You've got to love a good magazine.
And a particularly fine lifestyle magazine (and FREE!) out there is the excellent +1 magazine.
Now up to its sixth issue, initial fears that it may have been an inferior version of the cultural colossus that is Vice have been replaced by admiration and anticipation for each issue. Actually, I should have known better than to have doubts, as the people behind +1 are the same dudes that publish the rather good Document.
Last month's cover was provided by committed death metal enthusiast and reasonably-hot-right-now illustrator Richard Sayer aka French, and this month's issue (available to download from the +1 site, or from what is known as 'participating retailers') features an interview with grumpy Manc Rick Tomlinson (not Jim Royle), who is probably better known as guitar wizard Voice Of The Seven Woods, and a double page spread of uber-jazzy snacks. You should check it out for yourself; it's free, so why not?
I think part of the reason for my enthusiasm for +1 is that it reminds me of the short-lived Phat Magazine, the genius early nineties lifestyle mag that lasted all of three issues due to offending the WHSmith-visiting moral majority with contentious covers such as the Glock-brandishing 'Teenage Gangsta'. If I could be arsed to rummage through my magazine collection, I would take a photo of the three issues. Ah well... maybe another time.
Despite billing itself as "for young gentlemen of the hoodlum persuasion", Phat was actually a rather intelligent and culturally literate publication aimed at the then much smaller skateboard demographic. Nowhere near as offensive as the brilliant (but utterly scatalogical) Big Brother, Phat would frequently feature contributions from the late Gavin Hills, who is, in my modest opinion, the closest that we have had to a 'voice of a generation' in contemporary magazine culture. A collection of his best writing, entitled "Bliss To Be Alive' has been kicking around for a while now.
Worth checking out for sure.
