SHOCK OF THE NEW The Inside Scoop
25TH BIRTHDAY
A few notable breakthroughs for The List Words: Anna Millar
FIRST EDINBURGH FESTIVAL COVERAGE As Scotland’s leading entertainment guide, we of course jumped aboard the Edinburgh jamboree, wetting our nibs and waxing lyrical about the Greatest Show on Earth, our first Festival issue appearing on the shelves on 8 Aug 1986. FIRST COLOUR ISSUE Like a rainbow bursting into your dull grey lives, The List said ‘Bye bye monochrome, hello colour’ on 21 Nov 1997. Our cover star was Damon Albarn (check out those baby blues), who headlined our colour features section.
FIRST HOT 100 Here at List Towers we know what’s hot to trot, from actors, artists and comics to filmmakers, DJs and musicians. In order to share our pearls, we launched the sizzling inaugural Hot 100 on 11 Dec 2003. Shirley Henderson was our cover star; Young Adam director David Mackenzie our number one.
JOHN HANNAH PETER CAPALDI
East Kilbride’s most famous monobrow, John Hannah, hits the cover on 15 May 1987, with his TV show Brond. We jump forward to 5 Jan 1993 to get a first glimpse of the terrifying smile of Peter Capaldi.
Three of The List’s ex-editors, who have gone on to bigger things, discuss the more memorable moments of their tenure
ALICE BAIN Editor 1989–1990 Current editor of MAP magazine One week in 1989 I was compiling the visual art and dance pages, which I’d done since the launch issue, the next I was up in the attic as the new editor making up page layouts with The List’s then designer, Paul Keir. We used clouds of spray mount. Galleys of text, long streams of glossy paper, were cut and collaged with images, ready for the printer. All in black and white. All by hand. No email. No internet. No graphic design programmes. Just a handful of workhorse word processing Amstrads, phones and the typesetting machine. And all of us writers and editors of course. It was fast and fun and we all stayed up till the early hours on production night every fortnight. Not being a night owl kind of an editor though, I changed this routine a little. Within a few issues we managed to finish by nine-ish and could all go to the pub – it felt like a grand achievement at the time!
MARK FISHER Editor, 2000–2003 Current freelance journalist and critic I could tell the story of being so hungover I was incapable of chairing an editorial meeting and had to just sit there looking sickly. But that wouldn’t reflect well on me. I could tell the one about being alone in the office and having to interview a famous American animator without knowing anything about him. But that wouldn’t reflect well on me. I could tell the one about getting my four- year-old son to review the singles. But that wouldn’t reflect well on me. I guess it was a pretty ignominious time.
NICK BARLEY Editor 2003–2006 Current director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival One year, in a bid to drive up circulation at Festival time, I hit on the notion of a reader competition to win a date with Russell Brand. It was really only a joke idea but Brand thought it was funny and agreed to take part. As I remember it, there was a surprisingly big reader response, and the competition was won by a sassy and very impressive woman who fully understood the irony of the whole thing. It wasn’t until I was introducing her to Brand, in the green room backstage at the EICC after his gig, that it came home to me just how cheesy this could be. In the flesh, Brand is a sweet, slightly gauche and surprisingly tall bloke and here he was looking into the eyes of this rather diminutive stranger. Suddenly the whole thing stopped being just an idea for a cover line, and became a real life encounter between two human beings wondering how exactly the other one might be understanding the word ‘date’ . . . but they soon overcame any initial embarrassment and they headed off to a local bar for a drink. What happened next I can’t say, except that the winning reader emailed me the following day to say thanks, and that Brand had treated her impeccably.
23 Sep–7 Oct 2010 THE LIST 15