‘Bags of Fun’: The surreal XTC and Viz Comic collaboration

Posted On December 17, 2024December 17, 2024

Since its launch in 1979, Newcastle’s Viz Comic has become something of a British institution, delivering a cast of characters that mirror The Beano or The Dandy in a foul-mouthed Bizarro universe. Initially founded as a zine adjacent to the punk movement by the teenage brothers Chris and Simon Donald (costing 20p but 30p to students), Viz continued to circulate at a breathtaking pace across the 1980s, recruiting the ‘classic’ line-up of Simon Thorp and Graham Dury and reaching a commercial peak in the early 1990s as the UK’s third biggest selling publication.

Conceived in an era when swearing was still genuinely shocking—just a few years after the Sex Pistols’ notorious appearance on Bill Grundy’s Today show—and transgressive comedy was far from mainstream, Viz found success with its irreverent brand of schoolboy humour and perpetually adolescent gags. Relentlessly poking at the boundaries of respectability and good taste, it revelled in its love of toilet humour and inventive profanity.

Amid its puerility lies a sharp satirical send-up of the country’s tabloids pushing the red tops’ salacious sensationalism to surreal absurdity, and have found a new lease of life online with over 40 years of their Letterbocks, Top Tips, and phoney advertisements unleashed to a new audience on social media.

Largely inhabiting the fictitious Geordie town of Fulchester is a gallery of classic characters from Sid the Sexist, Roger Mellie, Norbert Colon, and Biffa Bacon, but one chap who has particular problems with his mobility is Buster Gonad, the boy with “unfeasibly large testicles”. The premise is self-explanatory; Gonad is afflicted with bollocks the size of two space hoppers and burdened with wheelbarrowing his plums in a series of scrotum-centred mishaps and adventures. Created by Dury in 1986, Gonad was selected by the Viz team for their first foray into novelty music.

Available by mail order and as limited stock in Ladbroke Grove’s Rough Trade record store in 1987, ‘Bags of Fun with Buster’ by Johnny Japes and His Jesticles was the group’s first and only 7″ single they ever released. All in on the fun, ‘Johnny Japes’ was cult folk-punk eccentric John Otway, and ‘The Jesticle’s was XTC’s Andy Partridge and Dave Gregory, coupled with journalist and now Liberal Democrat activist Neville Farmer.

Any good? Well, for a magazine that features “our readers have understood the concept of buyer’s remorse since 1979” as its tagline, Viz never claimed to promise much. XTC’s signature jerky bass throbs along atop cod-reggae, replete with atonal honking and seaside organ, Otway delivering every line like “bags of fun with Buster and his super scrotal cluster” with absolute vim.

It’s a busy cut, featuring pac-man death spirals, ‘Entrance of the Gladiators’ circus theme, and an irate bus driver refusing Gonad’s entry, but its most surprising creative turn is the drop into spaghetti western guitar and Enya piano (yes, really). If you want more, there’s the ‘Scrotal Scratch Mix’ B-side, a remix of the single featuring rigorous scratching of the titular ‘jesticles’.

Viz would see another music release in the atrocious 1992 cover of ‘Summer Holiday’ as The Fat Slags, produced by Mike Stock and Pete Waterman, but it’s ‘Bags of Fun with Buster’ that goes anywhere near capturing the comic’s crude charm.

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