Nothing Bag Magazine - Issue 1 by Nothing Bad Magazine

Issue 1

NOTHING BAD

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Contents Opening Statement Young and Lost Fashion Recycling Arts Review: Fay Gillespie Facadehunter The Catorialist Alex Preseton Sunderbands Beyond Louis Price Joel Clifford Othello Woolf Paso Doble Egyptian Hip Hop Bands On Tour The Horrors Male Bonding Metronomy Toto Coelo The Golden Record Andrew W.K. Us and Them Gemma Slack: Forget The Sun Strangle Magic DJ Feature Keexâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Food Interstellar Medium White Lightning Funnies Colophon

Issue Number One

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*Mariah

Carey - Palm Springs Film Festival, 2010

Opening Statement

Oh my goodness! Okay. I love you...I have to say, this is and please forgive me because I’m a little bit...Oh my goodness! I just honestly. I read this magazine, because my friend Rhonda said, “If you don’t read this mag, you ain’t living”, ...and I was like ‘whaaaaaa?’ and I read the magazine, and I criiiiied my eyes out and I read the magazine again and I criiiiied my eyes out...the thing is that, the thing is that, um, honestly, this material was so amazing to me. Yes, that’s right! You need to be clapping. Uh, sorry, sometimes I get you know a little, uh, difficult, but...um...but honestly, I need you to listen to me, I need you to, uh to, uh, whaddya call it?... You know what? I am so thankful................ So thankful....I’m very grateful, I thank you all for listening to me and um God bless you. Okay, yeah. Take care...*

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EDITOR Katie Coleslaw http://www.katiecoleslaw.com All photographs and words by Katie Coleslaw Unless otherwise stated ART DIRECTOR Georgina Bacchus http://www.georginabacchus.com All props, clothing and styling by Georgina Bacchus Unless otherwise stated EDITORIAL DESIGNER Edward Quarmby http://www.edwardquarmby.com WEB DESIGNER Andrew Kent http://www.arckdesign.com/ COPY EDITORS Adam Bainbridge, Eleanor Morgan, Tommy Naive TEXT Andrew Doig, Emma Herron, Evie Jeffreys, Poppy Jones, Akiko Keex, Jack Mills, Laetitia Wajnapel PHOTOGRAPHY / ILLUSTRATION Jiro Bevis, Tom Cockram, Greg Funnell, Neill Kidgel, Ferry Gouw, David Z. Greene, Elizabeth De La Piedra, Caitlin Shearer, GIRL MOUNTAIN (HYPER COLOR CASTLE), THANKS TO Blow PR, Ros Dave and Lucie Bagley, Eye Culture, Shirley and Victor Jenkins, Ben Rayner, Gemma Slack

http://www.nothingbadmag.com

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YOUNG AND LOST Luckily Sara Jade had the desk in front of Nadia Dahlawi otherwise Young and Lost Club might never have happened. “We were 12 and Sara kept turning round to talk to me,” Dahlawi recalls of their boarding school days. “We were really good friends straight away.” The music industry is synonymous with hard-nosed men with their own dashed dreams of making it big or signing the next fame school kid just to rake in the money. Refreshingly, Young and Lost Club are none of those. In fact, they’re the complete opposite. And it’s their knack for finding the best new music that has made them one of the industry’s hottest labels. “Ideally we would’ve formed a band, but I play the harp and Sara’s not musical. It was never going to happen!” At 16 found them down the darkened corridors of their boarding school at night, photocopying their fanzine while the rest of the school slept on above them. From there they began to venture out into London and became the Pyrrha Girls, running regular nights at Soho dive Push Bar. “We tried going to uni but we both dropped out in our first years,” says Jade. “Nadia got a summer job as the Queens of Noize assistant and I worked for Razorlight’s press office.”

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Young and Lost

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Young and Lost

Slowly, and with money saved from working the door at their Push Bar nights, they started Young and Lost Club at the tender age of 19. “When we first started the label we were always broke. We used to have to DJ for 7 hours straight at bars around London. That was pretty boring.” But it’s not all sticky CDRs and backroom nightclubs. “Once we were flown to Tokyo to DJ at an indie club. That was definitely our best DJing experience! Another time there was a stage invasion during one of our sets. The security guard just shook his head at the kids on stage as they all meekly jumped back into the crowd. Timid, but impressive!” In March sees the release of their 50th single as well as their 5th anniversary. “We were only 19 when we started this, it’s amazing that any bands trusted us.” In the middle of it all the girls somehow found time to start PUSH, an extremely successful club night at the now defunct Astoria 2 with fellow DJ Imran Ahmed. “Sometimes it does seem like we are YALCing all the time.” Although they do stress to having a social life, it’s not long before the conversation turns back to work. “We’re going to release our compilations album in March as well as the Oh Minnows album and the Planet Earth album and the Noah and the Whale EP…”

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In the wake of the Noughties: the decade of recycling, many of us are trying to do our bit for the environment. Remembering to bring your ‘bag for life’ on a quick run to Tescos is more difficult than it should be. But we can compensate for the pang of guilt that comes when the cashier produces yet another flimsy plastic bag that we’ll save in our stash but never use.

Fashion Recycling by Evie Jeffreys

Fashion Recycling

Let’s get creative. As we are already recycling fashion trends from eras gone past why not recycle our everyday paraphernalia of life too? Open your mind (and possibly lower your standards of your own appearance) and your home can become a free of charge shop. Think about it. After Christmas, if you have any seemingly obsolete plastic toys from a cracker why not transform them into a necklace pendant or brooch? Unless you are particularly unlucky, no one will have the same one as you. Do the same with nice looking beer bottle caps. While educating your taste buds with a new beer advertised by an interesting image, you also instantly have something to liven up a gold chain. Lovely. As for present-wrapping equipment, if you have saved it for other present-giving occasions, by which time you may well have lost it, use it now. If you have a wedding, funeral or a formal occasion coming up, and buying something like a fascinator seems a little wasteful as you’re probably not going to wear it again, collect any ribbons, bows and wire, tie them together decoratively and whack them on your head with a hair pin. Perfect. Finally, if you’re feeling adventurous and not afraid of the possible ridicule you might receive, keep an eye out for attractive plastic bottles. Once you have finished drinking it and washing it out, cut a slit vertically down the side, attach a chain or leather string to top and bottom and bingo...you have a new, quirky bag.

Hair and Make-up, Camila Fernandez Model, Lotte Andersen

NOTHING BAD #1

Faye Gillespie

Colin Stewart

ILLUSTRATOR

FACADEHUNTER

Arts Review Maxwell Krivitzky

Alex Preston

THE CATORIALIST

THE AUTHOR

Pages 20 - 35

NOTHING BAD #1 Faya Gillespie Illustrator “It sounds cliché but I’ve been drawing since I was a little kid.” Says illustrator Faye Gillespie, but then it seemed hard to avoid with a painter dad and an illustrator brother. Her work ranges from a collaborated piece with brother Neil for band The Lowely Knights’s artwork to her most recent project, directing a scène painting of a forest for the premiere of ‘Where the While Things Are’. “It was a huge job! 95 meters long!” But ultimately its people Gillespie prefers to draw. “I think having studied thearte design and directing encouraged me to study people that little bit closer. I’m interested in characters.”

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NOTHING BAD #1 Colin Stewart FacadeHunter Camberwell illustration student Colin Stewart’s obsession with houses began with dolls. “I was never interested in playing with them, just designing and arranging their houses.” But nowadays its real life houses that make him stop in his tracks. For just over a year he has been documenting his favourites with a camera borrowed from Uni. Houses are a never-ending source of inspiration, he says. “Sometimes its stone cladding or an interesting window frame colour or a hand painted name above a front door. But I definitely don’t go for conventional lookers.”

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NOTHING BAD #1 Maxwell Krivitzky The Catorialist Evie Jeffreys The Sartorialist fashion blog has set the standard for street style pages, but why should we stop at trends from mere humans? Maxwell Krivitzky, LA based cat enthusiast, but unfortunately allergic to the creatures, saunters onto the scene with his own blog ‘The Catorialist’ which beautifully documents cats’ styles from different countries. “Any cat can be stylish, they just need to find the style that suits them best, be it grunge, groomed, dishevelled...” On the blog Krivitzky features cats such as Minow, an old friend of his sporting the ‘Gentlemen’s style’: “To this day I am impressed with the way he carries himself; he is from an age where cats Page 28

NOTHING BAD #1 learned to wear their fur instead of letting their fur wear them.” Giving us ‘real’ cats as opposed to the pretentious, showroom prize-winners and pure breeds we may see on TV, Krivitzky is breaking fashion boundaries in the name of the previously unappreciated domestic and street felines of today...

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Photo: Greg Funnell

NOTHING BAD #1 Alex Preston The AUTHOR by Emma Herron “In early youth I remember collecting stamps, an obsession with Enid Blyton’s The Girls of St Clare’s, read by torchlight between thin pyjama’d legs under duvet. Later there were hot-breathed girls and drug-bright London nights, obsessive reading of Fitzgerald and Henry Green, a year in Paris. My parents are bohemian, creative, nurturing. My mother was a professor and my father a part-time pilot and full-time thinker.” Alex Preston’s colourful life story, strewn with books, makes a career as an author seem almost his birthright as he awaits the release of his first novel, This Bleeding City. So the fact that his fate lay firstly in the financial world, where he has spent the last decade, may come as a surprise. Page 33

NOTHING BAD #1 “I have been writing for as long as I can remember. I was a studious, geeky, bird-watching child who, via a starring role in Joseph and His Amazing Technicoloured Dreamcoat at the age of 12, became a voluble and queeny adolescent. I have spent the years since trying to synthesise these two essentially discordant characters.” This Bleeding City, a perfectly timed tale of emotional and financial booms and busts, happily marries Alex’s creative and logical self. “It was a novel born of a deep need to write, to make sense of the ridiculousness of the world I inhabited, to explore the failed ambitions of my generation.” “I couldn’t believe that so many of the young people I was at university with fell for the Milk Round spiel, traded their twenties for big bucks in their thirties, allowed their best years to be spent crunching spreadsheets for repressed bullies in Canary Wharf office-coffins. I studied literature under Tom Paulin at Oxford, came from a family of academPage 34

NOTHING BAD #1 ics and artists, and yet I too jumped aboard the bonus bandwagon. I’m lucky that I have ended up doing something that really interests me rather than in a desk-chained investment bank purgatory.” Alex’s family is his most valuable asset and he claims to owe his parents “everything”. He’s expecting a new addition as well as the arrival of his novel in March, before a year of music projects with his younger brother alongside numerous literary festivals. “I have just delivered the first draft of my next book to my agent and will continue to write books and music until I can no longer.” Emma Herron

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Jack Mills & Eleanor Morgan

A stark and mature-sounding band, with the kind of rhythmic, paranoid minimalism of Krautrock or the fuzz-box muscle of Kyuss. However, no lazy categorisation should be given here - Sunderbans deserve better.

Sunderbans

Formerly a collective from deepest, darkest Sheffield, the band were drawn to the bright lights and dark streets of London’s Dalston, where they set up shop as Sunderbans. The name is, apparently, based on an a ‘tidal halophytic mangrove’ in Bali. “We practice in a cellar hidden beneath a snooker club,” says bassist Chris Hutchinson. “It feels like out second home. But our flat also doubles as a practice room and creative space, too. You’ll often find us recording vocals in the bathroom, or writing songs in each other’s bedrooms.” Sunderbans secured a deal with the reputable Young and Lost label after garnering attention having played with the likes of Swedish demigods Bob Hund, and found themselves working with The Envelopes’ Henrik Orrling on the recording of their debut single, ‘We Only Can Because We Care’. “We all fell deeply in love with Henrik,” continues Hutchinson. “He opened our eyes to the beauty and importance of every detail. His guidance and energy gave us so much confidence and self belief.” Sunderbans’ sound is the product of devil-in-the-details workmanship and stark lyrical honesty. But their formative musical experience may have also shaped them. “Our primary school was kind of strange,” Hutchinson

Sunderbans

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Sunderbans

explains. “There used to be a Spanish guitar orchestra that accompanied the hymns in assembly. One teacher had amazing enthusiasm for the instrument, and showed us all how to play it.” Lead singer and guitarist Maurice Day is less enthuiastic about his musical past. “My dad comes from a musically repressed family,” he says. “Where talent was undercut by self-deprecation. Although Jack Day, my brother, is a folk singer and was pretty much the main musical influence for me growing up. He still is.” Sunderbans’ single ‘Road Kill’ is available as a free download on Young and Lost.

Words LaĂŤtitia Wajnapel

Beyond Louis Price

After the release of Beyond Biba on DVD, Louis Price shares with us his very intimate experience of the legendary 60’s brand. He chats to us about his story, working with Barbara Hulanicki and the process of making a documentary.

Beyond Louis Price by Laëtitia Wajnapel What is your own experience of Biba? My mother used to work there. She started out as a shop assistant, then rose up the ranks. She was there for pretty much the whole rise and fall. I grew up hearing the stories, and was very much aware of the mythology of Biba. I was surrounded with the Biba imagery aswell, the clothes she wore, and the films she watched etc. I read my mother’s copy of Barbara Hulanicki’s autobiography (‘From A To Biba’), a couple of years ago for the first time, and thought it would make a great subject for a documentary. Did you already have an interest in 60s fashion before making the film? I love 60s art and culture from Britain. I love movies from the 60s like ‘Performance’, and ‘Blow Up’. The clothes from the 60s are great, but I wouldn’t say I’m interested in the fashion element specifically, more as an ingredient into what made that period exciting for a lot of people.

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Tell me more about your previous projects. I worked as a professional stage designer since I graduated from university. During that period, I made loads of short loads of short films with the guys I made Beyond Biba with. It came to the point where we had an office in Ealing Film Studios, some Hi Def camera equipment, some lights, and we realised that we had to attack a feature length project. Its what we love doing the most. Describe your creative process and research involved in the making of the documentary. The starting point was obviously barbara’s autobiography, but I tried to push that from my mind when we were filming her, so I wasn’t prompting her memories. We knew that archive material (especially moving images) for Biba is very limited, so there was a long process of compiling imagery for the film. Barbara Hulanicki’s career in Miami Beach on the Art Deco hotels is not particularly well documented, but Barbara herself provided us with much of the stills etc that we used to illustrate this. How would you describe ‘the Biba girl’? I think the women that shopped at Biba weren’t of any particular type or class. The clothes were cheap to buy, so it attracted all walks of life. The look of a Biba girl was heavily styled on the imagery of the 20s and 30s, in the silent films, actresses like Louise Brooks and Greta Garbo. The colours too were at odds with the stereotypical brightness of the 60s. Biba colours were dark and musty.

Beyond Louis Price

How was it to work with Barbara Hulanicki? She was incredibly supportive when we were shooting the film. Constantly suggesting new things to film, and bringing in new interviewees. I think that she responded to the core theme of the film, which was to reflect a person as they exist today, rather than dwell on their past achievements too much, so that the whole endeavor is suffocated by the past. Would you be interested in making other documentaries about iconic fashion figures? If their lives or personalities interest me then I would definitely make more. I had a personal connection to Barbara. Her work and personality had affected me as I was growing up, so the subject came naturally to me. If i was to attempt a movie about John Galliano or something I’m not sure how i would do it.

The DVD: “Beyond Biba” available now beyondbibamovie.com

It’s a concept that has apparently slipped Topman’s mind. Having started out freelancing for fashion and record companies it only seems fitting that Joel Clifford, established graphic designer and now in-house designer at Topman, is packaging his new T-shirt range there in record sleeves. Why has no one done that before?! Preparing for London Fashion week and launching the upcoming A.D. T-shirt range leaves Clifford with very little time but luckily he has shared

a few details with us. “The concept for the t-shirt range is historical events that have shaped and formed our capital, London town, into what it is today.” Having taken inspiration from Jack the Ripper and the Great Plague, it only made sense for Clifford to shoot this line of t-shirts over the darken coffins in London’s Victoria and Albert museum. Basing designs around real life pigs’ heads and smashed diamonds, he is aiming for the range to be “macabre yet beautiful.”

Joel Clifford by Evie Jeffreys

44 Evie Jeffreys

Joel Clifford

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Othello Woolf

Obtaining a clear shot of Othello Woolf’s face in his press photos had been difficult. So difficult that waved at a boy outside Chalk Farm station, where we had arranged to meet, thinking that it was him... It wasn’t. After I did this a second time I decided to sit down and wait and after a while a tall figure appeared and introduced himself as Oli. It seems everyone in London is rooting for Woolf, a quiet, unassuming front man, and it’s easy to see why. On the cusp of releasing his debut single, Stand, the music world is in a flap with his “white man soul” sound and a voice likened to a young David Byrne. Add all this together and you’ve got Othello Woolf. The way you record is a pretty personal process. Do you ever find it difficult releasing them to the world outside your bedroom door? No, I look forward to it. I do fear that as things grow it could become harder to keep songs under wraps until they are

Othello Woolf

100% complete - you often hear about songs being leaked when they’re not ready to be heard and I don’t like the idea of this. But hopefully this won’t happen as I fully intend to continue producing and recording my own songs, meaning no one will hear anything until they’re finished. Can it get a bit stressful sleeping in your studio? It’s a very minimal studio set up so it doesn’t tend to encroach on sleep. I like that if I have an idea as soon as I wake up then everything is there for me straight away. That’s what happened on Deep Water. I woke up and had some lyrics in my head so I wrote them down and then immediately began working on that song. How long did it take you to record everything? It took around eight months to record an album of ten songs. That’s not because I was working on songs every day during that period, far from it. In my experience songs need time to breath, they need time to stew at the back of your mind unconsciously until suddenly one day you realise what is needed next. Astral Weeks was recorded over a series of weekends. Who was your biggest musical influence growing up? The Smiths, and they still influence me very much to this day. In particular the style of non-traditional chords that Marr can be found using in many Smiths songs. I’m not saying that I use these exact chords, but the idea that a chord on a guitar can be anything you make it as long as it conjures up a certain emotion is something I feel I’ve learnt from deconstructing Smiths songs.

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so a P Doble

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Paso Doble

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Paso Doble

Hair and Make-Up, Ala Hojat Styling, Georgina Bacchus Model, Sapphire Lewis Hats, Piers Atkinson

Words Andrew Doig | Photography Tom Cockram

EGYPTIAN HIP HOP ...hankers effortlessly with the spanking new 2010 directive: Anything goes. Debut single ‘Wild Human Child’, might borrow a harmonious groove or two from Section 25 and other Factory Records alumni (Manchester is EHH’s zone after all),but they’re padding this stuff out with tapped guitar poly-rhythms, looping synthesis, and a neat line in emotive contemporary pop savvy. Much has been made of their baffling name, age, Smiths connections and such; but the very musical reality takes a distractible generation awash with cultural access, driving to rethink the very modes of constructing music in an increasingly genre-less landscape. With the blogosphere on side and Late Of the Pier’s Sam Eastgate on current recording duties, the very scope of possibility Egyptian Hip Hop possess within their sound is their biggest draw right now. Mid-tour with IS TROPICAL, the band has this to say: 1. I was just sitting on an overland train full of teenage school kids talking about Lady Gaga and banging minimal house. Given that you’re both the kids on the train AND the banging minimal house, how do you find juggling academia with super hotly tipped dancetroupe? Are these alternate realities for you right now, or do the two things feed into each other neatly? Luckily studying and doing this has worked hand in

Egyptian Hip Hop

hand (so far) because me, Louis and Nick are all on music courses at a college specializing in music. It’s a little harder for Alex as he’s doing Art at a normal college but he does study music tech too. 2. Is tropical, kindness, Delphic: do you feel an affiliation with these guys? It’s like pop music went interstellar cool with its influences and grooves. Yeah I think there’s definitely a slight link between us, but just in the fact that we’re all making pop with unusual influences etc. 3. How come it took so long for bands to realize they could cross-pollinate any genre and aesthetic? With the

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same regard, how do you perceive your own sound? Are you into sticking within particular parameters, or open to complete aural technicolour? I don’t think it was a matter of taking long, some groups have probably been disregarding genre for a long, long time but its just taken a while for the public to appreciate the ultra influenced approach we and others before us have taken. 4. Everyone obviously has to mention that you’re from Manchester, so I will too. I heard there’s a new hacienda opening? This makes me think everybody’s always trying to recreate the past. Do you feel connected to this heritage? Is this GOOD for the Manchester scene?

Egyptian Hip Hop

It’s good for Manchester in the sense that there’s something going on in the city, however it’s not so good to dwell on the past like that. 5. So you’re pretty much in the middle of playing a tour with Is tropical. How’s it been going? Has anything weird or gross happened yet? Nothing that strange happened so far. I would explain but I’ve pretty much just written out basically everything we’ve done / has happened so far in here: http://blogs.myspace.com/egyptianhiphop

6. You guys seem pretty vibed over Ariel Pink cuz I read your twitter. Someone told me Ariel has mild tourettes apparently. What’s something nice you want to say about his awesome music? Ariel is a genius and him and his band are very nice people. He’s hugely under-rated because of his approach to recording when actually he’s written more pop hits than Prince.

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Bands on Tour Life in a band on tour isn’t all sweaty crowds, free booze and after parties. Its mainly one long motorway after another punctured by service stations and all the service stations food courts. Luckily, we’ve found bands that have managed to dig through the mundane and find the more interesting side to touring life. Over the next few pages four bands share with us their touring life, starting with The Horrors, Photos: Emily Rotter Above:Yet another day of deserted truck stops, this time in Texas. This one had a twist though, it’s owned by Willie Nelson and he has his own concert hall and bar inside. Instead of the usual snacks in the store, it’s just Willie memorabilia - an evening there would be a great Kodak moment. Below:Again this is when we visited the location of Twin Peaks, this waterfall was insane! The viewing platform leaned right out over the water and it felt like you were going to fall in at any moment. I love this part of being on tour, the worst part of being away for so long is the repetition, but it’s all too easy to stay up late and then sleep until load in.

Bands On Tour; The Horrors

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Bands On Tour; The Horrors

Above:It was the most amazing day so Tom and I walked down the seafront to play mini golf. Neither of us has much hand-eye coordination so it took forever to finish the game, during which weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d been heckled by a bunch of Spanish exchange students. Good times. Below:I think this was in Newcastle, but the northern UK towns seem to merge into one miserable experience for me. One of the rare times I can coerce Rhys into a posed picture, next to him is his younger brother Huw, who plays bass in our then support band, S.C.U.M.

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Above:A view of the venue in Dallas, TX, which is one of my favourites. One of our friends told Josh and I that a really hot man worked in the sex shop across the road. Going in there is definitely going down as one of the most awkward experiences in my life; the shop was really small and sold really dirty stuff which we had to browse so as not to look totally weird, and the guy was repulsive. Below:This was in Albuquerque, NM, which was pretty much the worst place Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve ever been. All I remember from that day was walking for hours in searing heat, and then eating some really soggy sandwich. The whole motel was deserted and we sat around the pool drinking shitty beers into the early hours.

Bands On Tour; The Horrors

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Male Bonding 1. Bushwick 2. Abes VHS Collection

Bands On Tour; Male Bonding

3. Pencil Factory Stairwell 4. Serge

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Touring is tiring. Sleep deprivation could kill a man (or woman, in my case). Surviving the touring life and feeling even moderately normal at the end of it, evokes a real sense of achievement. One must be able to require the skills to sleep anywhere and eat anywhere. After getting over that first ‘There is no possible way I am sleeping in this moving van’ hurdle, I felt invincible. From that day forth, nothing would keep me from slumberland. Anna Prior - Metronomy

Bands On Tour; Metronomy

Elizabeth De La Piedra

Chin wears vintage crotchet top and Bassike jeans

TOTO COELO Photography: Elizabeth De La Piedra

Chin wears Minimum Ima white blouse, deadly ponies Mr Bunny Bag Andie wears claude maus dress, bustier by Jeremy Scott for Adidas

Left:Andie wears denim skirt by Dress Up Chin wears jeans by Dress Up Below: Andie wears Azusa tank and Chronicles of Never necklace Chin wears Azusa T-shirt

Both wear Azusa tshirt and singlet

Chin wears Minimum Ima white blouse, deadly ponies Mr Bunny Bag Andie wears claude maus dress, bustier by Jeremy Scott for Adidas

Toto Coelo

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The Golden Record

Poppy Jones

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The Golden Record

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‘In 1955, a little more than four years after leaving a TV studio in Hollywood, signals bearing the first sound and images of the I Love Lucy show passed Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our Sun.’ 1 (Weisman, 2008) A conscious attempt to communicate a recording from Earth was made in 1977 by the launch of two Voyager Space ships. Affixed to each is a goldcoated photograph record, a message from Earth to possible extraterrestrial civilisations. ‘The record contains, encoded in the audio spectrum, 118 pictures explaining our planet and ourselves; greetings in fifty-four different languages and greeting from the humpback whales; a representative selection of “the sounds of the Earth” from an avalanche to a rocket launching, from an elephant’s trumpet to a kiss; and almost ninety minutes of some of the world’s greatest music.’ 2 (Sagan, 1978) Supposing some far off civilisation of the future was to find this record, and the technology with which to play it - without any experience of our world, their impression would be of a technology that creates rather than records experiences. -82-

The Golden Record

Without a memory of the time in which a film was made, a film becomes a documentary of the nature of the technology used to create it. The interference of technology on the images the film shows becomes more apparent, and more important than the images themselves. Our interpretation of the records of information, which we make and store through technology, is affected by our knowledge of the meaning of the representations themselves, and of the machines that encapsulate them. Without this knowledge, all that remains is the experience of technology itself. 1. Weisman, Alan â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;The World Without Usâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Page 253 Virgin Books, Random House. (2008) 2. Sagan, Carl Murmurs of Earth. Page 5. Hodder and Stoughton, (1973) Hair, Soleil Jackson Makeup, Gina Blondell Model, Helen Rendell

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This article was layed out using Tsischolds Golden Cannon of Page Construction.

Words Andrew W.K.

ANDREW W.K. by Andrew W.K.

In this photo, I'm enjoying the feeling of lifting up a bottle and a can. It's a celebration, and by raising these objects to the roof, I'm holding them up in worship - putting them above me, and bowing down to their greatness.

Andrew W.K.

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The look on my face in this photo is because I just realized that I forgot to take my pants off before I took a shit. And now I'm getting ready to wipe... it's going to take a lot of toilet paper to clean up this mess.

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I have a friend named Charlie Mom. He's standing just off to the left of this photo and I'm looking and pointing right at him. He had been telling a story about the first time he had sex, and it was really hilarious. He admitted that he threw up because he was so nervous, so I started laughing at him and making him feel stupid. It was amazing.

Andrew W.K.

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Andrews’ lost 3rd album: ‘Close Calls With Brick Walls’ is available in the UK from the 22nd of February http://www.andrewwk.com

Andrew W.K.

This is a very different sort of picture. I look "off" somehow. I probably wouldn't recognize this as me, if I wasn't wearing the white clothes.. and I have that bottle of water. I'm slow sipping it. Everything about this picture just seems... "off".

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Bra: Topshop, Dress: Charles Anastase

Us and Them

Top by Ashish Knickers by Myla

Charles Anastase

Us and Them

Gabe wears shirt by Paul Smith Sabina wears bra by Topshop

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Gabe wears jumper by Paul Smith

Us and Them

Make Up: Ala Hojat | Sabina Szymura at FM

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Gemma Slack

When we meet Gemma Slack it is on the Kingsland road, on the wrong-side of her studio door, and it seems that today isn’t a good day to be locked out. There is a commission for Italian Vogue waiting inside to be finished and a portrait with Nick Knight to sit for in the afternoon. Since graduating from the London College of fashion, Slack has had an incredible year which saw her designing Roisin Murphy’s tour costumes, two well received London Fashion Week shows and acquiring an impressive list of fans including Rihanna and Lady Gaga. This year is promising to provide more of the same success for Slack as she ploughs on into 2010 designing tour costumes for Kate Nash and The Black Eyed Peas, “Fergie wants pieces inspired by my current collection”

Gemma Slack

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Slack explains, which includes metal sculpted corsets ala Tin Man’s sexy girlfriend and warrior princess body hugging leather. Slack’s designs are theatrical and dauntless and thankfully currently without compromise, “I will eventually begin to place some retail-able pieces in there, but I’m not ready to reign things in just yet.” With her third outing at London Fashion Week hotly anticipated, these next few months are set to be launching Slack into overdrive. “It’s going to be hard, but there are 24 hours in the day so I can work all the hours available to me and sleep in my studio if I have to.” And all without an army of assistants too, “I’d love some but my studio is tiny,” she laughs, “people aren’t giving out grants and sponsorships for young designers like they used to, so you really have to want to be here to do it.” Smiling she finishes, “Do you know anyone with a spare £20,000?”

forget the sun

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Model, Nina Kaplan Make-up, Camila Fernandez Clothes, Gemma Slack Styling, Georgina Bacchus

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Strange Magic

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Models; Bethan Mathias, Amelia Rynkowska, Olivia Singer Make-up, Gina Blondell

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Dj Feature Transparent “Partying and bullshitting are our favourite things,” explain Sahil Varma and Jack Shankly for choosing the Notorious B.I.G’s song of the same name as their favourite to DJ. “It became our anthem because its rowdy enough for boys to get into and sexy enough for girls to get down to.” Since they began djing “3 or 4 years” ago, the Transparent boys have apparently not stopped. From putting on shows for the likes of GIRLS to Telepathe, they released their first vinyl this summer on their own label. So what’s next for Transparent? “To continue to be innovators and envelope-pushers in the fields of both partying and bullshitting.”

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Imran Ahmed Paul Simon hardly seems the likely contender to get people moving but his 1986 song ‘You Can Call Me Al’ is Imran Ahmed’s secret weapon. “I once won £50 that I could fill the dancefloor with just that track. Its guaranteed to get everyone moving.” Since 2004, Ahmed has played everywhere from legendary FROG to Pakistani weddings before starting his own club, PUSH, with Young and Lost Club. “Andrew W.K playing our birthday will always stay with me,” recalling his favourite memory of PUSH. “He puked backstage afterwards, the first time he had put his ‘Party Til You Puke’ principle into practise.”Nice. Rory Phillips DJing should come with its own safety warnings. Starting out in Newport, England, Rory Phillips has experienced everything from death threats to flying bottles. But alongside danger also came tears, too. “The last night at The End was probably the most emotional DJing experience I’ll ever have.” It’s not surprising. As one of the main DJs at (now defunct) legendary club TRASH, the venue was home to Phillips every Monday for 8 years. Add to that another 2 for his own night, Durrr, and Phillips is almost part of the woodwork. “I’ll never forget when we had the band Coachwhips play,” he says, recalling his fondest memory of TRASH. “They showed up as the night was in full swing, set up all of their equipment in the corner of a packed club and then we cut the music so they could play the loudest set I’ve ever heard a band play without a PA.”

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Keex’s Food

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Keex’s food ranking of 2009 "I love eating. I love eating tasty good food that chefs put their love into. I was always away from my house and London in 2009 touring. I got to eat different types of food in different places. Also when you are on tour you need good food; you can’t just survive on pita bread/ hummus/crisps from the dressing room. I know it helps save money, but not good if you need to keep on touring." So I did Keex’s food ranking of 2009 while I was on tour! No. 11 - DINNER I think it was called Dinner in NY, Brooklyn. Milo Big Pink took me here. The Dinner have their own organic farm; the beef burger and double fried chips were so good. No. 10 - MUSE CATERING When The Big Pink supported Muse in the UK, we had a very nice lunch and dinner every time. They had their own chefs cooking for all the Muse crew and for the support band (us). Everyday we had different types of main courses, salads, soup and deserts to choose from, it was definitely way better than going to a normal average good restaurant. No. 9 - RIBS I think the restaurant was called Angus’s stake house or something in Amsterdam. Robbie & Milo took me there for my birthday lunch. We ordered the same ones but with different sauces. I had garlic sauce. It was very good. I love eating chunks of meat.

No. 8 - ETHIOPIAN FOOD This is in Kentish Town, London. Again, I forget the name of the restaurant. This was the first time I ever experienced Ethiopian Food. Lots of warm cooked

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vegetables & meat on top of a big thin pancake, you eat it with your fingers. The pancake was a bit sour and tasted a bit like crumpets. It’s not like the tastiest thing I ever tasted, but the excitement counts on Keex’s food ranking too. No. 7 - RELIANCE This is in Leeds. Whenever The Big Pink plays in Leeds we come to this place for dinner. We’ve been there 3 times. They serve good wine too. No. 6 - TWO FAT LADIES In Glasgow. It’s nothing to do with that famous cookery TV show 2 fat ladies, but this restaurant has many fish/seafood dishes. I had haddock, it was so good.

No. 5 - HARBOUR CITY Liverpool, England. I remember The Big Pink had a big night out in Leeds or somewhere; we were all so hangover hadn’t eaten anything all day. We also had a day off in Liverpool. We all wanted Chinese food, something warm, filling and good. We found this Chinese Restaurant in China Town, it was the best Chinese we had.

No. 4 - JUNI Montreal, Canada. Again with The Big Pink. The Big Pink love Japanese food, it’s great news for me. We literally lived on sushi or chunk of meat when we are on tour. We are happy if we find a good sushi restaurant. This sushi restaurant Juni was one of the best sushi we had. The presentation was superior as well as the taste. They also made “The Big Pink Roll” especially for us...

The final 3...

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No. 3 - HARIMA-YA Osaka, Japan. I booked the restaurant when The Big Pink played in Summer Sonic Japan, you know, everything is perfect. Tasty, fresh, healthy, but also the presentation of the food, plates, the colour, the look. Just amazing. No. 2 - LA ESQUINA Mexican restaurant in Manhattan, NY. The Big Pink’s record label 4AD took us here. This is Next level Mexican Food. I’ve never expected Mexican to be so creative, decorative and fancy. The best Mexican I ever tasted, the ingredients are all fresh. Raw tuna, BBQ octopus canapés, seafood cocktail, and cucumber habanera margarita. No. 1 - Restaurant in Prague, Czech Republic When Comanechi toured with Yeah Yeah Yeahs, they took us to this very nice restaurant; again I forgot the name of the restaurant. Chefs showed us all the fresh meat, fish they had caught that day, and then we discussed what dish we wanted. No menu. It’s a cool way to serve food. We all shared the dishes, all the food was delicious.

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Interstellar Medium

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Interstellar Medium

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Interstellar Medium

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Interstellar Medium

Model, Charlotte Anderson Makeup, Ala Hojat Projection Images, NASA.Gov. Clothes, Georgina Bacchus and Gemma Slack.

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For a blog that started on a whim, White Lightning is pretty damn good. Elizabeth Spiridakis’s daily musings attracts a readership in its thousands and counts Kanye West as a fan. And it’s easy to see why. With fashion bloggers now in their millions (it feels that way), rarely are they ever this good. Or funny.

WHITE LIGHTNING Maybe it’s owing to a career spent in print media that has helped or just the fact that even now her good, nerdy taste from her formative years echoes that of her taste now. “But I love music first and foremost,” she explains. “I pasted Kim Gordon’s face onto my backpack. I loved Pavement, Guided by Voices, Mary Lou Lord, Hole…” Her teenage years saw her with “dyed black hair parted down the middle” with “a patent leather backpack from Patricia Field on 8th Street”. Spiridakis has always lived and breathed the quirky side that fashion has to offer. “I used to worship Winona Ryder and

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Liv Tyler, xgirl tees and stickers from xgirl & Ben Davis tees from X-LARGE from their stores on Lafayette.” Her blog turned 2 years last August and through it has received some insane experiences. “Going to London to make a blogger zine for ‘POP’ was incredible, as was attending some major fashion shenanigans during New York Fashion Week. Kanye West writing about White Lightning on his blog was also a pretty serious high.” But where there are highs, there are also those pesky lows. But luckily for Spiridakis, the lows don’t come too often. “I once got some of the nastiest comments ever (I surprisingly don’t get many) when I was gifted a pair of Chanel two-tone tights? But there aren’t too many, bloggin is LOVE.” Now, a typical day would find Spiridakis having breakfast to Howard Stern before heading to her office to catch up on blogging and writing. Her current project is a zine on First Kisses.

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“I love to talk about first kisses. Or First Heartbreak. I love firsts. Everyone has a story! Or a great funny sad sweet goofy detail that they remember. Marisa (co-ed on the project) and I often have great ideas about projects for ‘someday’. The zine is one that we loved so much we couldn’t not get it going.” What’s next for Elizabeth Spiridakis? For the first time, she is coy. “Oh, you mean “IN LIFE” ? That is a big question. I have a few things in the works…”

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Nothing Bad is available online http://www.nothingbadmag.com through http://www.Issuu.com Physical copies are available on demand from http://www. Lulu.com. Actual Size: 4.25 x 6.87 inches Typeset in Georgia, Helvetica, Courier New, Challenge Bold Nothing Bad Magazine, London Texts and Images ÂŠ 2010 Nothing Bad Magazine