Spike Magazine Is 10 Years Old

Written by:Chris Mitchell.

Sometime in June 1996 the first version of Spike Magazine arrived on the Internet. I’d learned HTML in a weekend thanks to one of Laura Lemay’s doorstop books and I didn’t actually have access to the Internet myself. I had to go round to my mate Dave’s house to upload the files I’d painstakingly built at home in and then put on a floppy disc. Dave was - and still is - my Internet mentor: he encouraged me to put Spike together to hang off the back of his own huge website hedweb.com, dedicated to the brain scramblingly complex research of paradise engineering. Spike still lives on Dave’s server to this day - thanks Dave.

When I started Spike, there really wasn’t very much else about art and literature and music online from the UK. Steve Kelly had set up the superb Richmond Review several months before, but that was about it. Now we’ve got a hugely vibrant and eclectic Brit Lit online scene (whether they’re blogs or not) - hell, we even have our very own Sinister Overlord of the British Litblogging Scene now. I wouldn’t say Spike is in any way a father to them - perhaps more like an older, badly dressed brother with Tourette’s Syndrome.

By way of contrast, Slate Magazine just celebrated its 10th anniversary and Salon past its first decade last year - the first Great Hopes of Journalism in the Internet age who burned millions in the quest for profitability but by a miracle are still with us. I mention both those sites because Spike has been compared to both over the years - which always made me wonder what would happen if I’d been let loose with a budget and an editorial staff.

The takeover of a small South American country, probably.

I’m glad I never did try and take Spike “pro” though. When I worked at Future Publishing we did an entire publishing plan for a books magazine - it was going to be like the Q magazine of books, codenamed “The Word” with staggering originality. Steve and Gary Marshall gave me lots of ideas, bless them. We realised that there was a lot of advertising dollars floating around for books, and a glossy magazine would be the perfect vehicle to catch them - but then you get locked into chasing the money and it quickly stops being about books altogether. I was secretly relieved when plans for the mag got shelved.

Much better Spike stays as it always has been - a bloke in his bedroom publishing stuff when he can be bothered, with no one else to answer to but Spike’s writers and readers themselves. There’s been scores of people who’ve contributed to Spike over the last 10 years, and it’s those contributors who have made Spike what it is. The only criteria for publication is - “Is it interesting?”

In between moving from Brighton to Bath to London to all over Australia and Asia and winding up here in Bangkok over the last 10 years I’ve managed to keep Spike going, although Steve basically wrote this blog for about three years. My interest has waxed and waned in the site, which has had a life of its own - like Steve Kelly used to say to me, “Everytime I leave the site alone for a couple of months, about twice as many people seem to visit it”.

What’s continually renewed my enthusiasm is the people I’ve met through Spike simply squatting on the Web like some bookish toad of judgement - not just the authors and writers I’ve interviewed, spoken to, or simply read their books, but increasingly the people who write about that stuff - the Ben Grangers, Ismo Santalas, Craig Johnsons and all the other great writers who’ve shared their love of all sorts of things through Spike. Spike has also acted as a placemarker for me in other people’s lives, a way of staying in contact with friends far away, like Steve, Chris Hall and Nick Clapson, three of Spike’s original contributors who have suffered the fate of knowing me in real life as well as via email. Spike’s even led me to meet other people on the other side of the world, like the incomparable Jayne Margetts. You can’t beat that.

I thought, when I started Spike, I had the archetypal “something to say” - I think that something was “I’m great. You should pay me”. Now I’m more content to read what other people have to say - the Hive Mind that is the Internet means that I don’t need to bother writing an essay about why I think Michel Houellebecq is great because Lee Rourke’s done it already. Steve got me into Blanchot, Cioran, Bernhard and Beckett before I left Brighton, then slowly teased out essays about each one for Spike which he’s embarrassed about now but are still, without hyperbole, some of the finest writings about Literature with a big fucking L you’ll find on the Internet. Chris Hall produced a superb eulogy for Bill Hicks and numerous interviews with J G Ballard and Will Self - (Self takes the prize for most interviewed writer on Spike). The Man Whose Penis Made Him Locally Famous has also continued to thrill bored office workers for the last decade, written by Adam Baron who helped me set up Spike in the very beginning - and who had the story purchased by Penthouse US as a direct result of the editor finding the story on the Web through Spike. They paid him 200 dollars for that. It seemed like a miracle at the time.

The onset of early Alzheimer’s prevents me from rolling out any further anecdotes about the last decade of Spike publishing, because, well, I can’t remember any. It’s been a long, strange trip, as the good Doctor would have said. But I don’t see Spike stopping anytime soon. Through the power of sheer bloody-mindedness, there’s now over 500 interviews, articles and book reviews on the site, with a couple more added each month. Wikipedia is the main source of Spike’s traffic because stuff like Steve’s aforementioned essays and Nick’s essay on Bruce Chatwin and Ben’s interview with Julie Burchill and Craig’s interview with Tony Wilson are all - rightly - considered authority pieces: if you want to get the essence of what these people are about, read these articles. Quite why the broadsheets et al aren’t falling over themselves to commission Spike’s writers is a perennial mystery.

These days, with teh Interwub ubiqitious, the thing I enjoy most about Spike is being sent new articles about all sorts of stuff - books, art, music, travel, anything - that I’ve never necessarily heard of, but the drive of the writer sparks my own enthusiasm. Ben’s Morrissey reviews are a case in point - I can’t stand the bequiffed misery guts, but I like reading Ben’s love letters to him all the same. There is some fantastic stuff on Spike, and I’d hoped to get a real, proper book anthology together in time for the 10 year mark, but it’ll have to wait - maybe in time for next year. Spurred on by the loveliness of 3:AM’s Edgier Waters book, I’d like to see Spike collected in a similar way, and let the articles have a new lease of life. It’s the best way of saying thankyou to all the people who have written for Spike over the years.

I just remarked to my girlfriend Lindy that Spike is already 10 years of my life. She gave her best cackle and said, “I’ll be taking you for a lot more than that, mister.” Here’s hoping I get to keep both.

Posted on June 23rd, 2006.

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