Camden
There is something inevitably voyeuristic about life in London. It’s the same in any big city, where it’s impossible not to find yourself, however briefly, peering through windows into other worlds, full of people whose lives are varying degrees of different to your own. In many ways, this is kind of the whole point, the dream statement fuelling the global metropolitan-flight-complex. No one tends to move from the suburbs to the city to find peace. Older cities tend to be deader ones. Chaos brings chances to those seeking gaps in the firmament, the eking out of niches away from the sedentary slumber of commuter belt dormitory towns. If the city is where there is the most life, that will be where those most thirsty for it end up taking themselves, London a place full at all times with people who seem to be if not always enjoying then at least determinedly engaged in the process of some grand existential drowning. As the capital’s population surges towards forecasts of 13m by 2050, it’s evidently a process that remains attractive to outsiders, despite all the arrayed bogeymen – ghost homes, bike thieves, acid attackers, political extremists, etc, etc – of modern London life.
For many young people growing up outside as well as inside the city’s borders, the idea of joining the melee begins in an adolescent bedroom, stirred up by some combination of technology, boredom, lovelessness and culture. The right window arrives one day and suddenly you’re confronted with one of London’s endless worlds, one that seems like it might just be a good fit. In the past it might have arrived in the form of a tabloid headline or a Fantazia tape pack or a punk on a train; today it’s more likely to come from the internet. Mushpit – a semi-regular publication started by two best friends from North London – blends the two, its online voice teasing a magazine that is only available in physical form but is young, nocturnal, politically engaged and self-aware enough to feel like a galaxy in and of itself. Thoughtful, sensitive and weaponised with wit, that it can be so full of in-jokes and clique-logic and still shift a bunch of copies in places as far afield as Japan is testament not just to the words and pictures within but the world they create when put together.
“We started Mushpit just after we’d both done exactly one internship each – we were disillusioned about not being respected as 17-year-old upstarts,” jokes Bertie Brandes, who founded the magazine alongside Charlotte Roberts in 2011. “We were like, ‘We should get paid for this.’ And so, logically, we did something that meant we didn’t get paid. Instead, we paid our own money to make something. But it was worth it.”
“From the start, it was very much about the tone of voice; us being pissed off with everything but also finding our friends and their weird anecdotes absolutely hilarious,” adds Roberts. “It needed a voice and platform beyond our living room.”
“We recognised that it could be wider than silly conversations with your girl mates about boy troubles and we could tap into more of a feeling,” says Brandes, “something more meaningful that was underpinning all of those conversations.”
Within the pages of the last issue alone you’ll find sardonic fake ads for luxury property and masturbatory aids, a “Posho Name Generator”, character assassinations of modern youth cult “types” like militant teenage Libertarians and Neo-Brutalist trendies, semi-fictional confessionals on the dangers of late-night lust, a payday loan exposé and a multiple-choice quiz titled “What Type of Leftie Are You?” It’s definitely started tackling the political in a more direct way since its launch – “politics was always inherent to it but we’ve kind of found our feet in that respect,” says Brandes – and that’s to be expected at a time when it feels as though politics pervades all realms of life in a way that is without precedent in living memory. What glues it all together, though, isn’t any concrete political philosophy beyond the desire for basic human fairness, or a pushy social agenda – they agree that “the last thing we want is for it to be dogmatic”. The glue is the tone, which remains anarchic even amid the ceaseless anarchy of Twitter and Facebook, and is laced with a gallows humour that steers it rapidly away from the earnest handwringing that characterises so much “issues” writing today. This comes from its roots in fanzine culture – they cite cult ‘00s publication Cheap Date as a big inspiration – but also from the pages of the teen mags they grew up reading in the 1990s. At times, it reads as though a night editor at Just Seventeen went rogue and started inserting into the copy repeated exhortations for teenage girls to go out, round up and start deporting their political opponents.
“What I’ve struggled with most since starting Mushpit is that the tone that’s come to dominate media is so flippant, responsive, immediate and impulsive – and that’s what separated us from everyone else in the beginning,” says Brandes. “It’s become really difficult to keep our tone of voice personal without it sounding branded or contrived. Even though it’s ours, the thought of writing for Mushpit is more intimidating to me than writing for anyone else. Because it has to feel honest, stupid, funny, clever, useful, independent, angry, apathetic and anarchic all at the same time.”
“The minute you place something into that online context, you reduce it,” asserts Roberts. “So that’s why we make it so you still have to experience everything that’s in Mushpit in the physical confines of the mag. We’ve created our own world – it’s got its own atmosphere, its own environment.”
Geographically rather than conceptually, Brandes and Roberts’ own environment is North London, specifically the borough of Camden where they grew up and still spend most of their time today. It’s a place that is full of world-windows, whether those portals to other ideological and cultural places are club doorways, the bedrooms of teenage house parties, the stalls of Camden Market, first-date Odeons or the natural arboreal arches of Hampstead Heath.
“We were going to the same house parties before we knew each other,” says Brandes. “Growing up, we were in the same weird bits of North London, we knew all the same North London lotharios. We used to hang out in Camden shopping a lot when we were 14, 15. Personally, it was just so fundamental to my development as a teenager, all that cliched stuff you’d buy in the market…”
“It was very innocent,” asserts Brandes. “There was no one really to look up to. We didn’t have internet icons in the same way, so you just had to keep busy doing stuff and hope that you’d find the world you wanted to be a part of. I didn’t even have a phone, there are no pictures, so the only memories I have are all the wristbands that I’d collect and glue into books, 50ps that I found in pubs – there was only that, nothing else. That time feels lost in a sad but also quite nice way.”
Nightlife is obviously a big part of Mushpit’s world. It’s a place where scenes are built, where new, slang-built argots are devised and refined, where formative experiences are found and lost, where identities are forged. More than anything, it’s a place where friendship waits and wanes and blooms, and friendship – with all its arcane codes and rituals – is what Mushpit is really about.
“It’s the basis and foundation of it all,” says Roberts. “We definitely found kindred spirits in each other and there were so many weird personality traits that at some stage we thought we might be semi-related in some way. The first time we met was at some flat in Hoxton – “
“I remember it really well,” interjects Brandes. “I was lying on the sofa, it was an afternoon. I was on my laptop…”
“You were like, ‘Where are you from in London, Char, who do you know?’ And then I said a few people and you were like, ‘…Oh.’ That was the first time we met. The second time, we were living together.”