I don’t buy magazines anymore. Not at all. Not even for the train. I prefer to read news sites, tweets, pompous novels, and the backs of cornflakes boxes; the only magazines you might find in my house are gaming bible Edge (which I nick from my other half because I’m far too cheap to procure it for myself) and Primary Times, which comes free in my daughter’s schoolbag every so often and chiefly functions as an advertising outlet for suburban activity centres. Nevertheless, I was, for the most part, raised by magazines. Magazines and my grandmother, who was far too busy baking brown bread and making eyes at Gay Byrne to teach me how to function as a modern girl-child. Everything I learned about love, life, career, and eyeshadow, I learned from the following periodicals.
I learned about boobs from The Sunday World.
Twinkle: Back in the 80s, girls were made from sugar and spice and all things nice, not from guts and determination and all these new-fangled ideas actual Spice Girls rode into town on. Twinkle was a pastel slice of placid imagination: business ambitions were channelled into teddy bear hospitals, relationship issues began and ended with naughty but adorable baby brothers. Twinkle didn’t teach me to be a hardass in shoulder pads, but it did make an army of friends out of my stuffed animals; because of Twinkle, I didn’t grow up the weirdo I might otherwise have been, with no one to keep me company but those cold portraits of Padre Pio and The Sacred Heart.
Bunty: One generally moved from Twinkle to Bunty in the late 80s, didn’t they? I remember there was a rival in the form of Mandy & Judy, which apparently was once two separate magazines, amalgamated like a papery Cerberus in order to challenge the preppy, blonde market-leader. I paid M&J very little attention. M&J didn’t have The Four Marys. Or The Comp. Or Luv, Lisa. Bunty taught me how to be a jolly decent little pre-teen, all about integrity and fellowship and lacrosse sticks. Incidentally, I only learned how to pronounce lacrosse the other day, when watching MTV’s If You Really Knew Me; a pretty blonde jock who was into the ould lacrosse learned to appreciate her older sister’s guidance, which was a lesson Bunty herself would have been happy to impart. Ah, the circle of life.
Horse & Pony: Too old for Bunty, too young for boys to start looking attractive (or even for them to be taller than me), I turned my attention instead to a magazine aimed at girls who wished and wished for their very own pony, but lacked the disrespect for the ISPCA to actually get one. Some of the boys and girls I knew had ponies and kept them on building sites, but after reading H&P cover to squee-ishly gorgeous cover for a year, I knew exactly what a horsey needed and that a building site was completely the wrong environment. Basically, I was a walking, useless, equine encyclopaedia. Luckily, puberty came along and saved me from many more years of crushing disappointme … oh, wait.
Smash Hits: My best friend, Caroline, bought pop magazine BIG, but I was that bit cooler and so I bought Smash Hits. It had longer interviews and an obsession with Britpop. Also, I was into, like, indie boys, and Smash Hits gave away stickers of Damon Albarn way more than it gave away stickers of Mark Owen or whoever it was Caroline was into at the time. Smash Hits taught me irreverence, a love for absurdity, and how to be extremely pedantic about song lyrics. And it once had a serialised interview with the godlike Ryan Giggs, a footballer. But that was Smash Hits. Always thinking outside the box.
Sugar: While some girls worried about tampons and bra sizes and The Willies Of Boys, myself and the aforementioned Caroline sailed through adolescence because Sugar had already taught us everything we needed to know. Well, outside of how to wire a plug, but I think that was covered in Junior Cert physics. Celebrity culture is all-pervading nowadays, but I don’t remember much gushing over celebrities in Sugar back in the mid-nineties – if there was, we had very little interest in it. Sugar was all about community, creating a shared experience out of the pubertal nightmare; it had so many problem pages, it is not a stretch to suggest that it was wholly dedicated to soothing the banal frettings of an entire generation. From Sugar, I leaned that sex is best when it’s with someone you’re completely comfortable with, that it’s never worth falling out with your friends over a boy, and that if your crush touches you when he talks to you, he’s probably looking to snog you to East 17’s Stay Another Day. God, they don’t make Christmas No. 1s like they used to. Nor magazines, for Sugar is set to cease publication this year. Woe!
More!: When dull and dreary became the perverted pages of Sugar – which dared to tell teenage girls that sex wasn’t automatically Wrong and Cheap – it was time to move on to More!, which was aimed at Uni-age girls who shopped and went on holidays and paid rent and Did It in armchairs if they bloody well wanted to. This was utterly enlightening for a while, though the armchairs thing never happened to me, as I shared my flat with four other girls, all of whom would have been most disconcerted had they arrived home from a lecture to find me and whatever Oh-Yeah-He’s-The-One I had at the time all akimbo in front of the afternoon’s Pokémon episode. More! magazine taught me how to tan, be sick in my handbag, apply for a credit card, and overspend in Penney’s. I realised shortly afterwards that I didn’t really want to know any of that.
Which is probably why More! was my last magazine, disregarding a brief dalliance with the ugliest kind of madness a few years later when I got sucked into the vortex of bridal publications, and barely escaped with my wedding budget still intact.
Anyone else with some lovely, glossy, print-media memories?
Anthea McTeirnan
Croí na Duibhlinn
Aoife Barry
Aoife McLysaght
Arlene Hunt
Attracta McCarthy-McKenna
clairehennessy
Ann Cronin
Amanda Brown
Eleanor Fitzsimons
Edel Coffey
Anna Carey
Lauren Murphy
Jennie Ridyard
Jude Leavy
Hazel Katherine Larkin
Léan Ní Chuilleanáin
Leigh
Lisa McInerney
Laura Slattery
Maman Poulet
Megan McGurk
Clare Kleinedler
Molly
Rosita Boland
Catherine Crichton
Sinéad Gleeson
sarahefranklin
siobhandowling
Susan Daly
theantiroom
Nuala Ní Chonchúir
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You just described my formative years. A lovely walk down memory lane!
I love this post, though I take umbrage at the dismissal of Mandy and Judy, both stalwarts of my youth (as was M&J, because even though I was about 14 when they combined forces, my younger sister still got it and the entire family read it every week) and, in my opinion, superior to Bunty. Bunty did, however, give the world Workhouse Wendy, a preposterous story about a rich girl whose parents own a workhouse and who goes undercover to investigate it while they’re away, only of course they die in a shipwreck so she’s trapped there because no one will believe her true identity. My sister J and I played “workhouses” for weeks and would only consume soup if we pretended it was gruel.
But – at the risk of sounding like a patronising geriatric – if you only knew ’90s Smash Hits, you never knew Smash Hits at all. I remembered ’80s SH as so amazingly deranged and hilarious I actually thought I was looking back on it with rose-tinted glasses until I unearthed a few old copies a few years ago and discovered it really was as funny and eccentric as I remembered. They revamped it in, I think, about 1990 or 1991 – by then I was a 16 year old NME-reading indie snob and Smash Hits was full of New Kids on the Block and Take That et al, but I still read my little sister’s SH because it was so funny, and I was heartbroken when they made over the magazine and got rid of stuff like Black Type’s Letter’s Page (prize: a Smash Hits teatowel) and the poems in the Bitz section and the in-jokes and the genuinely glorious language (thank you, Smash Hits, for giving me the expression “perv-breeks”). It’s remembered so fondly that a few years ago a collection of the Best of the ’80s Smash Hits was published, so fellow sad-30-somethings could remember the days when it was acceptable to spend much of an interview with Morrissey asking what biscuits he was going to have after his tea that evening…
I’m with Anna on this one. Mandy and Judy were both brilliant – and it was really annoying when they merged because that was one less comic you could swap around at school. Jinty seemed to have died, but its annuals were the best of the lot.
Thankfully, we had a *huge* stack of ancient annuals in my classroom in fifth and sixth class – there was one Misty story that was so scary we used to dare each other to read it.
Also, Smash Hits in the 80s was the biz – both Kim Newman and Miranda Sawyer wrote for it at the time. Lots of people graduated to Q – I followed the editor (Barry McIlheney) over to Empire.
And let’s not forget the truly great work of fiction that was the Just 17 problem page. We used to compose letters at school, with a whole committee trying to decide how far we could go on the sob story and still remain plausible.
Such a great post, Lisa. I grew up on these mags too albeit obviously a few years before you. When I was a lass Mandy was Mandy, a Sindy to the Barbie that was Bunty, although Barbie wasn’t a WAG in those days and Judy was Judy, the slightly odd one. The stories in Judy where a bit more on the paranormal side of life featuring magical talismans, time travel and a few ghosts. I devoured them all and remember being asked what was my favourite between them and not being able to answer.
I moved on then to Jackie, where I learned how to kiss, how to cook a cheese toastie, how you should never sit on your best friend’s boyfriends lap at a party, to look in the mirror at what you look like from behind and how to wear your school tie as a headband your v-neck jumper backwards under your shirt if you suddenly end up at a coffee shop without having changed your uniform. I read this as a preteen and what an exciting, free, lipglossed world the teenage life promised to be. i couldn’t wait.
I went looking for a comic for my kids but all they have now seeme to be character’s from TV shows accompanied by a crappy plastic toy. Equally, I was a bit disappointed to read my little sister’s Cosmo Girl and find it discussing barely anything except your image including surgery, your crush and ‘must have’ designer clothes. Everything seems so much more glossy now, yet more expensive and somehow cheaper. Come back Twinkle, we need you.
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Teddy bear’s hospital – forgotten all about that!
Love this post.
Was a big fan of Bunty, Judy and Mandy, remember the Four Marys and The Comp (though for years I read it as the ‘chomp’ – didn’t understand where the word came from at all). Wasn’t it on the back of them they used to advertise other future stories? I do have a clear memory of one entitled ‘I’ll never play tennis again” about some crippled teen or other. Priceless.
I was so baffled by what “the comp” was, until I realised it was short for “the comprehensive”, which was where I and everyone I knew was expected to go, and that I was one of the scary comp girls!
I grew up on these at the same time as you Lisa, so this is like a trip down memory lane!
As the eldest child I was ‘banned’ from reading teen mags by my mother – which meant that I used to devour my friends’ copies of Bliss, Sugar, and even the woeful MG (‘My Guy’, remember that?!) when at their houses. I’m sure I sneaked a few home too.
Of course, my younger sisters were never banned from them – the curse of being the oldest!!
I used to adore any American mags I could get my hands on, as they were few and far between in Cork. Jane was a particular favourite, as was Jump, a short-lived American mag that was actually really good. I had about 3 copies I kept for years and re-read regularly. When I was much younger I read Teen Beat and other terribly bad mags featuring pics of young American actors like Brad Renfro who I swooned over.
I don’t buy as many mags anymore – I usually just buy O magazine (I’m a granny inside I’m sure) as for some reason I prefer the American magazines – mainly the ads for all the products we can’t get here.
I occasionally buy music mags too as I used to buy Uncut religiously for a few years, and Q, Mojo & Hotpress when I was in college. Sadly I didn’t buy Select or Melody Maker back in the day.
Because I was a boy I sadly missed out on all this. Once Judge Dredd et al. were over for me, my first grown-up magazine – at the slightly ludicrous age of 12 or 13 – was Flight, the periodical of the aviation industry. While you were reading about sex and shopping, I was finding out about real, practical stuff like how to outmanoeuvre enemy aircraft using vectored thrust. I clearly recall explaining the speed of sound to my cousins as we walked home from school. “At Mach 2, we could be in Galway in… thirty seconds.”
It was I suppose a ray of excitement into rural adolescence. An odd interest, but it kept me out of trouble. And what I couldn’t tell you about the use of carbon-fibre composites in the construction of an aircraft’s wing, you really don’t need to know.
As I write this, I’m sitting in my girlfriend’s bedroom. (Don’t look so surprised.) At a quick count, she has more than a dozen make-up brushes, all different, and yet she never appears to be wearing make-up. I begin to suspect that while I was busy being escapist, she she may have actually been studying something.
Richard, I’d posted the comment below thanking the “ladies” before I’d seen your response. Very prejudicial of me … sorry!
The girlfriend and yourself could make an elite combat squad, y’know – with your aviation know-how and her camouflage skills. Could be useful in future international conflicts.
Memory Lane! I had both Judy and Bunty – didn’t Bunty come out on Tuesday, and Judy on Thursday? Whatever – I remember sitting on the top of the stairs waiting for the Plop! of the magazine on the map!
Four Marys were a bit twee, for my liking. But they did light a yearning in my breast for going to boarding school – a yearning that was, sadly, fulfilled.
Which one had the story about the pretty girl who couldn’t sing, and the ugly girl who did? So the pretty girl fronted the band, and the ugly girl sang from backstage. When eventually found out, of course, ugly girl became rich and famous and still liked pretty girl.
I think Judy had the story about the death of all the bees, so all plants had to be pollinated by hand. I don’t remember when that came out, but I was also reading Rachel Carlson’s Silent Spring (yes, I was a forward child!)at the time, so it has really stuck in my memory.
I am LOVING the comments, ladies – remembering bits I’d forgotten and grinning like a loon.
Something that’s just come to mind is the biscuit-tin interview Smash Hits (90s Smash Hits, soz, Anna) used to subject their chosen celebs to. One of the questions you could pick out of the biscuit tin was “Why are Meatloaf’s song titles so long?”, which, naturally, was one of the questions Meatloaf picked out when he did the interview. He was rather stumped as to the answer, as I recall.
Fantastic.
In our house we got the Beano and Whizzer and Chips at the same time as Bunty (Mary Simpson, Mary Cotter, Mary Brown (?) and Mary Raleigh). I vividly remember (but from what comic?) The Double Life of Debbie – she had some sort of facial scarring (depicted by some ovals sketched on her cheeks) and was an ordinary office worker by day, but at night she put on a mask and became a beautiful ballerina. Nina, Pretty Ballerina still makes me think of it.
My sister and I despised the babyish cutout dolls on the back of Twinkle and longed for elegance and underwear of the more grown-up Bunty doll. Not that we ever glued it onto thin card before cutting it out, so she wasn’t even upright, let alone elegant. At some magic time someone donated a pile of second or third hand Jackies (lots of ads for Anne French cleanser) and eventually a couple of Just Seventeens.
When I can’t make out the lyrics of a song I still think of reading them in Smash Hits – it was always such a revelation to read what people were actually singing.
Anyone remember the DFC a couple of years ago? It was a lovely, but short-lived comic without advertising and with good stories and heavyweight contributors like Philip Pullman. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DFC
A welcome change from crappy characters and throwaway free gifts.
Ah, back in the old days you had to send away for your free plastic tat with a postal order.
Mary Field, Antonia.
I had to look her up to get her proper surname. She must have been the forgettable one, I suppose. I remember Simpy was the scholarship girl … am I right?
Oh, Field.
Radleigh was blonde & lived at Poshy Villas. HotPress reported her http://www.hotpress.com/archive/464482.html as replaced by Mary Goebbels.
When I was seven, I asked for the Twinkle annual for Christmas, and my mum decided it was babyish and bought me Mandy instead. I was furious, and I remember throwing it down the stairs in a fit, and my mum picked it up very sadly and put it on the bookshelf, and I felt TERRIBLE. I managed to ignore it for about two weeks, and then I sneaked it off the shelf and took it up to my room to read, and discovered it was brilliant. I went and confessed to my mum that I did like my present after all and that I was sorry, and she told me that I could get Mandy every week from the shop if I wanted, I just had to go and tell the newsagent down the street to order it in for me.
JOY! Running home from school on a Tuesday and getting 20p ( then 22p – then 24p – 26p – inflation was high in the late eighties!) to go to the papershop with was a feature of my life for the next five years. I can still see my surname written in the newsagent’s handwriting on the top righthand corner…
I stopped reading it in 1990, when my friend Zoe bought a magazine called Girl! with a free lipstick on the cover. I never really got into Girl!, though, because it was about 85p which was waaaay more than I could afford. From about 1991 onwards, my best friend at school got Just Seventeen, which we all passed around and loved, and I can still quote “A tampon would have to be thinner than a matchstick to pass into the womb!” and “To be sussed is a must, but remember sex under 16 is illegal!”
Then in sixth-form it was More, and acting out the Position of the Fortnight on the Music department sofa…
Your Mandy vs Twinkle story is brilliant, Mary, thanks for sharing. I used to have my mags reserved at the newsagents too, with the name scribbled on the top corner in blue ballpoint … gosh, happy days!
Oh my gosh, Twinkle!! I totally forgot about that. Just looking at the cover brings back a flood of memories. I was also into Bunty and Mandy & Judy. There was nothing like getting your hands on the latest copy. Great post, thanks for sharing.
Amazing to see these teenage magazines for girls giving them all kinds of information about sex and relationships. At 15 the only magazines I looked at were National Geographic and my dad’s Wood Carving magazines. For me adolescence was uncharted territory I had to figure out alone.
Yeah, but didn’t National Geographic have topless tribal women? Surely that went some way towards sex ed?
Perhaps, Lisa – I may have been picking up little bits of tribal romantic etiquette without knowing!
*forces sharpened stick through nose*
And not a word for poor old Misty? which to be fair was probably before your time but it was sort an early learning guide for goths in the early 80s. Some of the stories were quite a downer, with occasional endings where the focus of the story doesn’t quite make it to a happy ending.
Aww man, that sounds brilliant! Pre-Radiohead teen angst in foldaway form … I love it.
DIdn’t Misty merge with another magazine like Mandy? It only reappeared in annual form for a while, it was just before I could decide for myself and my folks decided that Twinkle and Bunty were the best for us. They banned a bunch of magazines for being too violent or inane.
Yep, Misty was merged with Mandy. Apart from that occasional flirtation with Misty (which I’m sure from what I recollect I read so as to impress the edgier girls, sadly they ended up with the blokes with motorbikes for whom reading comics would have been an intellectual stretch) I was mainly a Cheeky and 2000AD bloke.
For those who reckon the boys comics weren’t as practical or educational, you’re forgetting the language skills we acquired, like how to say Achtung and Gott in Himmell whenever surprised by something, though it doesn’t have the impact who might expect in response to looking at the restaurant bill in Vienna. Must have been the accent. And it’s useful to know adding to -er to a country identified someone as citizen of that same land as in Englander, Americaner or Frencher.
There were practical guides to counter insurgency (has anyone thought that perhaps the rise of urban terrorism in the 70s and the publication of these comics was perhaps related in the opposite direction to that we presume?
And there was any amount of quare shaped objects to throw at trees, windows and birds given out by these publications. Truly they were a boon to the plastics industry and eye surgeons.
You really threw me here. I was reading this thinking ‘when did I write this’ and ‘where in my Belfast Prod house was Padre Pio?’ because this summons up my magazine life so beautifully.
My first life ambition was to be a Twinkle cover girl (or an ice cream lady…)
My grandpa used to give me seond hand copies of Bunty and Judy when he visited and I read them cover to cover, particularly adoring the annuals.
I however kept up the magazine love past More! and devoured copies of Minx, which was More!’s more feminist sister. I also decided to give myself some lifelong hangups by obsessively reading Vogue for years and owe my career as a make up artist to the non celeb obsessed Elle of the 90s.
I pretended I was cooler than I was with Nylon magazine and enjoyed trips to the doctor or dentist to catch up on more niche things like Practical Caravanner and Ulster Tatler.
I now only buy food and interiors magazines, but could probably have put down a decent deposit on a house if I hadn’t spent every penny from the age of five on magazines. I must go and read how to deal with that…
I was a total tomboy until about 15 so I didn’t buy magazines. I didn’t have time what with spending all my free, after school time in the yard with Dad (or when younger, out with my imaginary horse… I was allowed have one either). But I would sneak a peek at the magazines my sister bought (all of the above, if not more).
In college I went through a brief phase of religiously reading Total Film every month.
Now that I am no longer 15 and do pay rent and have a credit card, I too have very little interest in buying magazines anymore. They are all celebrity trash. The only exception is the odd copy of Vanity Fair when I am on the train… which, if I’m honest, can sometimes be a more expensive version of celebrity trash!
Brilliant post, Lisa! I used to love Sugar and Bliss and all their vital info on how to tell if a boy likes you and how to shave your legs. Does anyone remember Dan Corsi? He was the Bliss model that was featured in almost every issue and he appeared in the lineup part of Never Mind The Buzzcocks recently, as he had been in some dodgy boyband at one point. Total blast from the past! Also, I remember reading More magazine when I was a bit too young for it and being AMAZED by the Positions of the Fortnight!
Dan Corsi and Sean Maguire…!
Yes!
Honestly these years the only magazines I get are knitting magazines. I flick through some of the other magazines in work and every time I look at them I feel so out of touch with some of what’s going on in the world and then I talk to people and I know a lot more about the stuff that actually will be talked about in history books and will affect my future!
Thats kind of true, though i would argue that the “what’s going on in the world” that your acquaintances believe in isn’t actually the real world, but one constructed for their entertainment (or marketing ploy) by publishers.
Knitting magazines have a niche all of their own, alongside “The People’s Friend” and “Ireland’s Own”
Yes, Lisa! Lovely post. Loved comics! Between Enid Blyton and the Britist DC comic stable, the world was an endless diet of orphans, pony-mad kids, ballet-mad kids, boarding schools and improbable quests, and quite a lot of witches, magic and the paranormal – anyone remember those?
All the Sugars and Smash Hits and that modern like came long long after my time, but a friend took Jackie and we swapped it. Never liked that much. And i can’t remember the name of the comic that used photos and speech bubbles to illustrate “true life” stories, which were always about girls competing for – wait for it – “dishy” boys. It was dire, but so dire it was funny
but don’t forget Jinty, which was my favourite of all. And the annuals, ladies, the annuals – no Christmas was one without a Mandy or Hudy annual. My favourites was Girls Crystal and i will forever be on the hunt for the GC annual that had a kind of a thriller story about a dancer who ended up being tapped in a room that was just like a music box she had seen, and she had to dance her way out of it by a set of moves … you really had to read it.
i would LOVE to interview the people who wrote and drew those strips.
I had a Girls’ Crystal that my great-aunt gave me. I read it to bits – possibly almost literally, although I do hope it’s up in my parents’ loft somewhere.
All I remember about it is that nearly all the heroines were called Avril.
I grew up in the US so for me it was YM (Young Miss) and Teen Magazine. The thing I remember most about both were the variety of (now odd) beauty tips in each issue. I recall one about putting talcum powder on greasy hair to make it look nicer, and another about pinching your cheeks on and off throughout the day to keep them looking “blushed.” I pored over these but it was more out of desperation to be one of the models in the magazine than anything…I am half-Japanese and grew up in a very white town in LA and all those thin, blondey models just made me feel worse about my dark hair and big lips. Still, I kept paying for subscriptions. Twisted, really.
Talcum powder doesn’t freshen up greasy hair?
No wonder I’ve been getting funny looks!
Horse and Pony FTW! An alternative to being a girly girl. Barely any pink in it, in my day. Sad that it’s no longer with us.
Was Horse and Pony the one that had the hilariously bad photo-stories amongst the horse-care articles?
And I KNOW there was a weekly/fortnightly horse-y comic that I used to buy obsessively in the mid-90s. Possibly called something as banal as ‘Pony’, and filled with the same sort of comics that were in Bunty et al, but with a horse thrown in as a plot point in every story..
I’ve just remembered a piece I read in a teen mag (early 90s) about holiday romances, in which it was mentioned that Spanish boys weren’t the best choice as they were so small and greasy.
I mean, don’t mind the sexual content; it was the casual racism we had to worry about!
Not only did myself and my nearest aged sister read Twinkle, copies were lovingly kept and passed to us and form us to and from older cousins, second cousins, very distant indeed cousins and other relatives.
Smash Hits is of course another story. My parents considered it to be somehow corrupting and indecent and it was banned from the household, which of course only drove my determination to read it to obsessive efforts. Looking back, I realise how innocuous it actually was, and how little my parents understood how they were creating an OCD like determination to do what I wanted.
Curiously, I think looking back now it was actually a golden age of publishing and its rather sweet to look back.
Here’s a question though.
Sometimes on this blog members are bothered by the low participation of women in politics or business. Yet the magazines described here seem to focus on things like relationships, sex and appearance. Might not other topics have been better at preparing young women for adulthood? Perhaps if teen magazines were about history and engineering and science then there would be more female leaders, engineers and scientists today?
In fairness, boys comics are just as fantastical! Desperate Dan, Commando, super-hero stuff … none of these helped prepare boys become engineers and leaders either.
Magazines were/are for fun, frivolity, and a feeling of community. As smart as I am, I don’t think you would have caught me reading Sugar were it full of the same stuff as my textbooks.
I suppose so, not being a magazine-reader back then (bar the nudey tribal National Geographic stories and How To Carve a Dragon articles) I don’t know what the male equivalent was. Football stuff I suppose!
Super post! I remember not giving a shite when my granny died in 1978 because I got a free pink brush and necklace in Bunty that day and that was me happy. Comics did that.
What about Blue Jeans & Jackie?
Completely forgot about Twinkle – ah, Innocence Lost
Hands up, who practised snogging on a pillow, as (allegedly) recommended in Jackie?
Ewwww, NO.
I practised on my arm like all normal people.
Such memories! I bought Mandy religiously (it was still just Mandy when I bought it early to mid 80′s) out of my pocket money when I was a kiddie and then hitting puberty I moved on to Smash Hits, Big, and Just 17…in fact I still had nearly every issue of Smash Hits from 1988 to 1993 and their Christmas annuals until I moved out of my folks house 7 years ago and they were (reluctantly) flung into the recycling bin. I don’t know why I kept them for over 10 years but I would occasionally read through them and some of the interviews I had memorised, particularly the ones with popstars I had liked. I suppose it was a tenuous link to my secondary school years – years that were stressful and wonderful all rolled into one. I still have some clippings of song lyrics, stickers, postcards and other stuff that came free with these mags and when I’m going through my bits and pieces and come across them they make me smile with the memories they evoke. I swear I can smell White Musk from the Body Shop and Constance Carroll lip gloss!
Strange that none of the comics aimed at boys had none of the “life” tips that all the girls ones had. Apart from taking lives maybe. I started on The Beano and The Dandy, Whizzer and Chips, Hotspur, Wizard, Topper. Valiant ,Tiger to name but a few. Then came Warlord and Battle and of course the Commando comics which seemed to be reprints of old WWII stories.
Then something changed in the Comics world. A publication called Action appeared, a gore -fest with an enormous shark with a huge hook embedded in his jaw, hence the moniker Hook – Jaw,as it’s flagship character.
Due to the many decapitations, evicerations, disembowellings and head shots, that were generously heaped upon our developing teenaged minds, the British censor banned the shortlived publication, and all the out of work artists and writers went on to create 2000 AD.
The rest is, as they say history.
I used to sneak a read of my sisters Bunty or Judy too of course…
Great Post!
Was there a “pen pals” section in Smash Hits or am I mis-remembering? A few years ago, I was equal parts amused and horrified to unearth a never-sent letter to a potential pen pal in one of my school folders — a plaintive handwritten cry for friendship from a black-clad Smiths-listener in Chicago hoping to find a fellow lost soul somewhere across the globe I could write long letters to about my love of poetry and “Meat is Murder.” I shall have to put on my pith helmet and cringe-proof jacket and unearth it.
Great post, Lisa.
There WAS a pen pals section! A friend of mine got a pen pal from it…
I’m still in touch with 2 people I originally started writing to through Smash Hits penpals! Less snail mail now and more Facebook comments but still it was the ‘hits that connected us…
Oh that is excellent!
I love this post. Do you rememember the free celebrity stickers that used to come with Smash Hits and Big in the 90s? Amazing.
Sugar and Bliss were fantastic too. I still remember how gorgeous some of the editorials were – often, the models had gappy teeth, or millions of freckles, or braces, and this was really celebrated. Those magazines in particular were very responsible when it came to young girls’ mental health – pity the same can’t be said for proper ‘grown-up’ womens’ magazines, really.
I had a similar experience to Claire.. in Staten Island we got Teen magazine and every issue I would hope that this was the issue where they’d finally have beauty tips for someone like me, with black curly hair, mediterranean skin and a non-tall thin size 4 body. I don’t remember a single hair tip for my hair type in the entire phase in which I read it. All the brunettes looked like Barbie’s blankly brunette sister, very waspy, inevitably with blue eyes. I kept buying it in hope: I didn’t like Young Miss and my mother deemed Seventeen too racy. Luckily I found Rolling Stone, Interview and the now-defunct Spy at around age 15 and bought those obsessively, obsessively, obsessively. I would occasionally buy two copies of RS: one for cutting up and putting on my wall and the other for saving in a pristine state. If anything I learned my beauty tips from the RS photography of Annie Leibovitz.
I think we share an almost identical magazine history up till Sugar. After that, for me, it was J17, Jane, Nylon and then around the turn of the century the incredibly relieved discovery of Bust, Venuszine and Bitch.
Does anyone else recall Jane Pratt’s hilarious editor’s letters? So, SO much celebrity name-dropping
hey Lisa, you were spoilt when you were young being the baby of the family. We, ur sisters and I didnt know what a magazine was until you got them and even then we were so jealous we pretended we were not into Mandy, Judy or whatever. Those were the good old days when we were in charge of you and u did what u were told……bliss times……..but hey we love u anyways xxxxxxx
Ammm, hello!! Remember the time we started out own magazine? Cannot remember the name of it for the love of fuck. Plus the fact it was about 20 years ago.
Does anyone remember Treetop Tania in Bunty? Girl shipwrecked on island. Was totally gripped and desperate for Tuesdays to find out what happened.
Also, a post-apocalyptic story in a Bunty annual where all the cities were now inside protective dooms, but two girls ventured/got trapped outside and were nearly eaten by a tiger that had escaped from a zoo?
Yes! I remember that. They all wore silvery space suits and I seem to remember they rode back to the dome on a giant shire horse or something.
That was class Lisa, thanks so much!
I too had pretty much exactly the same mags growing up. Just Seventeen seemed so ‘sophis’ at the time…it also cultivated a life long obsession with River Phoenix. I cried like a baby when he died (having only seen one of his films) and cut out all pix of him to put inside my locker at school.
It also armed me with a new vocabulary, a very British one albeit. Fab, gorge, snog and ace were hits, along with the “fest-”isization of everything….boy-fest, lurve-fest, cringe-fest and later, vom-fest….
So much to be thankful for.
[...] science. It seems that though that in the process I’ve accidentally written a response to this lovely blog post by Lisa “SwearyLady” McInerney. Yeah, comics were an important early influence in my [...]
Lovely article, Lisa, and beautifully written. Lads’ “comics” in my day were limited to the Beano and the Dandy, then later Whizzer and Chips. Around the age of 10, one was expected to move onto the much more mature and manly football-orientated magazines such as Shoot!, The Topical Times, and Score and Roar, or else the equally exciting Commando comics and Sven Hassel books. These prepared readers on the one hand for the process of becoming a proper man while also encouraging the construction of the imaginative framework required for reading older boys’ comics such as H&E, Playboy, and Mayfair.
On the other hand, if you hated sports, you were required to be a specky four eyes and have a Rubik’s cube and read Marvel comics and Douglas Adams books, thereby inhabiting a vicarious world of revenge, resentment, but ultimate triumph over all those losers who’d wasted their teenage years playing football, smoking fags, and chasing girls. Hah!
Revenge and resentment, eh?
Funny thing. The early teen girls’ mags were all about supporting one another and the sisterhood. No boy was worth more than your friends, etc.
But the later magazines were full of delicious tales of revenge and tips on chanelling resentment.
Fun!