“Make no mistake, Dirty Bristow is a folly, a fools errand headed by a couple of chancers and dreamers with only the vaguest hope of even breaking even, let alone turning a profit.”

A fools errand headed by a couple of massive fools. But one that’s become a reality. And that’s thanks to our contributors and everyone else who’s helped (they know who they are, but there are lots of them on this page).

Get a copy now for £4 inc UK p+p

‘Little’ Chris Downing of Brumcast has produced a mixtape reacting to the contents. Go Listen.

Mr Underwood illustrated Phil Barber’s article by way of an exclusive track. Go Listen.

The official launch was at our Summer Fête on Saturday 28th August.

beast (noun)

/biːst/ n [C]

• formal an animal, especially a large or wild one

a wild beast

The room wasn’t fit for man or beast.

• old-fashioned an unpleasant, annoying or cruel person

He was a beast to her throughout their marriage.

“He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”

* Samuel Johnson Quoted in “Anecdotes of the Revd. Percival Stockdale” (1809)

With the first issue successfully launched and issues flying off our metaphorical shelves here at the fictional Bristow Compound, rumours are already brewing about the other events we have planned for the next few of months to supplement issue one.

But what of Issue two? At our summer fête we revealed the theme of the next issue to be ‘Beast’ and are now looking contributions.

Go see more details or get in touch

Love the cover of Issue One? Then you may desire a quality print of the cover from TTV artist Pete Ashton.

They’re shiny, A4 in size (much bigger than the mag), and signed in silver ink. They’re only £8 and look, of course, like this:

by Pete Ashton

If you managed to get past Deirdre into our first fundraising event, and launch party on Saturday, thank you. The comedians were funny, the music was loud, scary, and wonderful, and the vegetables were miss-shapen.

A huge army of volunteers, like any village must have in this big society, were required to stage a fête in the middle of urban decay and you’ll have to excuse us if we take a second to attempt to list them:

The Entertainers: 8-Bit Ninjas, Glatze,  Brumcast, Gavin Wray, Tom Lennon, Harry Vale, Prof. Michael Grimes

The Stall-holders: Midge, Pete Ashton, Shona McQuillan, Annabel, Kate, Matkins and Craig (for playing Deirdre so well).

Plus all sorts of  support from Rill, Danny’s Mum and Dad, Julia, her mum, Stuart and the wonderful Lee and Sandra from Friction Arts for the use of the Village Green.

Fiona, Sas, Julia, Gavin, Pete, and Andy all took photos (if you did too, leave us a link in the comments).

It was brilliant, we made some money towards the first edition.

And no-one died. Although Chris didn’t make it.

If you missed it you can still buy the magazine of course…

To the fête? Cos if you don’t you’ll miss:

Getting a copy of Dirty Bristow issue one before the regular punters.

Seeing these two men do funny things:

Hearing these:
8-Bit Ninjas – Fight in a Bus Stop by crazygibbon

Glatze – Glatze (Live) by The Centrifuge

Splatting rats:

Buzzing buzzers:

Darting darts:

Competing vegetables (bring vegetables):

Bungee-ing Bears (bring bears):

Holding pegs:

Winning booze:

Nomming cake:

and that sort of stuff.

From 6pm Sat 28th Aug. At The Edge.

We’re planning* to have a new website for every issue. Good web designers and developers are artists just as much as writers or illustrators, and much more than contemporary dancers (hem, hem), so we want to let them loose too. Mark Steadman, trading as Moxypark, is one of our favourites, so we bunged him much of the content of the magazine and said — “build us a new website relating to all that. For nothing.”.

Surprisingly he did:

“There’s something very handmade and fanziney about the magazine which I wanted to try and convey with the design for the site. With articles coming from so many different sources and dealing with such varying topics, I wanted a header which felt sort of pasted together. It was this that gave me some inspiration for the headline generator, which is a WordPress plugin I wrote specially for the site.”

The headline generator pulls words from our local papers and lets you reorganise them into better headlines — see if you can do better than Trinity Mirror’s overworked subs desk…

*it may yet gand aft aglay of course.

Not wanting the magazine to tickle only one of your senses (or only two if you’re an ink-sniffer), we asked Chris Downing (Little Chris) of Brumcast (a freely downloadable podcast featuring only DIY & Independent musical talent from Birmingham and the UK Midlands) to curate a mixtape in response to the issue.

Chris had two large tasks, one to keep the contents secret after having read them a month or so before and the other to find music that in some way reflected the contents. But, for the first time I can recall he had the whole history of recorded music to pick from — not just Midlanders:

The sport of peg holding, a small part of the Bristow fête Olympiad, explained by Pete Ashton:

Mr Underwood illustrated Phil Barber’s article ‘Cock Art’ from Issue One of Dirty Bristow. He did it by way of this exclusive track:

Dirty Bristow by Mr Underwood

He says:

“Reading Phil’s article made me both angry and yet somehow resigned to the outcome. My tune is meant to reflect that, through the balance of driving, relentless repetition and the increasingly gnarly synth noises. The more I read the more I wanted to punch out. Thanks Phil.

As a bonus, the sound in the middle of the tune looks like the image (below), when the spectral frequency is viewed. At the time the article had no title, so I just picked a phrase from it. You will have to imagine what ‘Cock Art’ would’ve sounded like.”

by Sam Underwood

In his guise as Glatze, Sam has both an EP out and upcoming gigs, upcoming.

I’ve drawn you a map, in case you don’t know where The Edge is…

Cos people navigate by pubs and roundabouts.