Rather than focus like an angry bloke in a Wetherspoons on the terrible state things are in, and the even more terrible things people are trying to do about them, we decided to look at what being broken might actually mean.

With this as a backdrop features in the issue include an amazing photo essay by Edmund Clark commemorating scenes from the Falklands war. There’s an in depth interview with artist Jeremy Hutchinson about his project Err, which saw factory workers around the world asked to produce a one-off deliberately faulty product.

Bill Drummond – artist, writer and musician – gives an interview in which he talks about degeneration, conceptual compositions and rationing music. This interview is the first of 25 he has agreed to give for the rest of his life.

We look at Wasteland Twinning, an international art project that turns city twinning on its head by looking at wasted spaces. Empty, abandoned, city centres are examined, and we see who’s to blame for the disappearance of so many shops.

Also in the issue:

The history of ruin porn, glitch art, broken journalism, failed civic identities and dispatches from across the north.

There’s also The Life Worth Living – reviews of the art and books, and new music features.

Printed by Evolutionprint in Sheffield, the magazine is 84 pages of delicious mixed litho-print, on three weights of paper.

Copies can be ordered from the Article shop (link) now for dispatch on April 18th, or can be found in any of the stockists listed on our website within the next 2 weeks.

WHY PAID?

Article has been around since 2008 in various guises, and this issue is a departure for us. After several years as a free magazine, it became unfeasible to keep delivering the magazine for free. Adverts couldn’t support it, and it couldn’t serve its readers.

By offering ARTICLE as a paid for title we can make a better and more regular product. Instead of trying to sell you as a demographic to large companies with sweatshops across the undeveloped world, we can instead sell you our content, words and images at a reasonable price. We hope that you will all continue to enjoy Article as much as we do making it.

Article.

So if you are in Sheffield, Wednesday 18th, no excuses. Facebook RSVP here.

There will be beer, projections, music and magazines.

I’m what is called a fair weather football fan: sometimes I might go watch a game in a pub, if all the other radio stations are on my nerves, I might switch over to five live rather than turn it off, and I once bought a long sleeve England shirt for a fiver from Lillywhites in 2006. Beyond this, I am largely apathetic towards the Beautiful Game.

However, a B5 free magazine on soft matte paper with full colour print changes all that. In their Editor’s letter Paul Gleeson and Dan Byrne explain; “This is issue is about football as culture.” It’s this approach that makes the magazine readable and likeable to football fans, fair-weather, and non-fans alike. Raising the tone, and moving away from lad culture, Spiel is at once an intelligent and obsessive look at football. Check out their website to get an issue, or have a look around. There are some in good stockists around the North, not sure about down that London way though. You can buy a copy online if you fancy though. I suggest you do.

To give a taste of the mag, here is one of the lead features.”The Changing Boundaries of Fandon” is by Roger Domeneghetti, writer for Who Ate All the Goals.

Whether it’s the Scouser who’ll never walk alone, the 100% Blade or the Geordie with portraits of Kevin Keegan and Alan Shearer tattooed on either moob, we all know a true football fan when we see one, don’t we?

That’s the stereotype anyway; if you don’t support the team from where you were born you’d better have a bloody good reason. And unless you support them through thick and thin, taking in every home game as well as trips to all four corners of the country then, mate, you’re really just a bit of a fraud.

Locality and loyalty. Those two words describe how ‘true’ fandom has been defined for decades. The image is hammered home time and again in popular culture from lad-lit bestseller ‘Fever Pitch’ to the latest promo for the sponsorship pairing of Vauxhall Motors and the England team which makes the link between fandom and locality explicitly clear with the strap line “supporting a team, we’re supporting a nation”.

This relationship between fans and their local club has a common sense aspect to it, in addition to being named after the area in which the team plays its home games many sides were founded by local organisations like churches and social clubs or developed out of factory or company teams. Football also became a mass spectator sport at a time of rapid urbanisation with clubs providing a focal point for the populous of the area, a place for common identity to be forged.

Talk to a sociologist and they’ll tell you this theory is ‘functionalist’ – football clubs developed to fulfil a ‘function’ (a place to bond with other people from your town or city in a fast-changing world) and so it follows that supporters must come from the locality of the club.

The perception of the fan-local club link was heightened by the onset of football hooliganism. Firms would travel the country to metaphorically invade their rivals’ territory by the literal ‘taking’ of ends in the football ground or the smashing up of a local pub. Conversely, of course, local firms would defend their territory against such attacks.

While these lads were having a jolly fun time on the rampage their actions further cemented the idea that a club’s fans were inextricably link to its local area. It seems not everyone thought that Saturday afternoon was alright for fighting and so to counter hooliganism and the associated perception that communities were fracturing, clubs were encouraged to start projects, which were designed to create positive messages about the club and strengthen ties with the local area. In a way it was the forerunner of a political discourse that has led us to David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’.

Running alongside this, over the last 20 years at least has been an increasing gentrification and commercialisation of football. Thanks to Nick Hornby, Gazza’s tears and the Taylor Report the face of the game has changed dramatically; grounds are no longer the preserve of young, white, working class males.

At the same time, and thanks to that nice Mr Murdoch, TV coverage of the game has risen dramatically meaning there is almost daily access to a ‘live’ match. These modern forces are seen by some as negatively subverting and changing the nature of fandom and in the process creating a different stereotype – the ‘new’ fan whose ties with a team are less strong than the true fan.

Even more recently, the Internet and social media have further changed the nature of how fans interact with each other and the game. Football bloggers consistently challenge the narratives created by the media as well as challenging decisions made by football authorities or the Government in connection to the game.

In so doing, they often suppress their club allegiances instead defining their experience of the game through their common social and cultural experiences. Twitter allows people to easily and quickly communicate across vast distances sharing experiences in a way that further subverts traditional, geographically-deterministic notions of fandom.

Gideon Rachman, writing for Prospect Magazine, defined the very essence of this new, supposedly fickle breed of fan. He has swapped his allegiance between Chelsea, QPR and Spurs, and suggested that: “to the true fan, of course, this is consumerist heresy. My response is that I’m the real football fan – because I’m actually interested in watching good football. The ‘true fans,’ on the other hand, are cultists worshipping a particular piece of ground or a shirt.” His approach is the antithesis of everything we are told represents a ‘true fan’ yet, Rachmann argues, he is “both more rational and more honest” a fan than those who trudge through the same turnstiles week after week.

Furthermore, there has been limited research to validate the functionalist theory and what little there has been suggests that Rachmann is not alone and it is the ‘true fans’ who are, in fact, in the minority which begs the question what is true fandom really?

As early as the Thirties, and probably even earlier than that, the supporter base of particularly successful clubs (sound familiar?) in large urban areas came from a vast geographical area. In short fans have been choosing which team to support on the basis of factors other than geography for much longer than the stereotype would have us believe.

Think of Toon Army loyalist Tony Blair. OK, he never said he sat in the Gallowgate End nor that he watched Jackie Milburn play but he was a self-professed fan. So why Newcastle? Blair spent the latter years of his childhood in Durham so Sunderland would have been an option too. That he chose Newcastle demonstrates that fandom can be about a proactive choice.

But then perhaps the whole thing was manufactured by arch spin-doctor and, supposed die-hard Burnley fan, Alastair Campbell, who grew up not in the shadow of Turf Moor but in Leicester and Keighley.

Even Nick Hornby the man who, in the early-Nineties defined fandom, for the prawn sandwich brigade at least, swapped from his beloved Arsenal to Cambridge while he was at university. And why did he choose Arsenal? He didn’t live near Highbury, it was just the first game his father, who had recently separated from Hornby’s mother, took him to see in a year of great personal trauma for Hornby. As he says: “I wonder how many other fans, if they were to examine the circumstances that led to their obsession, could find some sort of equivalent Freudian drama?”

OK, a true fan might not chose a club on the basis of where they live but once they’ve made that choice they’re loyal, aren’t they?

Simon Kuper and Stefan Szmanski offer what they call a ‘critique of the Hornby model of fandon’ in their book Why England Lose. They studied football attendances in England between 1947 and 2008 and found that year-on-year 50% of fans will not return. Furthermore this trend was in evidence for the whole period. The casual ‘new fan’ is not a new phenomenon.

Kuper and Szmanski had unearthed what they call the “dirty secret of English football” – many fans support more than one club. Football fandom is generally, they argue, very close to music fandom. Fans are able to follow more than one band at the same time and move on when one group splits up or fails to deliver entertaining output.

The pair also quote the similar findings of academic Alan Tapp who researched the fans of one particular football club in the mid-Nineties. Tapp found that many fans choose to watch different clubs at different times and argued that these “repertoire fans took a lot of pleasure from a multiplicity of aspects of the game itself, while single club fanatics were less interested in football, more devoted to the club as an entity.” Non-fanatics are getting more from the game? Eh? What? You get the torch; I’ll get the pitchfork.

The perception that runs hand-in-hand with the stereotype is that the ‘true fan’ is being pushed out of the game by the ‘new fan’ – supporters who don’t care as much. However, it seems the reality is that ‘true fans’ have always been in the minority.

Football clubs are a great number of things, but perhaps most powerfully they are symbols. Throughout the history of the organised sport teams have meant different things to different people. For some they may have always been exclusively geographical although even that is symbolic as the fan ‘displays’ their loyalty to the club and the local area through the songs they sing, the fights they pick or the clothes they wear (whether the full club strip or your Adidas Sambas). There will be a myriad of different reasons for the choices individual fans make.

The concept of loyalty is more elastic than we might at first assume. At least since the years immediately following the Second World War the majority of fans have had a regularly changing relationship with the club (or clubs) they follow.

It seems the ‘true fan’, the banner-maker, the face-painter, the wig-wearer, is actually in the minority. The impact of modernity on the game is not killing off these types of ‘authentic’ supporters; instead it is actually revealing the true colours of fandom.

Motor City vs Steel pits the dance music culture of two cities against one another with a staggeringly big line-up. Sheffield heavyweights the Black Dog and Forgemasters will represent Steel City. With DJ Stingray and Ryan Elliott flying over from Detroit and Berlin to represent the Motor City.

For the night we will be producing a zine and films exploring the industrial heritage and decline of both cities, as well as looking at both city’s expansive and historic electronic music scenes.

This event is not to be missed. It’s certainly worth getting your tickets now!
More info on the event can be found here.

Tickets available here.

In an age where cameras can play back the images seconds after they are recorded, it is easy to forget what it used to be like in them olden days. Now, if you don’t like it, you delete it. But, believe or not, there once was a time where each shot cost money, and a person had to economize as well as wait. (I know you all know this, I’m just trying to be romantic.)

Like all good ideas, Straight 8 is simple. Film-makers submit a single three and a half minute cartridge of unedited and unprocessed Super8 film. Film makers shoot, compile a soundtrack and send it back fro processing. There is no editing, no nothing. Once it is shot is shot. The first time that anyone sees it is at it’s premiere.

Straight 8 is a great reminder of how different film making used to be, and a wonderfully simple creative brief that has generated several gems of short films in it’s thirteen year history. (See the clay-mation zombie movie below.) Though all constrained through process, no editing and three and a half minutes long, the breadth of films made is both fascinating and entertaining.

There are three more weeks to enter this years. So if you are interested, get cracking.

And, it’s a bit early to announce anything, but keep your eyes open as this June: a Straight8 premiere will be coming to a cinema/warehouse/venue/carpark near you!

Through a range of features and design we will explore the obsession with abandoned buildings, the failings of city centre planning, the rhetoric of Broken Britain, and what the recession actually means for art. Our interviews with artists and designers ask why people don’t study repair instead of design and what it means to break something intentionally.

Now, Article is changing a bit. We are increasing our number of pages to 84, and we are also going to get a proper cover and some glossy pages in the middle, cuz we’re posh like that. Importantly, we are no longer going to be free. The whole advertising thing turned into a bit of nightmare, and we thought we could make a better more consistent magazine if we charged readers £5 for their own copy. It was a tough call to make, but we think it will be the best deal for everyone in the long run.

You can subscribe below for £15 a year. Do the maths. We are quarterly. So, it’ll save you £5 over the year. But move quick, the first fifty subscriptions will receive our Culture tote-bag free! Or for a fiver you can just straight-up pre-order an issue to have it delivered to your house/crib/loft-apartment/squat/office/kennel when we get them from the printer.

Lastly, we will be having a launch party in Sheffield on the 18th of April. More details to follow. Watch this space!

Now, go hit the Buy Now button below!

Love,
Team Article
x x

Single Issue: 

This exhibition in the Workstation pays tribute to the ideas of Alan Turing, on the aniversary of his hundreth birthday. Turing, for those of you who don’t know, was the inventor of the digital computer, a philosopher and a code-breaker during WWII. His legacy and importance shouldn’t be understated.

The exhibition sees the work of digital and computer artists from across the world brought togethe, paying tribute to fascinating man. More here.

ondedotzer : wow + flutter

wow + flutter 11 trailer from onedotzero on Vimeo.

This is a chance to see some of the most forward thinking and up to date motion graphics, animation and experimental short films on the big screen as currated by onedotzero. It’s on at 11:30am on a Friday morning, but I can’t think of a better way to start your day!

Spawning Ground

An 8:1 speakersystem will play soundscapes of rivers and fjords from around the world in a sound installation exploring the “acoustic activity of subaquatic environments.” The installation is the work of world renowned field recording artist Jana Winderen.

Press Pause Play

“A film about hope, fear and digital culture” Press Pause Play looks at the democratization of art through the advent of the internet. The film examines the double edged sword. Cheap technology and ease of digital distribution make it easy for artists and makers to get their work out to a larger audience. But, any new voices must now join all the others, in a see of mediocrity. This film is required watching if you are trying to get your work out there and seen, be it art, music, film or writing.

Pattern Discovery

Finally, some live music. Pattern Discovery will showcase ambient and aggressive electronica from Bruce Gilbert (the guy from Wire), R/S, Russell Haswell, and another chance to hear Jana Winderen’s sound installation. This is an unbelievably good line up. Check out any of the artists.

Ideally you will be able to work in our office in central Sheffield for up to two days a week.

Please apply with a brief cover letter explaining why you would like to work with us and what skills you would bring. Please send some examples of your writing as well. Don’t worry about a long CV. A short one will do. We’re not really interested in your GCSEs.

Emails to hello@articlemagazine.co.uk