Word up!

In 2004 I was standing in Cardiff Central Railway Station's branch of WH Smiths. I was hungover and readying myself for a four-and-a-half hour train journey home. I had my sarnie, my water and I needed some reading material. The men's magazines looked as terrible as usual but, just I was about to give up the hunt, I spied the headline "Jeff Buckley lives!".

Now, during my first year at university I had become somewhat obsessed with the drowned-warbler that was Mr Jeff Buckley, after the recommendation of the album Grace from a friend, and so to see this headline, staring out at me among the sea of other "look at me" cover lines, felt somewhat serendipitous.

It was a magazine called "Word", something I was vaguely aware of but not really. Anyway, I bought it, I read the article, I very much enjoyed it. The rest of the magazine was equally compelling with intelligent, interesting, well-written, articles, reviews, interviews and so forth. Ever since I have enjoyed Word - mentioning it in my interview for the Cardiff Magazine course - texting Radio 2 when Mark Ellen was on the show asking for advice for aspiring journalists when I was in my university days, reading the blog of David Hepworth, having a subscription in the boom times (on the Christmas list for this year too) and so on.

Then, in October, I won a competition hosted by Word (by submitting this video), to play with the JD session group the New Silver Cornet Band - made of up musicians who have played with the likes of Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, and so on. The day itself passed in a blur of nerves, missed notes, and a flurry of a guitar solo. Afterwards though, during the little interview I did with The Word's Andrew Harrison I offered (because you have to take advantage of the weird ways life can work out and play into your hands) to write something about the gig that was taking place two nights later, featuring Brett Anderson, Jon McClure and Carl Barat, and - perhaps because I had oh-so-subtly mentioned some of my other freelance work including The Guardian, and plenty of music reviewing - he said, "Okay, sure."

Much agonising over words later I emailed the copy off and sat back, waiting to see what would happen. Fast forward to today...after much peering at shelves in various corner shops in Pimlico (if they're not on a corner, what are they?) I found the December issue and there on page 49 is my review in full, complete with a small picture of me and the band from the rehearsal day, complete with a little, in-bold byline. Pretty cool.

Okay, so I got to write it via a competition entry I saw on Twitter (yet another tick in the pro-Twitter column) but hey, I can now say I've written for Word Magazine.

Q is for...

Quantitative Easing.

No I am not really going to talk about quantitative easing, I am not qualified to do so. I could easily quote some experts but there's a risk it wouldn't be quite right so I think I will just stay quiet on the matter.

Q in Scrabble is worth 10 points, and if you play it with the letter 'I' it makes Qi which is the term for the 'Chinese life-force', It's a legitimate play and can make or break a game.

Q Magazine was originally going to be called 'Cue', as in 'to cue a record to play', but, apparently they (being Mark Ellen and David Hepworth (thanks Wikipedia)) thought people might think it was a snooker magazine, so changed it to the far more emblematic Q - and ruined John Virgo's dream of releasing a snooker magazine called Cue in the process.

Q is a troublesome, yet highly interesting, letter and almost all the words it begins with catch your eye in among a sentence of other more humdrum vowels and consonants.

For hardcore Scrabble fans out there, Qaid is a legitimate word too, meaning A Muslim tribal chief, judge or senior official. So there you go. No need to wait for that elusive U to show his horse-shoe form in order to play the killer Q.

Run Run Run...

If you like running you can read two race reports by me in this month's - November's - Runner's World UK. Another little freelance job.

Also, just when I was thinking about writing a post about how much I love The Only Living Boy in New York by Simon and Garfunkel I spotted David Hepworth has written something similar on the Word website about The Boxer.

What I like about The Boxer (on top of what it says on the Word site) is how it starts from such a simple, descending guitar pattern but by the end has turned into this loud, booming affair with big drums and duck whistles - inspired - and the repeating la la laaaas become almost hypnotic, a mantra, a chant. Meaningless but somehow sounding meaningful.

I'll do my post soon. Watch this space. Well not this space, nothing more will appear here. The space where that post will appear. Look, I'll let you know.

Blog looked for a place to sit

Hello again. Yesterday I promised you some thoughts on magazine captions. Here they are:

In many magazines aimed at men, either self-professed lads' mags, or magazines for men that have a veneer, or even facade, of being upmarket, there is golden rule they all follow blindly. Hilarious captions. Every picture must have a side-splittingly funny caption. This is because, you see, men like humour. Of course we do. We like drinking lager, staring at women, and laughing. Ideally at the expense of our mates when they do Something Stupid.

As such, magazine chiefs believe that by giving every picture a witty, offbeat, irreverent caption, they are appealing to LADS! enjoyment. But they're wrong. It's just bloody annoying. I don't need every picture to have a caption, and I certainly don't need them all to be jokes. In fact, the effect is cheapened by having every caption trying to be your friend because if there is one or two genuinely wry observations on an amusing quirk in an image they are buried beneath the avalanche of mediocre ones on every page.

Worst, and Shortlist does this a lot, the writers often give an inanimate object a personality, or an essence of being 'alive', by capitalising the word. So, for example, a ladder becomes "Ladder" and the caption could read. "Ladder wished he'd gone to Spain on holiday" or something equally banal. There was even a job advertised for Shortlist in which you had to submit your own "Shortlist style caption" for a picture of Tim Lovejoy.

Here's mine: Tim wondered why there was a game of PacMan on his t-shirt.

Cornish success

One of my best moments in my short journalism career thus far was when I saw my photography and writing in the glossy print pages of Cornwall Today magazine.

Since then I've done numerous features for them: Tops 10, various walks and a couple of interesting one-off features too. So I was delighted to see the magazine has won the Magazine of the Year award at the Press Gazette Regional Awards bash in London. I'll take a 1% share of the award, maybe?

It's great to see something you've been part of succeed and, irrespective of my connection to it, seeing something that represents the county I come from, being recognised and rewarded for its fine work.

Passing on knowledge

Friday saw an escape from London for the relative quiet of Cardiff to impart what wisdom 16 months of real world journalism have taught me on the current student of the post-graduate magazine option at JOMEC.

Although strange to be back in the old "mag lab", it was nonetheless enjoyable to be able to offer some tips and knowledge on what I have learnt, which focused mainly on business journalism, freelancing, and a few things on C.V.s and interviews.

Having had many speakers when I was on the course, some good, some bad, some indifferent, I tried to make sure I was honest and realistic about things, and that, like anything and everything, there are positives, negatives and moments of surrealism, to the journalistic profession, but that the course they are on does equip them to be able to handle all that is thrown at them. I should know, I do almost every single aspect of what I was taught, including page design, subbing, coverline writing, feature and news writing, the use of CMS, and, yes, blogging.

There's no denying the current job market is slim to non-existent, but I at least hope they took the fact that they are on one of, if not the, best journalism courses in the UK as some solace in their future endeavours.

Did I mention?

I went to Felix Dennis’ ‘Did I mention the free wine?’ tour on Friday night, in which publishing magnate, and all-round raconteur, Felix Dennis read a selection of poetry from his new book and some from his old ones, and lured people to the reading by offering free wine and canapés. Good wine too, no cheap plonk here.

It was an interesting evening and Dennis is certainly an entertaining host, with his poetry very much performance poetry as he accentuates voices, and hops about the stage when the subject riles him – mainly politics – but always sticking to his meters – a point on which his hatred of Ezra Pound was clear to all.

He even made a sly reference to the infamous ‘I killed a man’ interview (worth a read) but no more than that. Unsurprisingly with free wine on offer the crowd was utterly raucous, shouting, talking, answering back – in some way it was like being in a physics lesson when you’re 16, all the morons sniggering, ‘oh right sir, how’d you figure that then?’ then sitting back to take in their acclaim. Except here the people were in the mid 40s, the ones near me at least, and it was all a bit pathetic really.

All in all though, it was a very interesting evening, and nice to see such a charismatic figure from the world of publishing and magazines.

The case for...

Interesting article here on why books will never die out, even with the invention of fancy book readers, that has a lot of similarities with some of the arguments used to claim why newspapers and magazines will never die out. Probably.

They all laughed

Interesting BBC Magazine story here about the continued existence of people who genuinely believe the Earth is flat. It's well written as it lets the bizarre individuals and their beliefs be shown up by themselves and their quotes in attempting to justify what they believe, rather than the author trying to do it with his own words. It is fascinating though that people still believe this stuff, if a little worrying.

As the final lines say:

"While we all respect a degree of scepticism towards the authorities, [says Ms Garwood] the flat-earthers show things can go too far. It is always good to question 'how we know what we know', but it is also good to have the ability to accept compelling evidence".

Plus gives me the opportunity to put in one of my favourite quotations:

"It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small." - Neil Armstrong

Magazines

The BBCs online magazine section had its fifth birthday the other day. It's an odd section of the BBC, far more opinionated than almost every other output they do and a real ‘community’ feel to it – as magazines are meant to have: caption comps, letters pages, roundup of the daily newspapers, (often very tongue in check), and interesting sideways looks at the issues around news stories. I hope it keeps going very much under-the-radar, left to follow its own agenda.

A miss is as good as a mile

Another piece of childhood dies. I can still remember eagerly rushing to pick up my reserved copy at the local shop. Now it is no more.

Headline - does it draw you in?

A friend sent me a link to all The Onion's mock front covers
of its weekend supplement. It's fantastic stuff.

Oh Dear

Cliff Richard's interview with Q sounds like it was an odd affair.

Like many people Cliff Richard has mistaken ‘most’ for ‘best’. Because he sold more records than The Beatles and Elvis he assumes he is ‘better’ than them. This of course ignores the fact his music is more middle of the road than white lines and his audience is that entire strata of the population who have a music bypass in their brains.

He’s even attacked George Harrison’s guitar solos as ‘out-of-tune’. Strange that it took 50 years and the incredible musical talent of Cliff Richard to point this out. You would have thought classically trained musicians, or uber-keen fans, or even fans, or even the band themselves would have noticed this in half a century of listening. But no. Everyone else is an idiot and Cliff is a bloody genius and only he can point these things out.

Why stop there Cliff? Come on, you’ve got all these outlandish opinions let’s hear them. There’s a whole 50 years worth of popular music to slate with ridiculous claims. The Rolling Stones (too loud); Bob Dylan (too wordy); Simon and Garfunkel (too many harmonies) – nothing compared to you Cliff.

I mean this is the man who set the Lord’s Prayer to the tune of Auld Lang Syne. Genius. Cliff is so sure of his own brilliance he calls himself the UPS – Ultimate Pop Star. A term he has coined because no one else has. Odd that.

Comment, context and criticism

Morrissey’s response on the Guardian blogs section is very interesting – for many reasons – but for me the most interesting side is his very cutting and succinct arguments on why the NME is a pathetic shadow of its former self, full of “cheers mate, got pissed last night, ha ha” interviews.

It’s a pretty fair summation and is very interesting coming from a man who has appeared on the cover, and even been awarded their “God-like Genius” award. Mercifully he turned it down.

Whether or not he answers the accusations of racism is up to you – perhaps Morrissey was merely stating a few home truths in relation to the past and the present? Or that perhaps what he was saying was neither a Black or White statement but merely a ‘shades of grey’ comment on the changing face of British society? That these changes have brought positives and negatives? That perhaps looking at his comments in the context of history would put them in perspective – and let newspapers like The Guardian provide better coverage of the whole self-indulgent affair then they did?

Perhaps, but context, history, and ‘shades of grey’ are never good for selling newspapers and getting website hits.

The Week

I bought The Week for the first time the other day and thought it was pretty good. It's nice having all the best news, reviews and opinions from the British papers brought together but I preferred it even more for reading comment from overseas which is something I read far less - even though the internet makes it far easier to do so.

I can see why, in our mad-paced world, a magazine which puts all the best bits into one nicely designed and easy to read format is doing well on the stands.

Hugh Grant Gets Mean(z)

Well who would have thought Hugh Grant liked beans so much? And hated the papparazzi so much? I feel sorry for him having to deal with people snapping him all the time but he shouldn't have snapped out. Not the first time he's been in trouble either eh?

The trouble is give it a few months and Grant (or any other attention starved celebrity) will be thankful for someone taking a shot of him doing some mundane just so it can grace that weeks gossip mags. But with the privacy laws in a changing state perhaps the age of endless shot of celebrities buying cheese, or picking their nose, is coming to an end?

All in the Past

I finished my work experience at BBC History Magazine yesterday and an enjoyable time it was too. I was given copy to write, facts to check, pictures to research, people to phone, books to log, and others things besides.

It was very interesting seeing just how much of our course is directly relevant to the real world of magazine journalism and the concerns and discussions that I heard while working there were very much those that have been brought up by lecturers and ourselves when working on our own magazines.

I sat in on a meeting with Nick Brett where they went through the April issue (pictured) and that threw up some relevant points too. The tone of the meeting was positive but it was interesting to see just how many concerns and opinions there were on each page of the magazine.

The best thing about all this though, aside from being treated like a competent person who they could rely one, was that it underlined that I have made the right career choice. Magazines, with their professional but informal approach (I only wore a suit on the first day there...), the importance on design as much as content, and the notion of writing what a reader wants to read, not what they need to (i.e. newspapers), all remain things I can see myself doing for a living.

Wild Issue Two

Issue two of Wild was finished last week.

Features on camping in the Gower, skiing, The Menai Staits and mountain boarding, helped make it a bloody good read.

The website is now up and running and looking ace too.

Have a look around and see what you like. Enjoy

Born to be Wild...

We finished our first edition of Wild magazine today (the website should be up by Friday) and it's a great feeling. After several weeks of gathering stories, taking photos, getting quotes, facts and information to finally see all that work beautifully laid out in colour is very satisfying.

From the initiation of the concept, the first meetings through to the final page being proofed and finished, for about the fifth time, it's a long process, but hugely rewarding. And we're already designing the pages for issue two which features mountain boarding, skiing, rambling and camping.

Given that we have made this entire 28 page magazine without any finance or backing and all without being able to promise outside contributors any visible means of their help apart from on the website, it makes me wonder how good it could be with financial revenue and a published product...