Just Seventeen Forever!

It was far too much fun to be called work...

Hello! *Waves from the writing cave, wild-eyed and highly caffeinated.

As I’m trying to crack a book deadline I thought I’d share a piece I wrote for a brilliant independent magazine called Friends on the Shelf, which you can find out about here. I’ve always been obsessed with magazines, so it was a real pleasure to reminisce about the Carnaby Street days.

In October 1983 something terribly exciting happened: the launch of Just Seventeen.

Cool, sassy and fizzling with attitude, it seemed to be exactly what the new generation of teenage girls had been waiting for. The launch issue featured a cover model wearing boxing gloves. For this nineteen year-old it was thrilling.

Magazines were everything to a girl back then. Okay, some gravitated towards the likes of Sounds and NME, and a tiny proportion (bizarrely to me) didn’t seem to need any magazines at all. My God, it seemed like not needing food, or air! But most of us scrabbled for info on all the important stuff - friendships, relationships, maddening parents, school, periods, chaotic complexions - from magazines made just for us. 

Jackie was literally the highlight of my life, growing up in rural West Yorkshire in the 70s. A beacon of Clockhouse fashion, Donny Osmond posters and tips on how to kiss (‘Practice on your arm!’).

When Just Seventeen arrived, I was working on Jackie in Dundee. It was my dream job and a fantastic place to be. But now this young upstart was stealing our readers. How dare they!

One Monday morning I opened the Guardian, as we all did then, as that’s where the media jobs were advertised. We all pored over them forensically.

Generally, a junior writer’s job on Caged & Aviary Birds was as thrilling as it got.

But this week it wasn’t Caged & Aviary Birds or even Model Railway Enthusiast magazine that caught my eye.

It was JUST SEVENTEEN!!!

Wanted - Beauty Editor, the job ad read.

Aw, shit. I didn’t know anything about beauty. On Jackie I’d manned the letters page, had a stint as Fashion Editor and written the horoscopes, features and multi-choice quizzes.

You know the ones:

Q: There’s a job you desperately want but you lack any knowledge of the subject. Do you:

a. Forget all about it?

b. Apply half heartedly, convinced you won’t even bag an interview?

Or c. Give it all you’ve got? 

I chose ‘c’, buying the Vogue Body & Beauty Book (a hallowed tome published in 1977) in preparation. I swotted up on face masks and something called 'the T-zone' as if prepping for an exam. There was nothing I didn’t know about eyebrow plucking by the time interview day rolled around. 

I was interviewed by David Hepworth, Just Seventeen’s launch editor, who didn’t ask me a single question about lash lengthening mascaras or blackhead extraction. All that swotting for nothing! When I received the call to say I’d got the job, I slid down the wall in my shared Dundee flat and crumpled amongst the desiccated pot plants.

Just Seventeen’s offices were in Carnaby Street. I turned up for my first day wearing brown cords and a voluminous brown cardigan, to hide what I thought of as my collossal bum.

No way was that being unleashed, in the London media!

I was so self conscious and nervous I couldn’t even go into the office. Instead, I prowled up and down Carnaby Street at least four times. The shop beneath Just Seventeen’s office was a tacky souvenir place that sold ‘willy warmers’ shaped like elephants’ trunks. I stared at them, heart thumping, and finally mustered the courage to drag my brown cardigan-swathed self in the bloody door and up to the second floor.

I was hit by the heady atmosphere of the large open plan office: chatter and laughter (everyone looked SO cool), phones trilling, music blaring from the record player, the clatter of manual typewriters and - yes - wafts of cigarette smoke mingling with the scent of Shock Waves hairspray.

But what impressed me the most wasn’t the fact that a fellow staffer had just dashed off to interview Tom Cruise - in Venice - but the way my colleagues would bowl into the office each morning and set about eating the toast they’d just bought from the cafe down the road. 

TOAST FROM A CAFE!!!

Was this how people lived in London? It was the most decadent thing I’d ever heard! 

Cafe toast! Decadent days!

Pretty soon I too was a consumer of cafe toast while battering out my beauty features with Wham! and Neneh Cherry blaring out from the office record player. And there was a pleasing perk to my job. I was flooded with Rimmel and Barry M cosmetics from the beauty PRs. There was more than an entire office of around 15 twenty-somethings could possibly use - so I’d dispatch jiffy bags stuffed with nail polishes and lipsticks to my mum in Scotland.

Meanwhile, my drab mousey locks had been cropped and bleached white blonde (everyone wanted to look like Yazz), and the lumpen brown cardi had been discarded. The Just Seventeen girls were now firm friends, and there was an office uniform of sorts - bleached ripped Levi 501s (this was the era of Nick Kamen in the Levi’s launderette ad). 

I loved my job as Beauty Editor, advising our readers how to backcomb their hair like Bananarama and whip up a face mask from mashed banana and oats. But I was keen to move over to features as that seemed more varied and exciting. Interviewing The Cure’s Robert Smith about his make-up tips helped me to jump over to the features department.

At features meetings almost any madcap idea was given the green light. When fellow staffer Jenny - still one of my closest friends - and I decided to ‘investigate’ ghosts at a country hotel, it was really an excuse for a weekend caper. The Just Seventeen team shared flats and went out together virtually every night (the pay wasn’t huge but somehow we could afford it). We’d nurse our hangovers over enormous jacket potatoes - with a fried egg on top, if it had been a particular wild night. 

We rampaged around Soho with our battered A-Zs, ‘borrowing’ clothes from the Just Seventeen fashion cupboard (which had been called in from PRs for shoots) and wearing them on nights out. Said clothes would then be given a quick squirt of Lulu perfume (everyone smoked) so ’no one would know’ they’d been danced in until 3 am. We went on holidays en masse - to Paris, Berlin, Florence and even on a road trip to New Mexico. 

The Just Seventeen gang were my chosen family. If went on holiday without them - with a boyfriend for instance - I’d miss them so much I’d write letters to ‘the office’ while I was away. Even then, I’d count the days until I was back at my typewriter again. We all worked like the clappers, pulling late nighters on press night and occasionally using the office as a handy hotel room after a night out. Kipping under a desk on the scratchy carpet tiles wasn’t unheard of. 

It wasn’t all parties and pop stars. We were the only teen magazine at the time to cover issues such as Clause 28. Just Seventeen’s original agony aunt, Melanie McFadyean, and Anita Naik who followed her were highly regarded as dispensers of clear-eyed and impeccably researched advice.

By the time I became the mother of a daughter, and she reached her teens, the internet had arrived, and with it seemingly endless sources of advice. And people talked about stuff. Girls were no longer worried about getting pregnant by ‘passing a boy on the stairs’ and teen imagines were no longer those vital sources of advice. 

I write novels now, and whenever I do a book event I’m amazed by the response from women from their forties upwards when I mention Just Seventeen. Everyone seems to remember the T-shirt:

The T-shirt!

Back in the mid-eighties, we advertised a Just Seventeen ‘open day’ in the magazine. ‘Come and meet us!’ we said. Health and safety never occurred to us as hundreds of readers poured into our office. It was mayhem. One girl screamed at me for treading on her foot.

It was a mad thing to do, but how lucky I feel to have been there, done that - and yes, I still have the T-shirt. 

Love,

Fiona xx

PS Exciting news! If you’ve ever had the urge to climb out of the bathroom window and run away (not just me, surely?) then my new novel is for you! The Woman Who Ran Away From Everything is out next Wednesday (March 14), and you can pre-order here!