VOICES 4 ISSUES 20 - 25 1979 - 82

Paperback 6" x 9" 389 pages £10.26

Voices, the Manchester based magazine of working class writing, ran for 31 issues between 1972 and 1984. It included such talents as Jimmy McGovern, John Cooper Clark, Tony Marchant, Jim Arnison and Ken Worpole. This reprint contains the complete text and graphics of the entire series in 5 volumes (available separately).

From the INTRODUCTION to Voices 4

During this period Voices became part of the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers. Rick Gwilt welcomed this development: 

Since fairly early days, VOICES has been national in scope without ever evolving a structure to match its content. The Federation of Worker Writers represents possibly the biggest single new contribution to working-class culture in recent years - certainly in the field of literature - and yet, despite a wealth of occasional and local publications, it has never had a regular national mouthpiece. The two organisations already share a common perspective; now VOICES has a ready-made management group and the Federation has a ready-made publishing group, which will continue to be based in Manchester. 

The long running feud with the Arts Council Literature Panel, whose criticism about Voices being "successful in a social, therapeutic sense, but not by literary standards" continued to rankle, took another slightly more positive turn noted by Rick Gwilt in his editorial to issue 22:  

Over the last few years we have been changing steadily, moving away from propagandist writing and towards writing in which people draw more directly on their own experience. Blake Morrison, in his unpublished report to the Arts Council, has noted this with approval: " The weakness of the magazine has been to print bad poems and articles simply because they express "good", ie. politically acceptable, opinions: shallow and overt propagandising has been more common than work of literary merit. - - - I noticed a definite improvement both in the contributions to, and the production of VOICES between the first issue of 1975 and the recent VOICES 20..."

Wendy Whitfield edited issue 23 with a call for more feminist writing. John Gowling edited issue 24 to champion other monorities:

Inside and outside of Voices we have been saying for years that in Voices' pages we want to see more writing on the Nuclear Threat and more writing by black and women writers. We can only express and reflect the entire spectrum of our lives if black conscious and feminist writing appears in our pages; and to this aim Voices does discriminate in favour of black and feminist writing. We want no-one to be looking at the mainstream of working class writing through rainy windows. So Voices belongs to all of us.

Jimmy McGovern warned that Voices was being hi-jacked in his article in issue 25. And more pointedly in an interview with Tom Woodin:

1979 - 1989 was a bloody awful time to be a white working class male ... The trade unions (built largely by white working class males) were smashed. The factories and mines and shipyards (staffed largely by white working class males) were closing. Feminists were telling us we were sexist pigs. Blacks were telling us we were racist bastards. Gays were telling us we were homophobic bigots ... The trendy left... had a mental image of us: a foul-mouthed fascist skinhead with a tattoo on his arm and a spanner in his hand ... And quite a few people in the Fed thought something similar. ... I think that's why I packed the Fed in ... In the future, I decided, my identity would be 'white, working class male'. I would still attack racism and sexism and homophobia, yes, but I would be a white, working class male and other decent, white working class males would be my true brothers.

On the purely literary front – this period saw the appearance of possibly Voices finest work of prose – Mick Weaver’s four part Michael’s Story about Irish building workers in London

Ken Clay 2008