Bearded Magazine, the new publication for music and such coming out of Birmingham, was released this week at selected venues. You can pick it up for free from Swordfish, Tempest, the Bulls Head, Island Bar and the Sunflower Lounge with more outlets to come. (Anyone wanting to stock it should get in touch.)
Alternatively you can download the whole thing as a PDF by right-clicking on that link there.
The magazine itself is quite lovely with lots of white space and a keen sense of design from Kevin Summers of This Is Make Believe. There’s a nice batch of Birmingham-centric content – a quick scan reveals a Supersonic review with photos and an interview with Untitled Musical Project – but the magazine has a non-parochial feel, happy to stretch out across the country and and world, which is a pretty typical Birmingham trait really.
As so often happening when all the effort is, quite rightly, put into a magazine the website appears to have taken something of a backseat. That’s not a complaint, more a recognition of the inevitable and improvements in that department with come with time no doubt. Of coruse, with Bearded being a music-centric mag you could argue all they need right now is a MySpace page and you could well be right.
I’d consider this is a very impressive start. Along with Fused starting their new mag Blink and others in the city we’re seeing something of a resurgence of design-happy magazines in the region, and that can only be a good thing.
Here’s an interview with publisher Gareth Main where he describes how he came to publish Bearded and what his plans are for it.
