When Saturday Comes

When Saturday Comes (WSC) is a monthly magazine about football, first published in London in 1986. "It aims to provide a voice for intelligent football supporters, offering both a serious and humorous view of the sport, covering all the topics that fans are likely to talk about, whether serious or trivial." WSC is still edited by Andy Lyons, who co-founded the magazine with Mike Ticher.

The magazine started out in 1986 as a bi-monthly, independently published fanzine. However, by 1988 it had developed and came to prominence, available in newsagents nationwide.

(Read more at Wikipedia.)

Links To Peel

"Fanzines, of which WSC must stand, with the Absolute Game, as right marker, have rekindled and redirected my enthusiasm for football in a manner I would have gauged impossible after Heysel. … May your team win when Saturday comes. (List of exceptions sent to genuine students on application.)"
(John Peel, Foreword to 'The 1st Eleven", a retrospective of WSC’s first 11 issues)

Huge football fan John Peel was an early supporter of WSC, reportedly sending a note of encouragement to the editors after the first issue, and later provided a foreward to a collection of the magazine’s first 11 issues. The DJ was also interviewed by WSC in 1987 and continued to provide pubic backing in his shows.

The DJ seemed heartened by the emergence of the new fan culture that grew up around the game from the late 1980s, epitomised by the popularity of football fanzines, with WSC at the heart of this development as a national publication not aligned with a single club.

As well as his continuing support for music fanzines, associated with punk and later indie, Peel had previously been a big fan of Liverpool-based The End, focused on "music, beer and football". In a happy omen, WSC shared its name with the title of a song by the Undertones.

In 2016 interview, WCS editor Andy Lyons picked out the support of Peel as a personal highlight of the first 30 years of the magazine:

"Personally my highlights have related to John Peel. Somebody wrote in after our third issue with a cassette tape of his show – this was around 1986 – when he had read out a few lines from the new issue, which was our post-World Cup issue. And then more recently somebody sent us a link to a sound file of his show from 1992, on the day the launch of the Premier League was announced. There was a news bulletin in the middle of his show, and on that they had a quote from Graham Kelly and a comment from me – I don’t remember doing this, by the way – saying I thought this would be a bad thing for football. It cut back to John Peel and he mentioned that he’d got the new issue of WSC that day and was going to read it on the train home. That sort of stuff [I liked], and finding out other people I admired were readers too."[1]

Peel in WSC

(Please add more information if known.)

Interview

WSC 10 (Sept/Oct 1987)

(On whether football or music had been the greatest love of his life): JP: "Erm, difficult to compare the two really. I suppose I can’t think of any musical equivalent to the feeling I felt when Alan Kennedy scored in the Parc des Princes. I can’t think of anything to match that musically. I actually thought, if I die now, I won’t care, you know, nothing could ever be as good as this again … “ [2]

Letter

WSC 57 (Nov 1991)

About being mistaken for a vagrant by FA chief Graham Kelly outside GLR radio station. [3]

Mentioned

WSC 156 (Feb 2000): Call yourself a football fan? – Michael Palin

"The high point of my footballing career was playing at Wembley in a charity game as a curtain raiser for a schoolboy international, England v Germany, with 60,000 there. I was in Tommy Steele’s Showbiz XI, against a Radio One team who had John Peel in goal …" [4]

WSC 227 (Jan 2006): Season to be cheerful

"And so, to adapt a line from the introduction that the late John Peel provided for a WSC compilation, merry Christmas and goodwill to all men (list of exceptions sent to genuine students on application)" ... [5]

WSC 260 (Oct 2008): All played out

"Elton John had his Watford, Rod Stewart his Scotland, for sure, and John Peel always made a point of reading out the football scores at festivals like Reading and Buxton, though to many of the assembled cross-legged, heavy-lidded hairies, he might as well have been reading out the results of Crufts, so irrelevant were they to them – he was booed for his efforts" … [6]

WSC 283 (Sept 2010): Stokoe, Sunderland And '73

"As a Sunderland supporter born nine years later, I have, on occasion, been accused of intergenerational grumpiness towards the club's 1973 FA Cup win. Acutely aware of the folklore that surrounds it – Bob Stokoe's trilby, John Peel's favourite ever gig (the Faces in the town a week after the semi-final), street parties and rented colour TVs – I've witnessed more rain-soaked half-time raffles drawn by members of the winning squad, while play-off hopes foundered or relegation fears worsened, than I care to remember" … [7]

WSC 296 (Oct 2011): Soul survivors

"There was a full 20-year gap before a footballer next turned up on DID. In the intervening years Des Lynam picked Nessun Dorma, and fans such as John Peel, Tom Stoppard and Ken Loach all made football related selections – the latter choosing as his luxury item a radio for the football results" … [8]

WSC 336 (Feb 2015): Great football sitcoms are in short supply because fans’ teams are tragic enough

" … football and comedy rarely mixed. One man changed everything. John Peel brought together the three areas of popular culture that were so important to teenage lives in the 1970s. He played non-chart music, talked incessantly about football and made jokes about both. His obsessive urge to champion all new music willed punk to happen. Fanzines took over from newspapers as our means of communication and it was only a matter of time before football would have its own" … [9]

See Also

• Books
• Football Compilations

Links

• Wikipedia
• Official site