Today is ILLEGAL TALES 20TH BIRTHDAY!
On April 20th and 21st 1988 Sting was in Milano for a couple of nights
at the Arena (...Nothing Like The Sun Tour).
This was considered the X-day
to launch what was called then Sting's Magazine from their creators, a new
fanzine totally devoted to Sting & The Police.
I joined them from the
first day they issued it, even if I didn't work for that first issue, I started
working from the second one issued a couple of months later, but I decided to
join them from that day; it was a mutual 'need'.
To tell the truth, the
creators kept themselves out of the magazine after three issues (money,
brothers, is always a matter of money), so I decided to keep everything on my
shoulders and give it a longer life (passion, brothers, passion).
From
Sting's Magazine it became ILLEGAL TALES, as it was about the three of them, not
only Sting.
Month by month and year by year, it became more and more well
known, not only from the members of the band, but from the record company as
well, from the management in UK (I will never say enough thanks to Tina, Dave
and Wendy, and later on to everyone at The Police management) and from Tv
stations in Italy as well as radios.
The computer era with internet made me
wanna open a website (www.illegaltales.com from 1998) and abandon the paper
version.
Illegal Tales brought me to have Sting on tv talking about the
fanzine and his records, brought me to collaborate with Andy Summers on his
several italian tours, being on tv playing with him ... too many memories my
friends...
The success of Illegal Tales on the web, drove me to work on a
specific web for Stewart Copeland...you all know how it went....
I still
take a look at some of those earlier efforts on paper....
So thank you
ILLEGAL TALES, 20 years by my side...not too many fanzines grow up in such a
fabulous way!
And thanks to all I met because of that little creation that
became bigger than what I could expect!
Ciao ciao
Giovanni