Boys Own Special – Club Kings
Club Kings

The best fanzine ever, returns to clubland…

Back in the day, Boys Own ran the fucking show Acid House style. Farley. Weatherall. Rocky & Diesel. Mark Wilkinsoon. Dean Thatcher. Steven Hall. And Pete Heller. All young DJs bringing us banging tunes on the most cutting edge label the Uk had seen at the time. Parties, albums, singles, the energy, the madness. This is what London and a sleepy town called Colnbrook near Slough was all about back then. Boys Own events in stately homes, sticking two fingers up to everyone and then…the funniest home made fanzine that hit our shelves. Well., get ready for a beautiful book that will look lovely on your Cannabis table…so over to the crew…

“Every now and then dog-eared copies of the original Boy’s Own fanzines (and sadly some Jeckyl photocopied ones) appear on eBay, going for the sort of cash that makes  me wish I’d kept all those boxes of mags that collected dust or became roach material  at our old office over in Ladbroke Grove. The fact that people have looked after them for all this time – and that others who weren’t around then are willing to pay for  them 20 years later – really does surprise and delight me, but then I suppose when  you’re right in the middle of an event such as Acid House you really don’t see it’s significance until later, as you’re far too busy living the moment

Check….

“Terry, Cymon, Andy and all the original Boy’s Own gang, please forgive me for selling these. It is for a skint South London Knowledge boy, who will not be charging the fare if you ever get in my cab in the future.”  – this was a seller’s note on a recent eBay auction of Boy’s Own fanzines.

So on we go with the pioneers of where it all started…

“This book is a collection of all the fanzines in their original glory, untouched, full of  typos, bad ’80s terrace slang, strange political views, and pre lads’ mag stories and  articles that were robbed throughout the ’90s. Of course robbing is something we  at Boy’s Own knew about, and once again I doff my rare groove cap to the lads at  The End whose fantastic fanzine we drew “inspiration” from.  In these days of the internet and mass media, fanzine culture is long forgotten, but back in the day it was an important way to get across a view and culture that  the music and fashion press ignored totally. I really hope the older heads buying or  blagging this book will enjoy reading it today just as much as when they were skinny, long-haired kids sitting outside of the Café del Mar hoping to blag the cash for a bocadillo and a  cheeky half. And I hope the  younger readers will feel it’s  vibe and maybe get a little closer to understanding the original Acid House culture of Britain that Boy’s Own represented. It certainly has it’s flaws (don’t we all) and  has an arsey Cockney attitude that’s maybe out of tune with today’s clubbers, but it is what it is, and we are all proud of the fanzines, the book and the original readership who have  kept the faith with us.

Terry Farley.

A real coup. As some of the 1st to embrace the Balearic vibe, Farley and Weatherall were  quickly drafted in as supporting DJs in the early acid clubs Shoom and Spectrum. =  Inevitably, Boy’s Own drifted from dissecting the soulboy and rare groove scenes to documenting the nascent house culture.  For Steve Hall, then working at British Airways, acid house was the excuse he  needed to avoid settling down “It was massive for me. It changed everything.” Like  many, as the energy of the scene became clear, he jacked in his job and, putting his weight behind their parties and setting up the label, started making Boy’s Own a serious cultural force.  Embarking on their own Balearic adventures, Boy’s Own sowed the seeds for the rave movement that would follow. The fanzine became, as Weatherall calls it “the  village paper for the acid house scene,” musing on the slang, the records and the  styles of the moment. In the spring of ’88 it proudly declared itself, “The only fanzine  that gets right on one, matey.” In August that year, in a barn near Guildford owned by a hippie mate of Eckel, they threw the first official Boy’s Own party. As one of the era’s first outdoor dance event, it was the prototype home counties rave, complete  with the first “bouncy castle”. Though driven by disdain for the peacocks of the earlier ’80s, Boy’s Own  eventually found themselves members of London’s clubland elite. Like anyone on the vanguard, they grew protective, and some of the fanzines’ best bits are the rants at the “teds” who got it all ever so slightly wrong and, while screaming “acieed,” took the formula mainstream. The lads found common cause with a handful of clubs across the country, the so-called “Balearic Network”, and though Boy’s Own remained decisively London- based, in later issues the spirit of national ecstasy unity is clearly evident. And in  1990, with a deal inked with London Records, they cemented their cultural influence  and became a label too. Boy’s Own and Junior Boy’s Own forged a credible UK house sound, signed Underworld and the Chemical Brothers, and with consistently great music and Dave Little’s powerful graphics, set the standard for the flood of  independent dance labels that would follow.  So the mags gathered here are important. Boy’s Own represents a turning point in  British youth culture. Acid house, with its origins in the casual world of beach-loving,  E-smuggling hooligans, was when the suburbs stole the reins of popular culture from the middle class art school grads who’d been hanging on to them since the late ’60s.  As Hall puts it “All those people who had spent years grooming their career at The Face were surplus to requirements, out on their ear in favour of some scally football- hooligan types that had good drugs and knew where to get cool records.” Some of it has dated, some is far too earnest, but most of Boy’s Own remains wildly original and properly hilarious. It’s been impossible to date the issues very precisely.Indeed it took a big effort to even put them in the right order. There were only two  or three thousand copies of each printed at most so if you’ve got any originals you might one day see them in Sotheby’s next to a moth-eaten Beatles wig. What you’re about to read is as close to an acid house chronicle as you’ll find. It would be an exaggeration to say that Boy’s Own was always in the driving seat of acid house – in fact it was usually way over the limit – but it was definitely in the cockpit, observing from the front. We were part of that suburban soulboy scene, that’s where we all came from. And that went  off into New Romantics and we were all part of that  but based out in the suburbs. So we’d all meet at jazz-funk nights in Sutton, or the Belvedere in Ascot, which  had Sunday jazz-funk sessions. We were just part of the  south-west London suburban clubbing gang really.”

Steven Hall

Growing up in Slough there was the  soul scene, which I got into later than Terry and the  others. There were all these all-nighters going on in Slough Community Centre. We went to this Funky Fox night with Alan Sullivan DJing, Heatwave were playing I think. People giving it the big ‘un on the dancefloor. Loads of little firms. And some dancers who were incredible. Andrew Weatherall too – stupendous.It was that classic suburban thing of people meeting at the one decent clothes shop – Cassidy’s, this guy Johnny Rocca worked there. I met Terry there, and Gary Haisman, the guy who did the ‘Acieed’ record. Pre-Acid house we used to meet up every Friday at 9 o’clock and drop a tab of acid, which is where that post-punk compilation I did got its name from – 9 O’clock Drop. Then we’d head into town and go to the Beat Route or Mudd Club or something like that. No matter where you were or what you
were doing you had to drop your tab at 9 o’clock. We would go out with £10: £5 for the tab of acid, £5 to get in. We’d put a quid each in for the petrol in the car, a blue Cortina 1600 LS; from Windsor to the Mudd Club and back again and the petrol needle would be back where it started.

Cymon Eccles

It was a weird time in London clubs. We all got the hump that we’d go along to these things and they’d let four of us in but not all of us. We couldn’t go straight from football, we had to go home and get changed. It did piss us off. It seemed like the whole club scene was run by a St. Martin’s School clique. Ollie who ran the door at the Beat Route was Welsh, Chris Sullivan was Welsh, Chris Marney from Demob was Welsh! I didn’t mind the clothes they were wearing in these places, but it was the inconvenience of being told what to do in your city, by people who were… Welsh. I knew as much as they did, I knew loads about records, but I could only come in if I got changed. We hated that scenario.

Terry Farley

Graham Ball used to describe us as the footsoldiers. “We used to love all you lot, we’d never have got anywhere without the footsoldiers.” We
were the guys who queued up outside Le Beat Route. Sometimes you wouldn’t be allowed in and sometimes you were. Then things like Dirtbox started and that became more our type of thing than trying to get in with Robert Elms. When House Music came along it was slightly ignored by London, not because people didn’t like it, but because the whole rare groove scene was so good at the time. The reason it took up north first was because they didn’t have such a strong scene as we had down here. There were some brilliant clubs in London. Discotheque and The Wag were really good. London didn’t need house music.

It was bang in the middle of the early rap thing, when people were mixing rare groove with Eric B and the Beastie Boys. Then the drug thing came back from Ibiza and that was what tipped the balance. Paul Oakenfold brought Alfredo over to a party at the Project Club in Streatham in ’87, which got raided by the police. Everyone went there, and they all bought an E, and everyone did it at the same time. Very experimental! London was terribly snobby. House music definitely broke down all kinds of barriers. Shoom was very sexually mixed: gays, straights, all sorts of gay palaver going on which some of the kids in there, who were football hooligans, would never have seen. Michael Clark and a Scottish guy called Sandy, who worked for Vivienne Westwood, they had these little urchin kids from south London who would follow them round like flies. It was like they were mesmerised by these Beautiful Creatures. Cymon: Shoom was a magnet for all the hedonists in London. It just pulled you in. We’d started going in February ’88, myself and Andrew. We found out about it late January. It just turned into these frenetic conversations on a Monday, Terry talking for two hours on the phone about this club: “Fuckin’ ‘ell, I’ve just had the club experience of my life.” Which was a report of them going to Shoom. Next week it was Paul McKee, same thing, two hour conversation. So we were into Shoom and away.”

Steven Hall

“Danny Rampling was all-important – because of the dance. The whole acid house dance is Danny  Rampling. Waving his record while he’s playing.
Until then DJs used to just put records on. They didn’t do anything. During the rare groove time you wouldn’t acknowledge the crowd. They wouldn’t
even smile at the crowd. The crowd wouldn’t smile at all.”

Terry Farley

“If there was one thing I could go back and relive it would be going to Shoom. It was what made me want to do what I’m doing. I’ve had a great time. And I work with loads of really creative people. But without those moments: walking down the steps at the Fitness Centre and seeing Danny DJ…it was a complete revelation. I’d been clubbing for years and I’d never seen a DJ who was so into what he was doing as Danny was. I’d never seen DJs make the atmosphere like he did.”

Steven Hall

“For me that whole movement came pre- packaged. You had the dance, which was so different from everything else. The first night at Spectrum when there was just 100 people, there was a guy that I knew, a rare groove guy, really good dancer, top face. And he was standing there with his girlfriend
watching all these kids doing the Shoom dance. I remember seeing him at the end of the night trying to do it and he couldn’t. He was crap at it. I remember thinking, “He’s such a good dancer yet he looks really crap, it isn’t his thing.” These other kids who weren’t good dancers, had ripped jeans on
and Converse, looked fuckin’ brilliant. You had the drug. You had a series of records that were totallyoverlooked by everyone, and they’d already been
hits in this club Amnesia, and you had to find them and buy them. Rough Trade? Where’s that? I’d never been in Rough Trade records. It wasn’t a soulboy shop, why would I have gone in there? First time I met Rocky I was in there trying to buy Nitzer Ebb and the Woodentops!

Terry Farley

“I’d started collecting records when I was 12 or 13 years old and whenever there was a get-together I would be asked, “Bring your records” when everyone
else was more interested in copping off and drinking party sevens. The next step was, “Get that bloke with the weird record collection to play some music.” That was a couple of years before Shoom, so that was ’85-’86. And the same happened at the birth of Acid House: “Call that bloke with  the weird records to play at six in the morning.” But then because my name started to get associated with Shoom and Spectrum, people would book me without really  hearing what I did. They probably booked me so they  could put Shoom in brackets. So I was getting booked to play main spots and going down like the proverbial turd  in the salad because I’d been playing weird music at six in
the morning. So I had to incorporate more and more house and disco tracks and learn how to mix.

Andy Weatherall

“Weatherall and I had been playing at places  like the Raid, and then it was just an obvious thing  to put on our own parties. We did a few small ones
before acid house, with him playing Gun Club and me playing soul records”

Terry Farley

“The Raid was a lot of go-go being played  and some early House. Those parties were hedonistic, everyone drinking Crucial Brew. Everyone getting
nutted. Great group of people. I started doing parties with Gary Haisman called Pandemonium. We did one for 3,000 people in Battersea Park in Gerry Cottle’s big top in 1987 into New Year ’88. I found this place, Café des Artistes on the King’s Road where you could throw a party. The door price was only a fiver but you got some food as well. You could fill it up with 150 people.”

Cymon Eccles

All our gang was going out. A lot of people had jobs down the King’s Road in clothes shops or hairdressers or doing a bit of ducking and diving,
and basically you had a ready-made crowd there. Acid house grew out of casual culture. The football hooligan was dead and buried for the trendy
hooligans. The casuals who were at the cutting edge of style, the ones who probably weren’t the best fighters but who were the best dressed, had knocked
it on the head, and were going to Shake’n’Fingerpop and puffing in the corner together. When acid house and E came along the creative forces on the casual scene became, by and large, the creative force on the acid house scene. The whole acid house thing grew out of that suburban soul scene. Whether it was Danny Rampling or Paul Oakenfold, they were just suburban soul boys.”

Terry Farley

“Suburbia’s our heartland really. We were quite West End snobby, but at a certain point we realised our support came from somewhere else. It was Slough, and it was Kingston and it was Romford and it was all of those places. We brought people into the West End. We were definitely suburban.”

Steven Hall

“Acid house grew out of casual culture. The football hooligan  was dead and buried for, the trendy hooligans. And the same people who started doing
parties in places like Leeds and Edinburgh, they were all football casuals. I think it was very much  an alternative gang culture, only without violence.  You got the same high as being part of a firm and – it was a way of making money. They put the party on, and they dealt the drugs and ran the door. It’s
no coincidence that the biggest radio station was Centreforce and that was the ICF. Even the name: CF!. They decided they didn’t want to fight any more and this was the new buzz. I remember me and Andy Weatherall standing on  the door at Raid in late ’87. Guys who I knew from  Millwall were coming up in really dusty old shoes, Chevignon jackets and fucked up trainers. They’d all come back from a mad Ibiza summer and they had the start of pony tails, with little top knots. I remember a month or so later being taken to Shoom, and suddenly I realised that these people were the new faces at these clubs. They knew the records and they did the Amnesia dance. It wasn’t people from the, Face and i-D who knew about this, it was these kids.  Acid house gave casual culture a focus. Before, the only way that casual existed was through football. It had no other creative outlet. There were no  magazines or anything. It brought that casual scene together for the first time ever. Before that, it had just been groups of kids in different towns trying to hurt each other. Suddenly you could go up to Leeds for a do. I remember a do that Charlie did at the Corn Exchange and about 500 people from London went up and suddenly we were talking to these kids who, a few years before, would’ve been trying to kill you.

Terry Farley

“The label came about because a close friend of ours, Paul McKee, was an A&R man at London. He used to take Boy’s Own into work, and of course Terry and everyone had a relationship with Pete Tong. They’d DJed together for years. And in those days a label deal was nothing. It was more like, “Come in and tell us what records you like and we’ll take them off you and exploit them for you.” And that was fantastic for us. So in 1989 Pete said get your friends involved and Paul brokered a deal and that was in about 1990. We were all Factory fans so that was a loose blueprint: the indie/punk ethos but taken into dance music. The idea was to sign what was representing London, band – wise, and DJ-wise as well. We were supposed to be signing Flowered Up, but we could never agree on which bands to sign up and eventually Heavenly signed them. Natural Life were friends of ours and they ended up signing to Warners. Terry wanted to sign one thing, Andy wanted to sign something else and Cymon wanted us to sign his band, Airstream, and he went off to One Little Indian. We couldn’t really get a direction together. London used to look at us and think why do they do all their good work for other people? Like Pete and Terry remixing the Mondays, and Andy with Screamadelica. They couldn’t understand why we couldn’t do it for them. But I’d been trying to sign the Chemicals and Underworld and they both said they’d stay with me. Terry was making his records with Pete, so we had them as well. I started managing One Dove instead of being their A&R man. It started coming together. The other thing was Rocky and Diesel had started making records, so there was a group of people forming around us who the majors weren’t interested in and actually it seemed like we knew what we were doing. We’d had a record deal. We were attracting people towards us. We had a vibe going on. There were no home studios then. And because of the parties, we could always stump up a bit of cash for people. So we were able to help people who didn’t know how to make a record get in the studio. They needed someone who’d put £200 or £1,000 to book time in a studio so they could get stuff done. We were the most professional in a very unprofessional world. Ed and Tom used to follow Andy wherever he was  DJing. They were real fans of his. One time they gave him a white label of “Song To The Siren”, which has  being pressed up next door to our offices, CT Records. They said go in there and pick up a copy. Andy played it to us. I really liked it. So we said can we put it out for you properly? That’s how it started. And it all climaxed with the “Born Slippy” summer. Being number two in the charts for almost the whole summer. Selling millions of records and thinking it was going to go on forever. Working with Underworld is the thing I’m most proud of.”

Steven Hall

“Terry came round one day and said, why don’t we do it? And that was it. Around a cup of tea and a pack of biscuits. Let’s get ridiculous.
Nothing more than, “Let’s have a laugh.” My role was photographer; Andrew, Terry and Steve Mayes more on the editorial.”

Cymon Eccles

“Terry was enthralled with The End. His words at the time were, “If fuckin’ scousers can do it then I’m sure we can!” or some such pep talk. And we did. It was Pritt sticks and cutting things out on my coffee table.”
Andy Weatherall

I used to write silly letters to The End. And they’d print them, stuff about football fashion. I said I’d like to do a fanzine like the End but about London. Weatherall was up for creating this monster and he was very clever.”

Terry Farley

“Steve Mayes and Terry and all that lot, they’d get these things from football. I wasn’t into football. but I totally got what they were saying. So it was like, let’s give it a go. I just saw it as a chance for expression and I’d be able to write about music. It’s a fanzine, so it doesn’t have to be particularly current. You’ve got nobody’s product to push so you can be quite abstract.  I was “The Outsider” because I was a bolshie little bastard! I always want to be in a gang but then I don’t  want to be. I want the best of both of worlds. So I thought  I’d be able to write a sarky piece deconstructing or taking  the piss out of everything you’re about to read in the  magazine. I wanted to have my cake and eat it I suppose.  It was literally what anyone had listened to that week or  read or what had happened. After acid house kicked in it  became the village paper for the acid house scene. There  was only two or three clubs! There were pictures of parties  where only 2 or 300 people had been. It was very insular. After a couple of years, John Brown Publishing offered us  national distribution and we were like, it’s pointless, cos  npeople’ll just think, “Silly cockney cunts”. It would have  appeared too cliquey. Obviously people from up north did  buy it but they were people that came to the parties.  Cymon: And from going out together and doing  this magazine we started forming this little band.  It grew from that.”

Andy Weatherall

“I’ve kept all those friends, those people have all stayed close, they’ve all gone on to be productive  in one way or another. A lot of these people then were  in fairly menial jobs or bumming around not doing  anything. A lot of people, obviously, are in the music  industry now, and a lot of photographers and writers. All my friends now are friends I made then. If we had  a Boy’s Own party now, nine out of ten people there  would be the people who were there in early ’88.”

Terry Farley