The Seagull Love Review is an unofficial Brighton and Hove Albion Football Club fan magazine. Released every month during the football season (August to May), it is currently the only fanzine for BHAFC fans.
Established in the summer of 2008, TSLR was conceived in The City Arms pub, Kennedy Street, Manchester by Co-Editors SS and SS. The life-long friends from Brighton were both journalism graduates with an interest in fanzines of old and decided to launch a new Albion publication for the season 2008/09.
The fanzine was to be an anti-thesis of the colourful and glossy official programmes and offer off-beat features and reviews of fan culture at the football club. Aesthetically it was to mimic publications from the golden age of fanzines - 1987 to 1992 - with no colour printing and the use of cheap, white matted paper stock.
A sister website - www.theseagulllovereview.com - was launched at the same time. Primarily a blog, there is also a shop facility to purchase back issues.
The name is influenced by the 1980s London magazine The Modern Review as one of the Co-Editors was reading the editor's - Toby Young - book How To Lose Friends And Alienate People at the time. You may occasionally here the Co-Editors mimicing the magazine's phrase 'low brow culture for high brow readers' as 'high brow reading for low brow readers'.
The Co-Editors also considered The Flirty Dolphin as a title.
The first issue was sold at the Crewe Alexandra away fixture on Saturday 9th of August 2008 priced at £1. TSLR still costs £1 today and is usually 32 pages long (although TSLR036 - this season's Christmas special stretched to 36 pages off goodness). The fanzine has used catalogue numbers to easily organise issues in the same way a record label organises their releases. The first issue was labelled SLR001, though a T was added soon after. Two parties thrown by the fanzine at the end of the 2008/09 and 2009/10 seasons were also given catalogue numbers, as well as a Goodbye Withdean coffee-table photograph supplement released at the end of the Theatre of Trees.
In it's first season, TSLR was nominated in the now defunct National fanzine Awards for Best Fanzine, Best Blog and Best Editors. The fanzine won fuck all.
You can usually buy TSLR at Falmer from in front of the official club shop. Sometimes you can buy it away from home, but you'll have to search hard for one of our inebriated TSLRites - or sellers, as they're otherwise known.
You can email the fanzine on tslr@hotmail.co.uk
There is also an Albion related-ish TSLR Twitter account you can follow TSLR through plus a rarely updated Facebook page.
