liked.
AC: We shouldn’t talk about other people, it’s a bad vibe. Looking back over the glorious career you’ve had as the main editor, and from which period most of this book comes from, which would you say were your favourite issues?
JP: My second issue was the Special Issue. It was the first time the majority of an issue was given over to one group of people.
AC: What was the thinking behind that—giving over the issue to a small group of people rather than “check out the world through our gay magazine lens” like a lot of other people do?
JP: It started to become clear to me that to do themes like we were doing, we needed to go all the way and get every single page of the magazine in line with the theme, and so we had a run of issues where every single page was dedicated to one theme.
AC: That’s kind of where that “immersionism journalism” started that I always talk about when other people interview me about what Vice is. And I guess that style of journalism became our hallmark, right?
JP: Well, I have to say, we acted like we invented that and we 100 percent did not. Ever hear of a guy named George Orwell?
AC: The name rings a bell. Is that the guy who wrote The Da Vinci Code?
JP: Yes, that’s correct.
AC: Yeah, we definitely didn’t invent immersionism in any way at all but it became what we did.
JP: The whole thing from our perspective was to let the subjects tell as much of the story as possible. There were obvious ones like the Poverty Issue and the Mentally Ill Issue, all of which involved me going and staying with the people in the mag and you and other editors doing the same.
And then the Cops Issue came out which was a classic. For a magazine like Vice to come out with an issue all about our respect for cops was pretty good. The thing about cops, or one of the things we wanted to get across, is how insanely funny they can be, and who has better stories than cops?
Soldiers and ER doctors I guess can compete, but not many other professions.
AC: I guess VBS started out of that immersionism journalism thing. Remember when that started? It was when Spike [Jonze] said to Shane [Smith, Vice CEO], “Why don’t you film your articles?” But let’s just talk about the magazine here. There’s a whole section about VBS later in the book.
JP: Yeah, well, immersionism started to turn into a bit of a crutch for the magazine and I think it’s important to keep changing things up and so we stopped doing as much.
AC: We started doing longer interviews, like huge interviews with people. But that in itself was also a kind of immersionism.
JP: Yeah, but they weren’t just interviews like: “Let’s ask the guy from a band what inspired his stupid shitty boring new record”. I think that the interview is one of the best and most maltreated formats there is. It’s direct in the same way immersionism is, if it’s done right.
AC: It was a natural extension of what we were doing. My favourite interview, but also possibly my hardest and worst interview, was with Shane MacGowan.
JP: Yeah, Mumbles MacGowan. I wish that one were longer.
AC: It was four hours of transcription and the time we spent with him was amazing, but we only got 800 words of understandable stuff. And Shane is so far the only celeb we’ve put on the cover non-ironically.
For those who are new to Vice—such as the person who has just had this book bought for them for Christmas and is thinking, “What is this shit?”—why did we never put celebs on the cover?
JP: Because people only put celebrities on the covers to sell magazines, and we don’t care about selling magazines.
I think that our Fiction Issues were a big step for the magazine.
AC: How did that change people’s perceptions of Vice, do you think?
JP: It made them think we were even more pretentious than they did before.
AC: Haha. Why did people think we were pretentious anyway?
JP: It’s probably because they didn’t actually read the magazine. Instead they listened to what other people had to say about it — “hipster, etc, etc”.
AC: There is currently an advert on British TV based on “how many hipsters can you fit in a car” or something and one of them is carrying an issue of Vice.
JP: Good, good.
AC: It’s basically God saying to us both, “The last eight years of your life? With all that stuff you did? This is what it boils down to: two seconds in an unfunny advert for a shitty car.”
JP: You could look it at that way, I suppose…
Buried in among the important world news about celebrities falling out of nightclubs and criticising each other on Twitter, there are also less important things like war, famine, terrorism, aggressive dictatorships and global economic meltdown to report on. Additionally, there are extremely pressing news stories about sex, drugs and what it’s like to live with a dog on a string for a week. In this section we attempt to tackle it all.
BABES OF THE BNP
BY GAVIN HAYNES | ILLUSTRATION BY DANIEL DAVID FREEMAN
Published July 2009
You no longer need to be a hatchet-faced National Front refugee to join the whites-only club. The fascist menace no longer wears jackboots. It no longer flags down the number 25 bus with a hearty “Sieg heil”. Nope, ours is a new, gentler, more airbrushed age. Feminism’s here, so now girls can dig race-hate too. As the BNP’s attempts to reposition itself as a mainstream party have advanced its perimeter far beyond the usual crewcuts ’n’ tats brigade, we spoke to three of the more acceptable new faces of the unacceptable. What a bunch of hotties! Phwoar! Makes you aroused to be British.
REBECCA EDWARDS, MANCHESTER
Vice: How old are you?
Rebecca: 23.
What do you do for a living?
I’m a full-time mum.
