HAPPY CHEESE

Interview with Christopher Push Dawes. 26/05/2020

Q1: How & when did you get involved with the local music scene?

A1: It was in 1981, when I was in my first year at the UEA. I’m a local lad – I grew up in Swaffham in West Norfolk – and I’d been coming to Norwich for gigs for a couple of years before that, but I became more interested in the local scene when I was living here and had the opportunity to see bands pretty much every night, many of them of local outfits.

Q2: What prompted the idea of a music magazine (Happy Cheese) and why Happy Cheese, does Cheese have emotions?

A2: I started reading the weekly music papers when I was about 14 – Sounds was always my favourite when I was at school because of its early punk coverage – and from there I started writing about music for my own amusement. I used to write reviews of the records that I bought in an exercise book. I started at the UEA in October 1980, but I caught glandular fever over the Christmas holidays so I had to spend six weeks at home. It was during this period that I started writing more and more of these record reviews and by the time I was able to start back at the UEA in February 1981 I had decided that I wanted to be a music journalist. I think the first issue of Happy Cheese came out a few months later. I think it must have been in May or June 1981.

As for the name Happy Cheese, I’ve no memory at all about where that came from. I don’t know if it was my idea or someone else’s and I was always torn by what I thought of it. Sometimes I thought it was a bit peculiar and quite memorable, but sometimes I thought it was bloody ridiculous and felt pretty embarrassed about it. As for whether or not cheese has emotions, I’d say that depends what you do with it.

Q3: How was the magazine put together and produced?

A3: There were four of us involved in putting together the first issue. Myself, Carol Smith (my girlfriend at the time), David Smith (Carol’s brother) and Mark Lane. We all came from the Swaffham area and we’d been friends at school. By the third issue, a few people that I knew from the UEA had also got involved, including Alan Bullimore, Ant Cadley and Tom Smith (in his days before Gee Mr Tracy).

The issues were always a mixture of xeroxed pages, some of which Carol used to do on the quiet during her lunch breaks at work, and text-only pages that we’d print ourselves using an old Gestetner machine. You had to create a wax paper stencil using a typewriter with the ribbon removed, clip the stencil over an inked roller on the machine, and then crank the handle to send paper between the rollers. The youth club in Swaffham had a Gestetner in the office, so Carol, David and I would go down there while the youth club disco was on. We’d do it over several evenings and it would take us hours. It was an archaic process even then!

Because the little group of us that started Happy Cheese came from Swaffham, we didn’t really see ourselves as a Norwich fanzine, although that is where we sold the vast majority of the copies. We used to also try to cover some of the bands from other places in Norfolk, especially some of the King’s Lynn bands.

Q4: How many were circulated and where could you get them?

A4: I think we usually did around 300 or maybe 400 copies. We did get up to

1,000 for a couple of the issues, but those were the two issues that we gave away free. We’d sell the fanzine in the record shops in Norwich – we always seemed to do particularly well in HMV – and places like the Freewheel bookshop and the little indoor market on St Benedicts. We used to take them round to record shops in Lynn, Swaffham, Dereham and a few other places as well. We’d sell them at gigs too, which was quite a laugh.

I sold a copy of one of the early issues to John Peel at the Gala Ballroom one night. I tried to give it to him, but he insisted on paying for it and also buying me a drink. A couple of nights later, he mentioned the fanzine on his show and read out my address, which was in the mag somewhere. We had quite a few orders from that. People would send us postal orders for 30p or something and we’d send them a fanzine.

I sent each issue to John Peel after that. I think he mentioned us two or three times in total.

Q5: In issue seven there is a lot of local band coverage, what was your remit for content?

A5: We always tried to do a mixture of local stuff and national bands that we could get interviews with. The big local names for us were bands like The Higsons, The Farmer’s Boys, Screen 3 and Serious Drinking. I was never big mates with any of them, but I did know Jem Moore from Serious Drinking pretty well. He wrote a piece about the 1982 World Cup for the fanzine. Other Norwich bands we covered included The Happy Few, Popular Voice, Gothic Girls, The Disrupters, The Crabs, Vital Disorders, Ton Ton Macoute and Terminal Fun, plus King’s Lynn outfits such as The Nuclear Sockets, Reaction Process and Winston, and others like The Plastic Sandwiches from Dereham.

Getting interviews with national bands was always just a question of blagging your way backstage at a gig and then chatting to whoever you could get hold of. I got pretty good at that and managed to get interviews with the likes of Lol Tolhurst from The Cure, Kirk Brandon from Theatre Of Hate, Claire Grogan from Altered Images, Pete De Freitas from Echo & The Bunnymen, Vaughan Toulouse from Department S, and a big bunch of Pigbag people. Another one was John Cooper-Clarke. I’d been interviewing him for several minutes when he looked down at my tape recorder and said, “You do realise you haven’t got a cassette in that machine, don’t you?”. He was very nice about it and waited around while I rushed off to find a pen and paper from somewhere.

Q6: Was it always A5 format and 20p (this is written in pen on my copy)

A6: We changed the format all the time. We did seven issues in total, two of which were A4 and three of which were A5. We also did one issue in an A6 format, so half the size of A5, and another which was a series of A4 sheets stapled together and put into a half-open envelope. I think the price was generally 25p, but the last issue we put out at 20p. The A6 issue and the envelope issue were both given away free. I remember Dave Guttridge writing about us in his Is It Fish? fanzine and saying “Happy Cheese is sometimes free and usually worth it”!!

Q7: Why did the magazine end?

A7: I think the last issue was around June 1983. I was just leaving the UEA and I had plans to move to London. I’d been contacted by Johnny Waller, the reviews editor at Sounds, who had seen a couple of issues of the fanzine and he asked me to write some live reviews for him. The first one to get published was an Elvis Costello gig at the UEA. Johnny was very encouraging, but unfortunately he quit Sounds a few months later and I couldn’t get any work from the new reviews editor. I did manage to get a few pieces published in a few other magazines over the next couple of years, though, and in 1985 I started writing for Melody Maker. I’ve used the pseudonym Push since then I ended up working for Melody Maker for 10 years, writing more than 1,000 reviews and features during that time. Since then, I’ve edited three magazines, starting with Muzik in 1995, and I’m currently the editor of Electronic Sound. None of which would have happened if it hadn’t been for Happy Cheese.