Published on 26 June 2025 by Andrew Owen (5 minutes)
I did my journalism training at the London College of Printing back in the last century when newspapers were still a thing. It was essentially a 13 week NCTJ training course (without NCTJ accreditation) and a crash course in desktop publishing tacked on to a liberal arts degree. It has stood me in very good stead. The liberal arts side was provided by plain-speaking Yorkshireman Roger Fieldsend and philosophical anarchist Barney Summers. It did a pretty good job of filling in the gaps for people like me who didn’t have a classical education. Kathy Hilton taught me almost everything I know about typography and page layout (and enough about QuarkXpress that I was able to get a summer gig as a copy editor in my second year). The computer lab tech taught me how to use Photoshop (before it had layers) and the inner workings of the Apple Macintosh. The professor of journalism was Antony Delano who I kept in touch with for a while. My dissertation supervisor was Paul Charman (who fell out with his friend Mark Knopfler after writing about him for Time Out). And the course director was Chris Horrie. I was absent (due to lack of funds) when they allocated positions on the student newspaper project. I was given the position of copy editor. This meant I wouldn’t get to write for the paper. I was upset when my avant-garde page layouts were rejected, and decided to find a way to get something published. Perhaps I should have learned from Charm’s mistake, but I ended up writing a profile on Chirs. It has some minor inaccuracies, but I present it here as it was published around 30 years ago.
“I can’t stick musicians. I’ve thought about this. I can’t stand them, and being stuck in a studio with them I think that’s my strength I can hear what they can’t.” —Mark E. Smith
On a Monday morning in 1996 a figure resembling Columbo appears at the entrance to a dilapidated building in Back Hill, London, England. His clothes are crumpled, and he has the same nervous air about him. He climbs the stairs and disappears into an office. He has not noticed the egg stain on his tie. In the evening he leaves, now bearing more than a passing resemblance to Bela Lugosi. This pattern continues for several days. On Friday, he still hasn’t noticed the egg stain.
Christopher Horrie was born in Manchester in 1956 to working-class parents. His father was a welder and his mother a school cleaner. He grew up in Gorsehill, Stretford, a stone’s throw away from Manchester United’s Old Trafford ground. As a boy, Horrie had always wanted to play for United and was good enough to be called to a number of try-outs for Berry Boys Youth Football Club. Unfortunately, he broke both his shoulder bones during a game when he was 15 and that was the end of that.
Horrie first had to come to terms with defeat when he failed the eleven-plus exam. He felt totally humiliated. “It remains one of the most vivid things in my life,” he says. The whole experience made him very competitive and insecure.
Later on Horrie joined the Manchester Musician’s Collective which produced bands such as the Buzzcocks and Joy Division. There he met Mark E. Smith and subsequently joined the Fall. “There was no sign we would ever be taken seriously,” he says. “The idea was to destroy rock’n’roll and the music industry, which is an evil thing.”
The main influence on The Fall was Iggy Pop. “It was a disaster for me because I’d spent years perfecting a Jimi Hendrix style,” says Horrie. Smith wanted more of a riotous noise. “I used to say things like ‘Why don’t we play a few Bob Dylan numbers’ and they’d look at me as if I was mad,” says Horrie. He left the band to go to college.
Horrie went to university to get away from home. He studied politics and economics at Warwick University because in 1975, when he was applying, there was a student protest, and it was the first university protest in the UK where riot police were sent in. He was also under the misguided belief that Warwick was about as far away from Manchester as you could get.
Graduating in 1978 with a 2:1 Horrie began working as a freelance sub on a variety of publications including Offshore Engineer and Carpet Review Monthly. He once served as editor of CND’s Sanity magazine. In that role, he doubled as public relations officer. He wanted to boil down the arguments for disarmament, such as ‘bases make targets’ but he fell out with CND over the Greenham Common protest. Originally there was no plan to set up a permanent camp and Horrie tried to persuade CND to disassociate itself from those ‘nutters’ who did. Joan Ruddock was in favor of the encampment, and Horrie was allegedly finally sacked for calling her a ‘stupid c—’.
Horrie has since written for every British national daily and Sunday newspaper, even the Guardian, which he once described as “a hopelessly disorganized newspaper.” He has also worked extensively in television, including a year on World in Action. He has authored and co-authored numerous 14 books, including “Disaster!: the Rise and Fall of News on Sunday", “What is Islam? A Comprehensive Introduction”, “Stick It Up Your Punter!: The Rise and Fall of the Sun", “Sick as a Parrot: The Inside Story of the Spurs Fiasco” and “Fuzzy Monsters: Fear and Loathing at the BBC”.
