what we’re about

A Word from our Editor in Chief

Negativland is a magazine of four brains; Kirkland, Isaac, Grace, and me. We all met at uni through various hazy means.

Kirkland and I met at a party in his first week and ended up covering gigs together – never the ones we wanted. The worst was probably a folk gig in a church, which we got three songs into before going to the pub. After cycling through various shitty music magazines, we decided we could make one ourselves and do a better job of it, too. A jazz snob who I first met when he had a shaved head; now he’s got a broken front tooth and knows better than to play eleven-minute Fela Kuti songs without warning. The first conversation out loud about the magazine was actually just us two together at the Robin Hood pub in Bristol; the same pub we ended up using for the Wych Elm photoshoot almost a year later.

Isaac and I met at a Lovely Eggs concert where he was shooting for the house venue, and I was writing for The Bristol Gig Guide. Then, as now, his signature was a trench jacket and hair like Robert Smith, so you can see why I had to go up and say hi. He ended up joining me at the Gig Guide and turned me onto half the bands we interview in this issue. Grace and I have known each other since we were about fourteen, but became best friends at university. We bonded over getting wine-drunk on the bench outside my flat, listening to Sam Cooke and Dusty Springfield.

This is all to say that I’m not just proud of this magazine for what we’ve made, but for the time we’ve had making it. Drinking whiskey by the glass the night Shane MacGowan died, blasting Jimi Hendrix at 8am, cig in hand on the way to the boxing ring where we’d first shoot Getdown Services, flying to Paris on a whim to see DEADLETTER play – the first gig Grace had been to that meant anything at all to her - parties at Kirkland’s house, interviewing my favourite band at 10pm before their midnight gig in Sweden, endless promises of ‘Negativland’ tattoos from the boys that never quite get needle-to-skin; a project that almost didn’t make it off the ground. It’s been just what we wanted.

When we first started this magazine, I wrote up a manifesto of the movement I wanted us to document; a movement I felt would come to define my generation. A few brands had heard what I had, and were calling it post-punk on the radio, but it was a phrase that felt meaningless to me – I couldn’t help but wonder what The Fall, Heartworms, and English Teacher all had in common. There was obviously more to it than what people were saying.

For the most part, I think that it’s made by a generation of Gen-Zers who’ve grown up on a constant diet of media, from every angle; unparalleled access to older music, sure, but with their teenage years documented, by them, obsessively and permanently. We’ve consumed more of every media type than any generation that ever came before us, whether that be TV, film, literature, tabloid, trash, or advertising. I think a lot of this music is made as a kind of resistance to the idea of this being our Achilles heel – in a lot of ways it is, but it seems like our problem to face, to speak on, to attack. We know what it’s done to us, and it’s these anthems that seem like a kind of saving grace; something found in the ruins.

It might not all sound the same – you might be confused why Wych Elm and The Murder Capital are in the same magazine, say – but if you listen to what they’re saying, it’s all coming from a similar place. You can hear it in songs that are more musical collage than three-minute wonder, big intertextual and referential effects, sampling, quoting, mixed musical genres. It’s in the ironic or wry or coy delivery of lyrics that take shots at an older, less politically literate generation, the celebrazzi that dictate the way our generation are seen, or on the technology that raised them. Cynical but fun, self-styled yet candid, brash but thought over.

The name ‘Negativland’ was thought up by Kirkland, who first saw it while reading a book that featured the promo for the anti-capitalist ‘80s band named the same thing. A bit of digging, and it turned out they’d, in turn, taken the name from a song by the krautrock band NEU!. We’ve taken the name for a third time, so we just hope it’s lucky.

A lot of people in their early-twenties think that the best music has been and gone, but the main reason we’ve made this is because music is still very much alive and well, pumping hot blood through the UK’s underground, even if you can’t hear it in your local nightclub or on the aux at the afters.

Kate