The Almighty Julie

It was desperately sad to hear the news of Julie Pritchard’s passing. For those who don’t know, Julie produced the legendary Forest fanzine ‘Brian’ back in the day.

In the Cheese Pavilion and the only noise I hear

Is the sound of someone stacking chairs and mopping up spilled beer

And someone asking questions and basking in the light

Of the fifteen fame-filled minutes of the fanzine writer

When I heard this glorious Billy Bragg song in my early teens, I wasn’t quite sure what it was going on about. It’s called Waiting the Great Leap Forwards, and it references Camelot, Che Guevara, JFK, some gasoline, Fidel Castro’s brother, Oppenheimer, spilt beer and a cheese pavilion.

It’s a kaleidoscope of left field images, merged together to become something uplifting and hopeful. Even if I didn’t fully understand the nuances – and I’m still not sure I do – it gave me an idealistic vision of this thing called a fanzine writer.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I almost definitely bought a copy of the legendary Brian fanzine from Julie Pritchard as a kid sometime in the late eighties. I’d ask my dad for a quid and then run off ahead of him over Trent Bridge after painstakingly explaining that the quid wasn’t for a programme, but for a fanzine, followed by a confused and garbled attempt to explain what a fanzine was.

I devoured it. Cover to cover.

But who were these people who wrote this stuff? These fantastical people, Julie being at the forefront, were pure punk. Football punk. Without the Mohicans and safety pins, but with the big words. With the football knowledge. They did it all themselves too. They were sticking it to the man. And they seemed to know about good music too. They’d even heard of the Indie top ten! This was revelatory stuff.

I think Julie epitomised the whole fanzine thing when she said, ‘It felt as if there were a lot of intelligent people who were sick of being treated as pariahs and just wanted to watch live football.’

And discovering The Almighty Brian fanzine confirmed my suspicions about football fans: in amongst the idiots and toxic masculinity and bottle-smashing, shaven-headed blokes, there were others: intelligent people, cool people who had something to say and wanted things to be different and above all, just loved – adored – football and Forest and music and film and gigs and mix tapes.

There was another world out there and I wanted to be in it.

Until around 2015, Julie was a myth to me. I hadn’t met her. I wasn’t even sure if she actually existed. And then when I helped launch a new Forest fanzine and was onboard a boat going up and down the Trent before a Forest game, I got word that Julie was onboard too. Fanzine royalty in the flesh. I was a bit nervous about meeting her to be honest, but she turned out to be, well, Julie: a font of everything interesting pertaining to football and music. And even then, she knew even more about this stuff than she shared with others.

I harassed her to write some pieces for the fanzine. She prevaricated, took ages to do so, worried and fretted about her words. She needn’t have – her stuff was always the best thing in each edition.

Of course, to define Julie just by a fanzine she created in the 80s is hugely reductive. She was a remarkable person who lived a remarkable life. She would casually drop into conversation some of the stuff she had got up in the pub or at half-time on some freezing concourse or while giving her a lift home from an away game.’ Wait…you sold t shirts for The Housemartins?!’

But then again, what a legacy to leave. As we get older, we tend to become more preoccupied with what our legacy will be. What mark will we leave? What will our footprint look like once we’re gone? Will anyone remember us, or will the water close up and settle over our existence, once more a smooth surface, leaving no evidence of our noise and fury and joy?

Julie left a mark, a lasting one. A firm indentation in the car door of life.

*

This whole football fandom thing…maybe it’s just me, but as you get older, you start to wonder what the point of it all is. For the most part, it’s a ridiculous and tedious enterprise: following a football team around the broken motorways and railways of this country, traipsing through puddles with cold feet, spending more money than we would ever like to add up on – for the most part – a mediocre football team when we could be doing a thousand more worthwhile things with our weekends. What is the point of it all? Is there even any meaning in it?

But then again, this is the stuff that enriches our lives. We all sign an invisible contract knowing full well it’s all very silly, but at the same time, it means everything. Sure, the actual football bit is important, but that’s just a spoke in the wheel. It’s the community, the nods to the faces you see each week, the unspoken understanding and bond between us all, the ever-burgeoning shared history we develop, the friends we make along the way. An actual real-life community.

And there is a special corner of this space for the fanzine writer and their Letraset, wrestling with incompatible document formats, printing costs, the nuances of this country’s baffling postage system, pavilions, spilt beer and fifteen fame-filled minutes. Julie did all this, and so much more.

Sadly, the machine that is a guitar cannot literally kill fascists, but it can shape hearts, minds and culture. Same goes for the fanzine. Same goes for the fanzine writer. And Julie was the greatest of them all.