Push: Founding Muzik Magazine, Fighting Serious Illness and Setting Fire to Jordan (interview)

The most bizarre situation I experienced was setting fire to Katie Price, I got chatting to her in a bar once and she asked me for a light. I must have had a new lighter or something and it must have been set very high.”

15 years after he launched seminal British dance music magazine Muzik, founding editor Push admits his memories of the era are a little hazy.

“I can’t remember when and where it happened, but I think it was somewhere in Soho,” he continues, recounting his incendiary encounter with the uber famous (in Britain) reality TV star who at the time was better known as topless model/ glamour girl Jordan.

“As she leaned forward, a huge jet of fire shot out from the lighter and there was this horrible smell of burning hair and a squeaky scream,” he chuckles, “I think it was mainly her eyebrows that went up because her hair was in braids and pulled back from her face. Luckily she was totally hammered and seemed to soon forget about it.”

One of the first music journalists to start seriously championing acid house and techno, Push started his career with then hugely indie music magazine Melody Maker, setting up the newspaper’s first dance section in the early 90s. From Melody Maker, he left to become founding editor of Muzik, which he edited from its launch in 1995 until the end of 1998.

Notable for taking dance music and its fast-growing global culture seriously, the magazine was instrumental in launching superclub brands such as Cream and popularizing Ibiza yet also covered underground club culture and issues,successfully campaigning for free drinking water in clubs and warning of the dangers of tinnitus in one of its earliest editions.

It also created a new caste of fledgling superstar DJs, in putting then relatively unknown producers such as Deep Dish, Brian Transeau, Slam and Josh Wink on the cover, most of whom were then booked at the same nascent superclubs and festivals.

“I’m so proud of Muzik. It was a terrific magazine and a very successful magazine,” says Push, “It won several awards and sold over 50,000 copies a month during my time there. My personal greatest achievement was getting through the first year. I’ve never worked so hard in all my life.”

“I think the magazine’s single greatest achievement was giving dance music a sense of identity that it had never had before in the music press,” he continues.

“We took all those supposedly faceless DJs and musicians and presented them the same way that Melody Maker and NME presented rock and pop stars, and I think that was exactly what was right for the dance scene at that point in time.”

Though virtually all of the stars and clubs Muzik first championed remained global club brands today, Push himself stepped out of both the limelight and club culture soon after leaving the magazine, going on to write several books.
His best known one- Rat Scabies and the Holy Grail came out in 2005 soon after Dan Brown’s million selling epic Da Vinci Code popularized the pursuit of the Holy Grail though Push stepped even further out of the public eye after developing cancer. 5 years on he’s thankfully survived and has just set up a new website collating much of his writing from the early club days:http://www.pushstuff.co.uk Jonty Skrufff (who worked with Push as Muzik’s lead feature writer for its first two years) found out what’s been going on.

Skrufff: Starting with your new website; why did you decide to start it now?

Push: “I actually started working on it a couple of years ago, but for various reasons it’s only now seeing the light of day. It’s partly an experiment to see if anyone is remotely interested in this old stuff, partly an ego thing, and partly a fun way for me to fill in time. I first had the idea several years ago, when I was facing some serious health issues. It was like a promise to myself. I sort of told myself, “OK, once you get through this, you’ll be able to do that”. So it’s also about me keeping my promise to myself.”

Skrufff: What was your original vision for Muzik?

I wanted it to be a music magazine for the 21st century. That’s one of the reasons we called it Muzik, a title which wasn’t particularly tied to the dance scene. It was always meant to be more about the music and musicians than about clubbing and clubbers. That was what made it different to Mixmag”.

Skrufff: When did it all start to go wrong for you personally?

Push: “I don’t think it ever went particularly wrong for me personally, but it did get to the point where I wanted to try to do other things. I was editor for 40-odd issues and I felt that was probably enough.”

Skrufff: Others have since taken the credit for your work in founding the magazine and it seemed to me like you were written out of Muzik’s history: how conscious were you of that?

Push: “I don’t know anything about that. I always saw it as very much a team effort. (founding deputy editor) Ben Turner and I worked on Muzik for almost 18 months before the first issue came out and I think we made an awesome team. We brought different skills and ideas to the project, but the partnership worked well. But it wasn’t just me and Ben, there were also lots of others involved prior to the launch. Bruce Sandell, Muzik’s advertisement manager and later its publisher, was just as important as us.

Then there was Alan Lewis and Andy McDuff on the publishing side – they’d launched Loaded just before they launched Muzik. Then once the magazine started coming out, we had all the journalists and photographers and designers and subs and so on. Everybody played their part. As for me, well, you can’t actually write me out of the history. Last time I looked at any of those first 40-odd issues they all said “Editor: Push” in the flannel panel.”

Skrufff: How did you feel at the turn of the millennium as the magazine lost its credibility and slipped ever close to closure: did you ever communicate with- or feel anger towards, Conor McNicholas?  (the later to become NME editor who presided over Muzik’s closure)

Push: “I don’t know Conor. I’ve never met him or spoken to him, never had any contact with him. I’d been gone for several years by the time he took over. I was sad to see Muzik’s sales figures dropping and sad to see it close down, but I don’t know what the story was at that point, beyond the fact it wasn’t selling. The covers they were putting out towards the end couldn’t have helped, though. Some of them were fucking dreadful. We had a couple of stinkers when I was editor, but by that point they were all stinkers.”

Skrufff: More recently you wrote the Holy Grail book with Rat Scabies; how much did you consciously abandon club culture? Why?

Push: “It wasn’t just club culture. For a long while, I lost interest in music altogether. I’d always had a very broad taste in music - as a kid I’d like punk as well as disco, as a music journo I’d interviewed the likes of Nirvana and Guns ‘N’ Roses as well as your Chemicals and your Orbitals – but after I’d left Muzik I almost couldn’t bear to listen to anything. I don’t know why. Maybe my ears were full.

So the Holy Grail book was an opportunity to do something totally different. People see Rat’s name on the cover and think it’s a book about punk, but it’s nothing to do with music at all. It’s a road trip about two blokes trying to find the Holy Grail who spend all their time poking around in old churches and hanging out with nutcase treasure hunters. As it happens, since I finished writing that book, my appetite for music – of all different kinds – has returned with a vengeance.”

Skrufff: In an interview with Fortean Times you said ‘If I had to say what the book is about in one word, I'd say: "belief". ‘ how much was Muzik about that? How much did you loose your sense of belief? Why specifically did you walk away?

Push: “I had other things I wanted to do. Plus, to be honest, I was exhausted. I needed a break. For the last few months I was at Muzik I’d also been working up dummy pages for another new magazine for IPC, which the powers-that-be then decided not to launch. I was frustrated by that decision, but it coincided with me being offered a book deal for what became my first book, The Book Of E, a history of ecstasy which I wrote with Canadian journalist Mireille Silcoff. Muzik was certainly about belief and I still believed in it, but I felt my time there had run its course.”

Skrufff: You also told Fortean Times “Technology, communications and medicine are changing the world faster and faster by the day; I certainly need to step outside that and ask where my place is as a human being in all that’: have you found any answers? (Are you still actively seeking the Grail?)

Push: “I said that? Wow, I’m impressed with myself. What was I on about? Hmmm. Well, no, I haven’t found any answers. I’m not even sure I know what the questions are yet. As for actively seeking the Grail, yeah, I’m still doing that. Absolutely. But everybody’s doing that, aren’t they?”

Skrufff: What's your take on the rumours of treasures being found in France?

Push: “My take? I’m jealous.”

Skrufff: And how about 2012, December 21st? Where are you planning on being?

Push: “Bugarach, a French mountain village near Rennes-le-Chateau, which is where Rat and I do a lot of our grail hunting. Bugarach was Jules Verne’s inspiration for Journey To the Centre of the Earth and Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It’s your best hope of surviving the apocalypse. Apparently. Mind you, some say it’s going to happen on December 12th, not 21st, so you’d better get there for then. It’s probably a good idea to get there early anyway. I suspect it’ll be busy and it’s only a small village.”

Skrufff: At what point did you develop lymphona? What were the first symptoms?

Push: “I was diagnosed with lymphoma in early 2007. It started with a tumour in my left eye socket, which developed quite slowly. The first signs were double vision, which got progressively worse, and problems with bright lights. My vision was very strange for a long time. It was like looking through a glass pyramid. I was shocked by the lymphoma diagnosis, though. I knew I had a serious problem with my vision, but I hadn’t expected anything like that.”

Skrufff: What lessons has having the disease taught you?

Push: “The same lessons everyone learns when they go through something like that. You can’t help but reflect on your life and what you’re doing – and I do have quite a different view of life now. I haven’t always been happy with my lot, but I’m bloody ecstatic these days. Life really is too short. It took a little while to get my health back on track and I have some ongoing problems caused by the treatment I had, but that’s OK. It’s more than OK. I have been very lucky - extremely lucky - and a lot of other people in a similar position haven’t been.”

Skrufff: With reference to Muzik; any regrets; looking back, anything you wish you’d done differently?

Push: “Lots of things, really. The main thing is I wish I’d written more for Muzik. I wrote almost nothing. In the 10 years I was at Melody Maker I wrote more than 1,000 pieces. But at Muzik, I wrote less than 10 features and maybe only 20 or 30 reviews over the course of three-and-a-half years. I just never seemed to have time to write. There were too many other things to do.”

Push’s website is at http://www.pushstuff.co.uk

His blog is at http://pushblog.co.uk

Jonty Skrufff: http://listn.to/JontySkrufff