Image © Simon Black, 1986

Edited by Simon Black, Spectrox was a printed fanzine from the Nottingham area which was launched at the DWAS WhoCon 21 event in October 1984. Two and a half years later in June 1987, as it notched up its fifth issue, Spectrox made an unexpected sidestep into the world of tapezines. Let’s start at the beginning however...

“Spectrox had always been against the mould somewhat,” says editor Simon Black. “Right from Issue 1 in 1984, I wanted something that looked great – not a tatty, Imperial 66-typed, home pasted and photocopied effort. My family ran a wedding dress manufacturing business and had a really good relationship with a local printer, who had a typesetting machine and was prepared to do things in his own time at cost, as I suspect he held a candle for my mum! We had a few challenges with poor Arthur the printer, who would sit there late at night re-typing the copy I had sent him into his typesetting software, struggling with the inevitable transcription errors that resulted. There was never a window for proof-reading though, since he was doing me a favour, so sometimes I just had to let Zygons be ‘Zygones’. Fans being fans, we always used to get nitpicking letters pointing out each error, so the editorial was littered with humorous sparring between myself and the poor printer. Regardless, this meant I had a typeset lithograph-printed fanzine which looked the business, even if the initial written content was not the greatest, and in the 1980s that was what counted. All this made for a more pricey ’zine, but the presentation was an important factor and the fact that we were getting it at cost meant we could obtain the quality with a small print run and still break even.”

Nicholas Pegg, now an authority on the work of David Bowie and a Doctor Who new series Dalek Operator to boot, takes up the story. “Simon Black was a fellow student, a couple of years below me, at Nottingham High School. I would have been 16 at the time, so Simon must have been 13 or 14. At the time, the biggest Doctor Who fans in the school were me, Simon and a chap called James Burns, so we three were the original core of Spectrox. We were very young and enthusiastic, but we weren’t terribly good at writing, which I’m sure is amply demonstrated by the early issues! As it went on, and particularly after I started up the Nottingham Local Group of the DWAS in 1985, other writers joined in, including people like Chris Newbold, Keith Topping and Tat Wood.”

Messrs. Black, Burns and Pegg took stock after the first issue and quickly honed their journalistic techniques. Gradually, the quality of Spectrox’s written content rose to meet the clean, professional look of the presentation. The influx of writing talent from the Nottingham Local Group and from the wider world of fandom helped the fanzine up the ante. Spectrox gained a good reputation and a wide readership, but change was very soon in the air.

“There had been four issues of Spectrox by the time I did my A-levels in 1986, at which point I handed the Nottingham LG over to someone else, and headed off to university,” Nicholas Pegg reveals. “I can’t recall whether Simon ever asked me to write anything for Issue 5 of Spectrox – either he didn’t, or else I was too wrapped up in my new student lifestyle – but whatever the case, I was hundreds of miles away and I had nothing at all to do with the production of Issue 5 of Spectrox, which came out in the summer of 1987.”

At the same time, James Burns also found himself moving on to pastures new, and for similar reasons to Nicholas. “Nick and James were both two years older than me and had left the school by the time I came to Issue 5, so that one was really Tat Wood and me on creative overdrive,” Simon Black comments. “That was a good combination, as Tat has some amazing ideas and is an incredibly prolific writer with a spot-on sense of humour, whereas my strengths lie in structure, presentation and delivery – so, I was able to rein his ideas in and take a few of them fully to fruition. It was a lovely creative process, and a shame not to do it again for another issue, but by then I had had enough.”

One notable innovation seen with Issue 5 of Spectrox was the audiozine that was offered as an optional purchase to anyone buying the printed fanzine as per normal. The audio cassette was to contain exclusive content and Simon Black and Tat Wood saw this move as a way to keep Spectrox at the cutting edge of fandom.

“Audio was the ‘big thing’ in fandom in the mid-1980s, having been part of that whole audio-obsessed movement that we went through pre-VCR,” Simon explains. “I remember picking up a tapezine called Time Listener and a handful of the original Audio Visuals tapes at a convention in Brighton in the mid 1980s, being impressed at the concept and thinking that this could be the way forward for Spectrox. Some time elapsed between that and the Issue 5 tapezine, as we did issues roughly once a year and this was during the programme’s 18-month hiatus, but a friend of mine and contributor was doing a media course at a local college, and had access to a studio and recording equipment which made the whole thing achievable. I had always been very keen that Spectrox was seen as a high quality product and didn’t want to have something that hadn’t been properly crafted, so wanted something that was done in a proper studio rather than the back office bedroom.”

While the idea of trying Spectrox out on tape had been under consideration for some time, it became a reality due to an unexpected circumstance, as Black reveals. “We had recorded a lengthy interview with Richard Franklin at my house in Nottingham with the whole of the DWAS Local Group, but the content was far from ideal and difficult to transcribe, so I hit on the idea of releasing it on audio rather than not at all. I could also feature additional material that I didn’t have room to publish in the printed edition. Another reason for pushing it all out was that I was going to be giving up the ’zine to concentrate on finishing my A-levels, and was handing to over to Tat Wood. The fanzine had quite a lot of material being contributed on spec by this time, and it seemed a shame to waste it all, so with the three factors of the Franklin interview, access to equipment and a lot of extra material, we decided to go for it and decamped to Heanor College for a day to record the new material and edit it all together.” This marks the Spectrox tape out as almost certainly the only Doctor Who tapezine to be recorded in a studio environment.

The billing in the Celestial Toyroom advertisement for Spectrox 5 claimed that this experiment was the “first and probably only time” that such a dual-format approach would be employed on the fanzine. This once-only aspect rapidly became a reality due to factors both of a technical and organisational nature.

In addition to the interview with actor Richard Franklin already mentioned, audio content for this 90-minute bonus included a memorial tribute to Patrick Troughton, who had passed away on 28th March 1987, the all-new Matrix Data Bank and a Local Group report. Also vying for the listener’s attention were interludes of “typically warped Spectrox humour”.

“Was it a success? No, not really,” Simon Black now admits. “I had no idea what I was taking on and the quality of the content varied enormously. I also learned that basic lesson of analogue noise degradation very fast, and whilst the Franklin interview sounded passable on the original recorded cassette, it rapidly became incomprehensible once edited, mastered and then duplicated a couple of generations down. I also wore out my mum’s twin deck Hi-Fi running off copies to sell, and had a real nightmare keeping up with demand. Spectrox had a regular print run of about 400, and we would normally shift about a quarter of that through adverts in Celestial Toyroom, and another couple of hundred at conventions. The master tape was ready about three weeks before a convention and I really had not worked out the maths regarding duplication time. The ’zine was mastered on a C-90 and each one had to be duplicated in real time by my fair hand. I think we did about 200 of the tape, as not everyone wanted one, so that was about 300 hours of sitting there watching the reels roll round. The Hi-Fi died when the rapidly elongating master tape snapped and melted itself onto the tape deck heads (so anyone who received a copy that sounded a little fast now knows why!), thereby prematurely ending the run of the Spectrox tapezine...”

Just under a year later, Spectrox returned in print-only form under the editorship of Tat Wood, who oversaw four printed issues in total. The fanzine closed its doors for good in 1996, a time when many Doctor Who fanzines, both printed and on audio, were disappearing from view due to the arrival of the Internet, which changed the creative focus of fandom forever.

Reviewing Spectrox’s sole foray into audio seems a little like missing the point, as for the greater part of its existence it was a printed fanzine – and a very good one at that, both under Simon’s and Tat Wood’s editorship. However, Who’s Listening is about tapezines and therefore it is that that we consider foremost.

(To be continued...)