How many times in your life have you uttered the phrase “Where on earth did that thing go?”, perhaps followed up with “Did we chuck it out during a clear up?” I know I have said this many times throughout my life, mystery disappearances of items that I am pretty sure I would not have thrown away on a whim. There is one item that I have said this about many, many times in recent years. I am positive that I would not have jettisoned it for any reason at all, and I remain hopeful that one day it will reappear, likely emerging from a dusty box tucked away in a far corner of the loft. What is this thing? And why does it cause me perpetual head scratching?
I’ll come straight out and say it: I got The Prodigy their first magazine full front cover and I have no way to prove it.
I interviewed Liam Howlett (over the phone) at the time when Experience was released. I think it’s fair to say it would not have been deemed a literary masterpiece. I was a mere 20-year-old whose main reason for writing was not for critical acclaim for my prose. I just figured that if I write for music magazines, I can get free promo records. It worked! It was highly unlikely that I would get on the record promo lists just from DJing one night a week at a small club in Southampton. But as a writer? Kudos! It worked so well that I even had to construct a special box for the almost daily deliveries of free vinyl that I would receive.
Back to the main point, though. My writing probably sucked. If I could read it now, I would probably cringe so hard that my jaw would break. But this is precisely the point, I have no way of reading it, for this magazine is the thing that has disappeared at some point in the past, causing me to forever wonder what happened to it.
But it gets worse.
I could just Google for it, right? Or as my daughter would put it “you could just search it up”. Alas, that is not an option because as far as the Internet is concerned, this never existed. It’s my word against the Internet. The reason why there seems to be no record of it, other than in my head is that, well … let’s just say that the magazine didn’t exactly sell in Earth-shattering numbers.
Mixmag started its life as a magazine that was sent exclusively to members of the DJ mix service DMC. At some point, they decided to make it available to the public. And it would be wonderful if I could say this was the magazine I’m referring to but unfortunately it was a magazine launched by a different DJ service called Music Factory.
DMC was associated with the über cool World DJ Championships. Music Factory, on the other hand, was associated with Jive Bunny.
The magazine that Music Factory launched was called ‘Hit The Decks’, and it followed the exact same route as Mixmag from member-exclusive to public availability. It just lacked that whole ‘people actually want to buy it’ factor. I don’t think it made it past a few monthly issues before they threw in the towel.
Nobody bought it, nobody archived it, it’s like it never existed. Every now and then I Google for it in the vain hope that something might have changed but it never shows up. Now that I’ve written this piece, I’ll add to the frustration even more as this post turns up in the search results.
I had a glimmer of hope a few years ago when Liam was doing an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit. I took the opportunity to ask if he recalled it but I didn’t get the “Oh hell, yeah I remember it!” reply I was kinda hoping for. He did, however, point me in the direction of a man, James Hyman, who has a literal warehouse full of magazines from 80s and 90s. He even seemed to remember the magazine, but that lead went cold pretty soon after.
So years later, I still have no proof that this ever happened. I’ve all but given up on hope of finding a copy, but if anyone has any bright ideas about how I could one, please leave a comment.
AI to the rescue?
Just for shits and giggles, I wondered what would happen if I tried to get AI to recreate the magazine cover. Um, yeah … this is not how it looked.
Prompt: “Create a fake magazine cover. Its title is ‘Hit the Decks’ and should be in red lettering. The front cover should be monochrome and feature the four members of The Prodigy”
AI:
Update: I contacted James again about the archive. Well, let’s just say that chances of it ever reappearing are slim.
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