Its hard to believe but 25 years ago today on 30th April 1988 a new fanzine hit the streets of Southampton and who would believe its still here today.
Football fanzines were not new when The Ugly came out for the first time on a sunny Saturday in 1988, the boom had probably started around a year earlier and its true to say fanzines had been popping out of the woodwork at a rate of knots in the previous six months, indeed we werent even the first Southampton one, that fell to Junk Mail run by amongst other the likes of now club historian Dave Juson.
But The Ugly was truer to fanzine roots and after sellingaround 300 copies on the initial run went bigger and better the following season.
The two people behind it were myself Nick Illingsworth along with Clive Foley who will be well remembered amongst older Saints supporters, we conceived the idea, got in a few contributions from mates etc and then in the main wrote most of thet first issue ourselves.
We couldnt afford to get it properly folded and stapled, so the day before was spent putting the pages in the right order, folding them and then stapling them with a normal office stapler, no easy task I can tell you.
n Saturday 30th April 1988 we played West Ham United at the Dell, the result was 2-1 to Saints, the crowd was 15,562 and around 200 of them went home clutching issue 1 of The Ugly Inside, its fair to say that probably around 50% of them knew either myself or Clive, we sold most of the remaining copies the following week at Liverpool and hoovered up the rest in the final game of the season, at home to Luton Town.
At only 50p it was a bargain and we just about broke even, it spurred us on to put out a second issue and the rest as they say is history, although I dont think anyone at the time would have thought that a quarter of a century later we would still be going, in fact if someone had said that it would no longer be paper based but in a space aged invention called the internet we would probably have laughed and put them straight in the next "outs" column.
Its been an eventful 25 years which has at various times seen us sell paper fanzines, produce T Shirts, expand into a record label and put out The Valley Slag's, Legend Of A Saint single and waste any profits we did make on such ventures as well as what became legendary parties. Oh and we have been a newspaper column as well.
Over this time in rough terms we were completely a paper fanzine for 12 1/2 of those years and online for the rest a very neat line to draw I think.
Will we still be here for the nest 25 years, well given this has seen me go from my 20's through my 30's 40's and now my 50's its would seem highly unlikely, 77 year old fanzine editors are not the norm, however you never know, The Ugly Inside has spanned four decades and is still going strong.
Over the years many people have been involved and i havent got the time to mention them, sorry, but they do all know who they are, this piece isnt intended to be an article on the history of the Ugly Inside and what it has or hasnt achieved, its more of a Birthday card to itself, congratulating itself on all these years having passed and still being here and hoping for a few more happy returns to come.