karen and pete allen

They both recently joined us here.

It was their hard work and efforts that reintroduced us to Glenn's music. When we first discovered there was a fan club, we couldn't believe it - we had always wondered what Glenn had been up to through the 'lean' years, and after receiving our first issue a whole new world opened up for us! Since then we've done everything we can to promote the music which has given us such pleasure over the years.

Nothing beat the anticipation of the next issue arriving in the mail with a two page hand-written letter from Glenn prominently displayed - it gave that personal touch that emails and web sites just can't match!

These days after running various incarnations of this web site and also now responsible for CTC, we understand how things must have 'gotten prohibitively expensive. The key is to have full participation from as many members as possible which is what we try to do with CTC. Luckily for us, the production of the fanzine is more or less free (other than time and effort), whereas 'The Voice' had printing and postage costs on top of that and due to lack of new or existing subscriber renewals it must have just got too much. The popularity of the Internet didn't help, as news was able to be diseminated so quickly.

I still have my Membership card which I still carry around with me

Werner, David,

Thanks for the kind words from both of you.

Yep, Karen and I are still going strong, still heavily into our Glenn and as grateful as any fan that sites such as CTC and Glenn's official site actually exist, even though we still have some contact with Glenn and/or his mum, Sheila.

David, you are spot on in what you say. Printing costs had risen out of all proportion over the years so the actual production of a Fan Club magazine had become virtually impossible. But the biggest change, I suppose, was the net. Like any business these days the net, email and real time access has completely changed the way we all work. The fan club, being a postal service, could not compete with the internet where information is available instantly. Effectively, anything we had to tell the fans was basically old news by the time it got to them, as a result the fan club membership base began to fall to a level that could not sustain it... as you say, participation is the key. I'm not decrying the net, but a certain personal touch is lost when ventures like The Voice cease to exist. Such is life !!!

I'm just glad we were able to have had the experience in the first place because we've made a number of friends worldwide.

It's amazing when you consider it all began through a letter from Karen to Dave Ling at the then RAW magazine asking how we could get in touch with Glenn as he had just returned to action and we wanted to tell him how great it was for all us fans. Dave actually met Glenn that week for an interview for RAW, gave him Karen's letter and Glenn, as Dave puts it, stuffed the letter in his pocket so Dave thought that was the end of it.

Well, apparently, Glenn read the letter as soon as he got back to his hotel and, on hotel paper, we received a persoanl letter from him to our home address within 2 days. Now, Karen being Karen, she had given Glenn some honest, heartfelt views in her letter (she's good at that!) and she must have hit the right chords because Glenn told us to get in touch with Tony Perry, the Trapeze manager, to arrange us to meet Glenn back stage at the forthcoming Trapeze gig at Brierly Hill in the West Midlands, UK, in spring 1994.

We did that and, guess what, we met Glenn at that very gig .... the first time I had met my idol! I was gobsmacked! We must have made some sort of impression, or Karen must of at least, because the next thing we knew, around July time, we got a phone call from Glenn who was back in the UK, and he wanted to come to our house on the Wirral (10 miles from Liverpool) to discuss us setting up and running his worldwide fan club. So imagine that, here I am 3 months after meeting my idol and he's sitting in my house talking to me and my wife. Unreal or what! The best thing out of all of it is he's still the greatest vocal talent on the planet but he's not my idol any more, he's my friend now and always will be! God bless him!

Hope you liked this little story. It's a great one to look back on in years to come.

Well, thanks again for the kind words.

Keep on funkin'
Pete.

Hey!

Glad you joined!!

I still have all the fanclub mags and the card

Great Stuff!