guy said about £1,000 or something and the person just paid and took the lot.
Chris Donald the Viz
My kids wouldn’t buy this.
peep:
I’m just thinking that he looked so much like you. It was such a surreal moment.
Chris Donald:
I might have a double going round, or maybe I’m lying, and I’m just going round buying up second hand Viz Comics In order to bump the prices up? You know I have actually bought stuff. We did a tea towel with an issue. It would be around about 1984, 85, we printed a tea towel. It was when we did our VIZ 25th issue, we called it the 25th anniversary tea towel and it had all posters, cartoons on it, the characters, and sold them by mail order in the comic and that was all.
Chris Donald:
And then years later, around 2000, after I’d finished. I thought I’ve got a copy of everything, but I haven’t got that tea towel, never thought to keep one, and so, I went online and I found the one for sale on eBay and I bought it. I paid about £125 quid for it and it arrived in an envelope. The envelope the guy had received it in and it was his name and address on it, handwritten by me ( Chris Donald the Viz ) in my writing. So he bought it and kept it all that time, and then sold it back to me for £125 quid.
peep:
Really appreciate you taking the time out, because I know there’s a lot of people here who want to have a chat with you. Can I just ask what plans have you got for the future and what have you got planned?
Chris Donald:
The next thing I was thinking of was a concert poster. No, don’t worry about that, keeping the pink in concert. Now, me and my brother started doing a show called Donald Trump’s. We did that just before COVID and it was getting quite popular. We had 220 people come to see us at the stand. It was like a cross between stand-up and a game show, and that was good fun. I enjoyed it. It was getting very, very popular, and then we’ve just stopped doing that. So I’d like to look into doing that again. Maybe it’s me and Simon just doing some stuff. Well, he’s meant to be here. Yeah, I haven’t had a chance to talk to him yet.
peep:
I’ve completely forgot about your post cards exhibition here at The Globe Gallery. do you want to go through these, like, very quickly, like a quick fire? Well. If you want to yeah. . yeah, mate, definitely I can do it in the order.
Chris Donald:
peep:
Wow. Next one is Please Don’t Come to Darres Hall.
Chris Donald:
Yes, that’s an interesting ‘Please that’s my favourite one Darras actually because Darres Hall did have a station, but it was only open for 16 years, from like about 19 it was 1913 to 1929. But nobody used it because they all had cars, because it’s such a posh estate. So I’ve basically done a poster, an imaginary poster that the railway would have printed, just to tell people not to come to Darys Hall because the station is closed and basically they’re not welcome because they would be lowering the tone if they came.
peep:
Football specials having a weird day of travel by train. a
Chris Donald:
Yeah, the posters for football excursions they used to call them were a bit dull and I just fancied it. I like drawing trains because I’m a big train fan, but I thought I remembered when I was a kid in the 70s, going to football and being a train spotter, the football special trains would be all old, knackered carriages and that because they knew there was going to be hooligans breaking them up and there would be like gangs of kids roaming around trying to attack the away supporters and everything and put barking dogs. So I thought I’d try and capture that in one picture. And and the long-benten clockwork graffiti. That’s authentic. It was at Four Lane Ends Metro Station in 1980, and I’ve took it off a photograph because the long-benten clockwork were a gang or it was one bloke with a can of spray paint anyway, and I always used to be a fan of the long-benten clockwork. That’s brilliant that.
peep:
Have you actually drawn them, Chris?
Chris Donald:
It’s a combination, it’s a mixture of all sorts of things. It’s all done in Photoshop, but I have drawn it all with the computer, but using photographs of. It’s basically a jigsaw of millions of different photographs and then I draw over the top of them, Absolutely brilliant that Cars no way.
peep:
Cause, yeah, cause, no way, not in Whitley Bay. …
Chris Donald:
Whitley Bay to see if I could think of a poster for there. And they’ve got this new cycle path. And I hate cyclists me, no, I don’t, you know, they keep knocking you over, and well, they don’t knock you over. They keep knocking you over well, they don’t knock you over. But they’ve got their new own pink road in Whitley Bay now and apparently it’s been a bit controversial. So I thought I’ll utilise that controversy. I just wanted to do a Tour de France style poster and I thought I can combine a touristy poster for Whitley Bay and a Tour de France poster by making it about cyclists lovely, lovely, and I’m really interested in this one.
peep:
This is Get to Gateshead by train. Get Carter with. He ends up throwing him off the car park, doesn’t he?
Chris Donald:
one. Get Get Get Get Get I This This, that’s him out of Coronation Street who was trying to open a restaurant at the top of the car park.
peep:
Oh, cliff as well, by the way, wasn’t he? ‘
Chris Donald:
Yeah Well, he had to say Cliff. Yeah, that’s Cliff Mabumbi or something. Yeah Well, I was interested in Get Carter because when I was 11, our next-door neighbour was called Jolly Jim Faulkner and he was involved in the gaming industry and he would have fruit machines delivered to his front door and stuff. My dad didn’t like him, didn’t trust him as far as he could spit, but he had a red Jaguar, fantastic red Jaguar, and the people from the Get Carter film crew asked him if they could use his as a working model in the filming, because the one they had was like a write off so they could push it in the river and everything. So it’s our next door neighbours car that appears in the film. So I thought I’ll do a get to gate a poster for Gateshead and it gives us an excuse to draw a train, the Delta, because I was a train spotter and I also drew the carport. That was easy because it’s all straight lines. I absolutely love that train spotter and I also drew the car park.
peep:
Mess about at Morpeth.
Chris Donald:
It’s a drawing I did the drawings of the street and that and the clock tower, but I’ve copied the main figures, or at least three of them, from a famous, well-known Whitley bay poster called ‘Life is Gay at Whitley Bay’, where those people are like in a sort of pleasure boat and they’re just having fun at Whitley Bay, and I’ve took them and put them on old gate in Morpeth or in the market square, and in a life raft instead of a pleasure boat, because Morpeth was always flooding, or it used to be, so the idea is that, you can have fun in Morpeth while it’s flooding. The people of Morpeth will probably not like it, but they’ve got a good cheese shop there though that I can highly recommend. It’s called the Cheese Shop, but it’s just down that street, just behind there, I think.
peep:
The imaginative, ‘The cheese shop’, and we have Viralanda. Dramatic Kingdom of Doudi Drav.
Chris Donald:
Viralanda is as opposed to Vindalanda, or is it Vindaloo Vindalanda? Is that the name of the Roman fort in Walls End? I think it is Vindalanda. Is that the name of the Roman fort in Wall’s End? I think it is Vindolanda. Yeah, it’s a Roman fort anyway in Wall’s End and I changed it to Viralanda because there’s loads of railway posters promoting Northumberland and they always have pictures of the Roman wall on and I thought it would be a bit more exciting and a bit more relevant today if it had Vera on it, because you see Northumberland and the backdrop in Vera is always beautiful scenery in Northumberland and that.
Chris Donald the viz
So I thought let’s get her in and let’s use a little bit of artistic imagination and put Holy Island Castle on the Roman wall instead of stuck out in the middle of nowhere on the sea. I think there’s Warkworth Castle and Bamburgh Castle. They’re all on the Roman wall instead of stuck out in the middle of nowhere on the sea. I think that’s there’s Warkworth Castle and Bamburgh Castle. They’re all on the Roman wall. Now I’m regretting. I was just saying to my wife this morning I should have put the Tyne Bridge and the Sage at Gateshead in there as well. I might add them later to later editions of the poster.
peep:
Chris, thank you so much. You’ve been more than kind to show us round and show us your work and I think the work is absolutely brilliant and I wish you all the best in the future. Thanks a lot and thanks for your time cheers. Chris, thank you
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