A lovely photo exists of Bowie on a train reading Britain’s number one toilet-humor comic Viz, home to Johnny Fartpants, “Nobby’s Piles,” Sid the Sexist, and (my favorite) the Vibrating Bum-Faced Goats. He’s laughing helplessly, as if someone is tickling him. If this surprises you, bear in mind that at Glastonbury in June 1971 Bowie amused himself by performing an alternative version of “Oh! You Pretty Things” called “I’d Like a Big Girl with a Couple of Melons.”
Viz was founded in 1979 in Newcastle-upon-Tyne by DHSS clerical officer Chris Donald, his brother Simon, and their friend Jim Brownlow. Its blend of proto-Onion news satire and wickedly obscene parodies of children’s comics such as The Beano (see p. 51) found a ready audience, especially among students. Given how much he liked Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s “Derek and Clive” routines, Bowie’s enthusiasm for Viz makes total sense. In 1990 he presided over the “pop page”—a nod to the magazine’s origins as a fanzine—where bands were offered the chance to be included in Bowie’s Top Ten in exchange for a cash bribe: “It’s good to see that bands can score a hit for the very reasonable sum of £5,” he wrote. “You can’t buy much for a fiver these days. A couple of copies of my new single perhaps. But you’d only want one really. Unless you were buying one for a friend.”