Onwards And Upwards

These are exciting times here at Hot Press. The world keeps turning. Things change. And it is not just necessary but vital for a magazine like Hot Press to change with them.

It would have been impossible to imagine the contemporary media landscape when the magazine was launched back in 1977. Ireland was a horribly mono-cultural place back then, with effectively a single legal radio station, a small number of national newspapers and a tiny number of magazines – including then-prominent religious publications like The Word and The Messenger – comprising the full extent of the Irish media. In our hearts, we felt like strangers in a strange land – but we wanted to make it ours.
Hot Press was originally printed on basic newsprint stock, in an A3 tabloid-esque format. We didn’t think of ourselves as magazine publishers. We always talked about ‘the paper’: it was a simpler sort of world back then.
Having run a few hours behind schedule, the first edition was printed entirely in black and white. From the second issue on, we were privileged – hey, everything is relative! – to be able to use what was termed ‘spot color’ on the front-cover and on a smattering of pages through the issue. We had a choice of red, blue, green or yellow. Undeterred, our design guru Willie Finney found a way of mixing colors to add to the visual palette. We learned early how to defy the odds.
Since those brutally inhospitable times, Hot Press has morphed through a number of different shapes, sizes and guises. Full colour was introduced early in the ‘80s. A glossy front-cover followed in 1983. And that was the way we stayed until the turn of the century. That watershed inspired a desire to shape-shift again, and in 2000 we found an odd, almost square format, somewhere between tabloid and magazine size, which we liked, and that felt right for the new century.
We were early adapters to the interweb and had an online presence from 1994. But hotpress.com really only properly became a beast in its own right in the early noughties, adding a whole other dimension to the publishing offer, over which the greater HP team would preside.
During the Celtic Tiger years we moved again to an even smaller size, finally producing a magazine in the accepted definition. Smaller size, higher page count: we were always gluttons for punishment.
In certain respects, the scale of what we do may sometimes be overlooked. The population of Ireland – even at what is its highest level since before the Famine, in the middle of the 19th Century, killed 1.5 million people and drove a further 2.5 million away from their homeland – is only just over 6 million. And yet in Hot Press, every fortnight, we produce a magazine that is as big, and as packed with writing of the highest calibre, as that other famous fortnightly, Rolling Stone, in the United States – where the population is somewhere between 250 million and 300 million, giving them economies of scale that we could never even begin to dream of.
No matter. Hot Press has always been about engagement. Music is at the core of our editorial mission. But we’ve always operated to the manifesto that the magazine is not just about music – it is about what the music is about: that is everything that interests or moves or inspires musicians and artists to express themselves, or which galvanises us all on one level or another. It is about life, love, art, music, movies, books, comedy, politics, sex, sexual politics, social issues, the environment, people, health, food, drugs, fashion, sport, games, technology, the internet, entertainment, leisure, gossip, information, travel, photography, humour, competitions, good writing, ideas – and a whole lot more besides.
Nowadays, we engage on a variety of different platforms. The print title is just one string in the orchestral manoeuvres we have to manage on an ongoing basis – sometimes, it has to be said, at least partially in the dark. There is hotpress.com. There is Facebook. There is Twitter. And there are dozens of what we might describe as additional media adventures, as well as direct contact with our readers, friends, fans and critics alike. We produce a number of other magazine titles. We publish books. And we run dozens of events and Hot Press special activities during the year at gigs, festivals and other arts-related goings on. Not to mention Hot Press Munchengladbach 1891. I promised I wouldn’t mention the Munchies’ stirring weekly jousts – and I won’t (see page 114, if you must).
In the end, however, to a very large extent, we are about the same basic ideals that inspired the original launch of the magazine: these include supporting and encouraging Irish musicians, bands, filmmakers, writers and artists generally; providing a platform for journalists and writers of real talent to get their ideas, and their reflections on the evolving zeitgeist, down; contributing in a positive way to the national debate, with the objective, hopefully, of making this a more progressive, more compassionate, more egalitarian and especially more sexually open and liberal place for people to live, love and work; helping to make Irish people more fully aware of the international developments that are likely to shape their own lives and their futures, as well as the art, music and other forms of self-expression to which they are exposed; challenging the orthodoxies and pushing the outside of the envelope in as many ways as seems right to the Hot Press team at any given time; and, finally, generally playing a part in entertaining, enlightening and informing our readers about where we stand, all the better to assist them in making up their own minds as to where they stand on all the things that clamour for our attention and that crowd out the precious hours of every day, on our at times frantic collective rush through the present.
As with most publications, the latest twist sees Hot Press taking on a slightly more slim-line shape. There is a superb new look, courtesy of our illustrious design department – and we have reconfigured things editorially, in order to add fresh ideas and a new feel to what we do. It is a work in progress: the official launch issue is in a fortnight’s time and there will be further tweaks over the coming issues. But what you have in your hands represents the new look that we will be settling into. It has been created lovingly by a brilliant team. We all hope you like it now and – in Robbie Robertson’s timeless phrase – that you learn to love it later.
Somewhere down the crazy river. While Ireland is now a far better place than of yore, in terms of the social freedom that has been carved out, and especially as a place for children to grow up, we could not have foreseen that economically, Ireland in 2013 would resemble so closely the country that we tried to take by the scruff of the neck in the late ‘70s and on into the jobless ‘80s. Make no mistake, in the viciousness of its negative economic wallop, the current recession is worse, far worse, than anything that was experienced back in those grim days. Young people coming out of school and out of college in particular are being sacrificed on the altar of selective austerity. They are the victims of an officially enforced heist, perpetrated by the ruling international elite, who are bullying ordinary citizens into taking on the losses incurred as a result of the recklessness of the global banking bosses.
This is a subject to which we will return, and which inevitably acts as an undertow to everything that we write in Hot Press right now. In the meantime, I hope you don’t mind my saying that I am very proud of the fact that we have in our most recent issue, and again in this issue of Hot Press, delivered the first major exposé of the policy of compulsory fluoridation of the water supply in Ireland.
That is just one of a host of brilliant, original, powerful pieces in this nascent new-look edition of the magazine. And over the next few issues, there is more – much more – to come that will challenge the consensus and have people here in Ireland, and hopefully in our wider community of interest all over the world, talking.
Why do we always end up at Nick’s Café? A good question. The answer is probably because it is in our blood and our bones. Many of yours too, I reckon. A huge thanks to you our readers. Without you we are nothing. Catch the blue train, to places never been before. Welcome to the future...