Badpress was my investigative zine in Manchester. It plays a prominent role in Bob Dickinson's Imprinting The Sticks: The Alternative Press Beyond London (Arena, 1997) - far more prominence than it deserved - but the interview conducted in 1995 does tell the story. In my own goofy words.
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A Retch in the Rain
Thanks to Bob Dickson for permission to use the following extract.
Sarah Champion was a 'catalyst' behind a very different publication that began appearing in 1993 [sic]: Badpress. Written and designed by Andrew Orlowski, Badpress contained no music coverage, celebrated no 'dance culture'. Instead it published investigative news (during a period when City Life had dropped its regular news coverage), within a very unusual, but simple format - a single sheet of paper folded into a concertina. Orlowski had come to Manchester in 1984 from Northallerton, Yorkshire, where he had worked on a 'subversive' school magazine, Within These Walls, and a fanzine with the horrific name of 'Paradise Demise'. He had also been a buyer of City Fun. He subsequently became a student at Manchester University, and after graduating, took a course in computer programming. By the early 1990s, he was a programmer in Altrincham, 'and I found that a lot less creative than I'd expected, and this being my first proper job I soon got disillusioned...'
Orlowski wrote reviews for City Life from 1988. 'When I first came here it did have quite a mystique,' he says:
"I thought very highly of it, the investigative journalism and the quality of the pop features seemed to speak with a very intelligent voice... [But] I guess there came a point, and I was quite conscious of it, where I felt, 'I can't consume this stuff, I've got to write something back'. Now at this time, Manchester had an Olympic bid, all the alternative papers had dosed, I had actually no idea I wanted to start a newspaper - I mean Badpress wasn't particularly newsy, it was consciously obscene, the first issue ... it was like retching, you had to get something out. It was written after meeting up with an old friend on a Thursday evening, so most of it was written on the Friday morning, and knocked out on somebody's laptop copier Saturday morning. This was when I was off work, by the way - I took a lot of time off work. This occasion I was actually genuinely ill, I think, with flu. Oh, no - the flu came from giving it out on the Saturday night in the rain."
The 'retch' of the first Badpress led to a more considered approach to the issues which followed:
"It was really exhilarating just to have done something. And having done the first one, I had to follow it up with something. I mean a lot of it was immense curiosity. I wasn't involved with the city's politics at all. Really it was to quench my own curiosity that I started to look into things ..."
Badpress specialized in undermining the 'hype' behind Manchester's high-profile, media-friendly schemes such as Metrolink, the new tram system, running through the city centre on rails which, during 1993 and 1994, were constantly in need of expensive repair - the story was later picked up by City Life and the Manchester Evening News. Badpress No.2 also castigated the Manchester Festival of Arts and TV, to which Badpress applied the acronym'FAT':
This year's FAT was better organised than before, and benefited from 'an abundance of enthusiastic TV attention other festivals can only dream about. But the content was as ever. A weird paralysis seems to have overtaken most of Manchester's own critical voices; perhaps it's the proximity of the ludicrous Olympic bid. The more the mediocre and parochial are hyped, the further Manchester gets from any really international ambitions. And this year everything was wonderful.(9)
The impetus for this piece had come from a visit to a Chinese restaurant, where Orlowski had witnessed a group of festival organizers and media workers 'congratulating themselves on the event'.
Another story which Badpress latched onto early on in its career was Hulme City Challenge, the latest episode in the changing history of an area which had always stimulated the growth of the city's alternative press. Orlowski remembers:
A local paper, Area News, closed. It was closed coincidentally after it had given bad publicity to the Hulme City Challenge and it was "funded by the Council and founded by the same people ... I noticed the effect it [the story in Badpress] had on the way people discussed the Hulme debate. It probably introduced a third element into the way people in Hulme talked about politics there. 'Cause I mean I always thought it was very strange how Hulme community had an identity and was always gonna go its own way ... as soon as the City Challenge came along, that disintegrated very quickly ... I think after it came out people who you'd meet would say, 'How did that happen"
Badpress's coverage of Hulme City Challenge, beginning with 'There Goes The Neighbourhood' in issue 3 (21 November 1992), was to develop over subsequent issues. Says Orlowski:
"Within the space of about a month, I was spending all my time in research. And I started taking a weird professional pride in getting the research done properly. Again, I think one of the things with the second one was I'd started to get the council minutes ... if you looked through the small print, I mean it was mostly deadly dull, but I came across a story in which they'd wasted quite a lot of money on a scheme ... So I kind of found myself having to be a serious journalist, and enjoying it, and putting an enormous amount of energy in very quickly."
Badpress broke several boundaries which Manchester's alternative press had begun to assume were unassailable for several years. Format was considered as important as content, and the content was seriously investigative but humorously written and delivered. Badpress looked like it could have been filled with record reviews and opinions about Manchester dubs, but after grabbing your attention it hit you with serious stories, undermining the publicity and 'positive messages' which the redevelopment and relaunch of Manchester as a city during the early 1990s, has to such a great extent depended on. Orlowski admired Ed Glinert's investigative stories on City Life, but, according to Andrew, 'The pop kids just aren't interested in it. So you have to do it in a jokey way...'
In terms of format, Badpress was minimalist, a sort of 'microzine'. The first three issues consisted of two A4-sized sheets folded vertically, giving Badpress its characteristic 'flier' look. After issue four, Badpress was printed on one piece of A3, folded into a concertina.
Andrew recalls: "Actually I was quite pleased when The Guardian did their newspaper of the future - it was the same shape as Badpress".
This experimentation with simple paper-folding, as well as helping to simplify and minimalize the style of Badpress, expressed Orlowski's wish for a 'disposable' object:
"I really would love to have some paper which disintegrates within a few minutes of people getting hold of it. I didn't mind if people read it for five minutes and just chucked it away; I thought that was quite nice. It was just exhilarating to bombard people ... it looked a bit like a flier, and people thought they were getting a flier, and if people got some amusement out of it, or it made some slight impression for just five minutes, even a minute, I thought that was worth the effort. Basically I was just mad and very adolescent about it."
The minimalism was inseparable from the 'mad' tagging, the captions reading, 'Bitter and twisted!' (on the cover of Badpress No.2); the various 'bile' puns ('mobile', 'new bile', 'biling point') used under the title logo; the humour with which Badpress expressed a basic underlying anger. Other publications also experimented with 'microzine' approaches to concentration of format combined with disposability - during 1993 they included Spacestar (fromChorlton/Whalley Range) and Hungry and Homeless both consisting of a single sheet of A4 (printed, in the case of Hungry and Homeless, on one side only), and folded into eight, appearing as a tiny set of pages measuring approximately three by two inches. Hungry and Homeless, a zine which Orlowski admired, contained micro- interviews with musicians (one quotation long); micro-guides to places to go around Manchester; micro-reviews, and very, very smallcartoon strips. It was run by Mike Noon, ex-City Life writer, who also established the music fanzine Moral Sense, with which Homeless And Hungry was originally given away free.
Andrew Orlowski produced the first four issues of Badpress 'in very quick succession - about every two week intervals', and then came a three-month gap before issue five. Orlowski would print four hundred copies, which he believes readers very often reprinted. For issue five, he started printing Badpress at Salford University. 'There was a lot of mad adrenaline to the first four. But I wanted to do it monthly,' Orlowski says, 'I didn't want it to be less than'every month after that, at the very longest.' Issue four seems to have been a turning point; according to Orlowski:
"Badpress should never have really got past the fourth issue. And I think I was looking for a way out as well, still wanting to do something, hoping someone with more money and full-time would start something, an ongoing magazine which I would do stuff for, but that never happened ... It was a kind of conscious burden: 'If nobody else is going to do this, I'll have to do it."
With the production of Badpress becoming more of a duty, and the ongoing news stories still developing, Badpress No.5 looked at the fate of 436 terraced houses, part of the so called 'Tripe Colony' in Miles Platting, which had been declared 'unfit for habitation' by the council, engaged at that time in developing property relating to the Olympic bid nearby. Badpress changed its appearance for issue six - lifting the title page of Thomas Finzey's [sic Spence's] Pig's Meat, or Lessons for the Swinish Multitude, a seventeenth century weekly political satire which Orlowski had seen reproduced in an old issue of Mole Express. By this time he had met Mike Don, a colleague of whom had contributed a story to Badpress No.6. The old Manchester underground press was feeding back into its equivalent almost a quarter of a century after the counterculture had made its voice heard in Manchester.
But Orlowski was facing problems:
I decided to quit my job ... by the end of 1993 I thought my plan was to get a part-time job so I could do this [Badpress] and maybe do journalism to top things up. I thought, well, Badpress would come out than on a more regular basis. I got an offer to do regular work for Private Eye. And it was also, I was very aware of repeating myself in Badpress and I thought I didn't want to rant on about Hulme and Metrolink every week. I'm not a very good networker, I didn't really know what was happening in nightclubs, I kind of knew who was starting them and who was buying them, but that should have gone in some other magazine.
Orlowski moved to London, intending to continue with Badpress but lacking the time, on return visits to Manchester, to produce any issues subsequently. He denies Badpress has ceased publication, however:
Well, who says I've stopped? I've really wanted to do it and it's the thing I'm most proud of doing. By a long shot. And I'm always looking for ways to do it. Since I've decided to do this [freelance journalism] I've had a lot less money to do it. That said, the last Badpress was self-financing, from adverts.
Much of the impetus for Badpress parallels that which lay behind Debris during the 1980s - the personal fury of one editor/writer for the media, especially the local print media, of the day. But the formatting experiments used by publications like Badpress and Homeless and Hungry in attempting to insert themselves into the consciousness, by being cheap, or free, and 'disposable', but attention-grabbing, angry and funny simultaneously, resembled certain elements of the 1960s underground at its Pop Art best - Oz, in particular. (Another magazine which brings Oz to mind, but for different reasons, has been Headpress, the consciously shocking 'cultist' magazine from Stockport, run by David Kerekes and David Slater, dedicated to 'Bizarre Culture, Deviant Conceptions, Cinematic Extremes'.) Orlowski says that his distaste for mainstream journalism originates partially in the extent to which, in his opinion:
"People who write don't mull in introverted ways for ten years as they should. I'm not making any pretence to saying I wanted 'the people' to read this [Badpress]. It was obviously going to be middle class people who read this. But I think the problem the media has is that people don't have a clue. They start work on newspapers when they're very young. I think, you see you have a very different media now. A media that covers cultural issues. I mean newspapers never used to cover culture -now they cover nothing else. So you just have to find new ways of presenting culture, presenting your views differently, and get around that."
Orlowski's statement above strongly emphasizes the theme, picked up frequently in earlier chapters, of personal or communal isolation being important in the production of alternative publications. The isolation theme appears to have been as powerful an ingredient in the construction of the cultural intermediary involved in alternative publishing as the need to 'network' -and as we have seen, the very 'networks' that were operated by the community press in Manchester in the 1970s, and the music fanzines and related music industry in Manchester during the 1980s, obtained much of their original quality and ability to communicate through the extent to which they were consciously different, or 'outside' the mainstream. 'Isolation' and 'network' seem opposite terms, but the alternative press, and increasingly, the use of technology for alternative communication, have harnessed a plurality of isolated viewpoints to fire off new dialogues.
A portion of the book's family tree is here.[73kb JPG]
