Okay my birthday is on the 29th but the 30th July issue is close enough! I was one small day old when this magazine hit the stands, so I thought in honour of these 30 years that have passed I would read this issue and write my personal responses to it as I go. So Leo of me, I know. Surely issue 1282 of Jackie perfectly represents the world that I was born into and so reading this will reveal to me the deep truths of my existence….here we go!
The Cover
After all these weeks of reading them, I am now an expert on what makes a good Jackie cover and so I feel pretty confident giving this one an overall rating of 8/10. The issue is subtitled ‘A Peach of An Issue’ and the cover model is happily holding a peach up to her mouth. Presumably she is going to eat the peach whilst reading her copy of the magazine. This seems like a foolish endeavour as we all know eating a peach is a messy task and future archivists will be very unhappy with the sticky state of the magazine you’ve left behind. But she looks happy and I appreciate the effort that has gone into making sure the cover is a perfect representation of the subtitle. Five points for this. Two points go to the advertisement of its greatest feature ‘BROS or WET WET WET, Who’s Best?’ I’m glad to know that I entered the world in the midst of such an important cultural debate and I can’t wait to read on to find out who won. A final point for the back cover, a photograph of Belinda Carlisle, because she had that good song and it’s nice when there’s a poster of a woman isn’t it?
Hot G
Hot G, formerly Hot Gossip, was a Jackie feature that filled its readers in on the hottest celebrity gossip of the week. I’m taking this as a test of my 80s pop culture knowledge; how many of these people do I know?
The round up of gossip mentions the release of a new Pet Shop Boys single, Michael Jackson’s overworked road crew, Kim Wilde, and the news that Terence Trent D’Arby will not be recording a duet with good pal Rod Stewart. My pop culture knowledge so far is pretty solid, but I admit I only know who D’Arby is because I’ve read about him in Jackie over the past few weeks…
Other celebs mentioned in Hot G include those I am familiar with: Johnathan Ross, Bros, 
and George Michael, and lots that I have not: Neil Tennant, Sam Brown, Babakoto, John Wesley Harding and a woman named Taylor who is very unfortunately being mocked for her weight. The Daily Mail’s ”sidebar of shame” and Heat magazine’s “Circle of Shame” apparently weren’t the first to be printing this sort of thing.
My top pick from Hot G would have to be the terrifying Rockhead Bendy Toy ‘Wacko Jacko Puppets.’ No further comments.
Teenscope
I can’t resist a horoscope, I love reading them and I follow Astro Poets on Twitter for my weekly updates.
My favourite part of reading magazines when I was younger was looking up my 
horoscope and insisting that it was 100% true. So I am very excited to see what my horoscope was for the first week of my life. Here’s what Jackie’s resient astrologer had to say:
LEO
You’ve been in a v.good mood recently (totally true, I was very happy to have been born) and along the way you’ve been impressing more than one boy! (Almost definitely true. I just know that other baby on the ward was eyeing me up). Keep it up, soon they’ll all be falling at your feet (also true! My life has been one of constant praise and admiration).
So there’s proof, horoscopes are real. I am also very happy to discover via this feature that Kate Bush had her 30th Birthday on the 30th July 1988 and I can confirm that I too was dressed like this over the weekend.
Dear Ellie
After Cathy and Claire came Ellie, and both me and Rosie have been fascinated by the problem pages we’ve read throughout this internship. It’s so bizarre to read the intimate medical and often disturbing personal problems that girls wrote in to the magazine and we’ve really had to try and adjust the way we read them. It’s hard to imagine a magazine being your first, let alone your only port of call for advice in this age of Google and the NHS helpline but for a lot of teenagers in the 1970s and 80s magazines like Jackie really were all they had. In this issue girls have written in to ask about how to convince their parents they want to be vegetarians, being sexually assaulted at a school disco, and a boy has written in for advice on approaching his soon to be 16 year old girlfriend about having sex for the first time. These three very different letters are quite a good representation of the broad scope of problems that the magazine was asked to address. 
Often it’s jarring to go from one letter about vegetarianism or a girl asking for information on a certain type of work she’d like to pursue, to letters about sexual assault or rape, which are sadly very common. Medical problems are also common and the magazine introduced the Dear Doctor feature after the introduction of the pill in order to address a wider range of problems. It’s hard to imagine now that medical information would have been hard to come by for teenage girls but as Gayle Anderson (formerly known as Cathy and Claire) wrote in a 2016 article,
At the start of the 1980s, long before the internet and social media, I was Google for thousands of preadolescent girls in the UK. I’d receive sackloads of letters – up to 500 each week – asking for advice on everything from love bites to loneliness. I received scabs stuck to pieces of Sellotape, urine samples in Charlie perfume bottles.
It’s especially strange to think of how recently this was the reality of so many girls in this country, and how much has changed on this front in my lifetime. As prevalent as magazines were to my teenage life in the 2000s I can’t imagine ever feeling that they were something I’d turn to for serious advice. I certainly read problem pages and learnt some (probably not very useful) things about sex and the teenage body from magazines like More, Just Seventeen and Cosmopolitan but luckily I felt I could talk to my parents or doctor, or failing that Jeeves during my 30 minutes of dial-up internet time, before I thought about sending any urine samples or scabs off in the post.
Battle of the Bands
There’s a lot more I could write about from this issue but I know that if you’re still reading at this point it’s to find out who was better, Bros or Wet Wet Wet.
It was very close but Bros just edged it with 50 points to 49 ½ . On clothes, prettiness, and dancing Bros came out on top but Wet Wet Wet had the edge when it came to songs and live performance. The former obviously counts for more in the land of teen girls’ magazines, where pin-ups ruled (swoon).
So there’s my round up of the 30 year old magazine as a 30 year old reader. I have learned that the world I was born into was one of great pop music, weird toys, and a fabulously dressed Kate Bush. As I was taking my first breath teenage girls all over the country were gearing up to buy their weekly Jackie; their friend, confidant and big sister.
By Katie Taylor.
LJMU Special Collections & Archives 