An experimental independent magazine show

by Steve Watson in June 2025

What would happen if you took five great independent magazines and gave them a stage to perform on? We wanted to find out, so on Tuesday night this week we invited The Fence, Real Review, Vittles, Offal and The Paper to the Queen of Hoxton in Shoreditch, and asked them to put on an independent magazine show.

We’ve hosted lots of independent magazine events before, but they tend to be more industry-focused, digging into the process of actually making a magazine, or speaking about what’s on the pages. But this was never going to be a panel discussion or a series of presentations. We wanted to create something more entertaining; something closer to the experience of actually reading the magazines, but with the added benefit of seeing and hearing the writers in person.

The result was brilliant – we had some fantastic performances that were funny, some sad, and some quite strange, and I hope you’re going to enjoy listening to them via the podcast above. It ended up running quite long – picking five magazines was a bit of guesswork from me, and actually I think it would have worked even better with just four. But that’s the benefit of listening in your own time – you can either crash through the whole hour and 40 minutes in one go, or you can take the speakers one at a time and break them down into nice, little, 15-minute chunks. And if you really just want to listen to one speaker or one magazine, you’ll find them all at the following points:

Jack Beaumont (The Fence) 00.05.32
Ella Fox-Martens (The Fence) 00.17.07
Jack Self (Real Review) 00.29.12
K Biswas (Vittles) 00.54.30
John Merrick (Vittles) 00.58.29
Alice-Louise MacGillivray (Offal) 01.14.27
Mark Blacklock (Offal) 01.21.00
Offal AI (Offal) 01.24.49
Erin Mathias, Oliver Gabe and Owen Davies (The Paper) 01.29.54
Jack Parton (The Paper) 01.44.54

Take a look at the gallery below to see a few pictures of our independent magazine show as it happened, and I hope you’ll enjoy this trip to the Queen of Hoxton with The Fence, Real Review, Vittles, Offal and The Paper.