‘the style magazine with added colour’
AN INTERVIEW WITH IMRAN KHAN
TASHI Starting a magazine comes with its trials and tribulations, what made you decide to take that jump and create 2nd Generation.
IMRAN KHAN It really began with music. I grew up with Bollywood music, my mum was a huge Bollywood fan. My father was a huge, kind of Pakistani music fan. And so I've always grown up with music. It was always like a huge part of my life.
And how did they influence your personal music tastes?
So actually the scenes related to Bollywood and Bhangra music weren’t really for me. But suddenly, in the Nineties there were these super interesting artists coming along, like Talvin Singh and Asian Dub Foundation who were making this kind of drum and base, jungle influenced Asian music that I had never really heard before. And it kept getting categorised as ‘world music’, this was really frustrating because it was such a narrow generalisation. At the same time I was looking around in the media and the only representations of Asian kids back then was you’re either getting an arranged marriage, or you’re mugging somebody. That was the only representation and they weren’t showing anyone doing anything different from that.
So was this lack of diverse representation what triggered you to create 2nd Generation?
Yeah so I learned the ropes of how to put together a proper magazine. Sony gave us a bit of money, and we had lots of really great interesting things that we could put into the issues. Also at the time this was happening, there was a club night called Anokah, at the Blue Note, which was run by Talvin Singh and Sweety Kapoor, and it blew my mind the first time I went there because it was full of people who looked like me, dressed like me, talked like me, and who were in love with the same kind of things as I was. Yeah, so I walked into that club, probably about the second or third week it was running. And just thought to myself, “this is it for me, this is just incredible”. And I wanted to be a part of this thing, I want to do something that reflects this scene. I wanted an outlet for people like me. So then I kind of quit Dazed and Confused, and briefly worked with Toby Young and Julie Burchill at The Modern Review. Then like literally a week later I just thought I'm going to do this, I’m going to create 2nd Generation. So I got together a couple of friends of mine and I said to them, I'm gonna do this, and they were like, you’re insane. But I never thought I can’t do this. So we got together and basically I persuaded a printer to print me up a four page domain issue for free, which I then took to advertising agencies. Showed them it saying this is what I'm about to launch. They were all kind of quite cynical about it. And then I invited them along to Anokah.
Right to show them the scene that you were representing.
Yeah, exactly. And then I sold enough advertising to pay for the first issue. And the first issue launched in 1996. And then the next week, the week after it launched, and we were all really depressed, I was running it from my bedroom literally inviting all the writers over to my room, the artists, photographers, everybody.
That must have been a bit cramped!
And then The Guardian picked up on it about a week later. And after that, things went insane and the whole scene exploded as well. And we just happened to be at the right time at the right place. And we ran it for about two years. And it was just a brilliant moment in time when bands like Asian Dub Foundation, and, you know, Nitin Sawhney and like, really super great photographers, just incredible artists were coming along, people like Gavin Fernandez and it just became this kind of mad thing. And I started describing 2nd Generation initially, as the “style magazine with added colour”
Yeah, a very iconic slogan.
And then we changed that to “Brown is the New Black”, just because we thought it was really fun. It was insane, people from all over the world were calling from America, India, Pakistan, Thailand, like really insane places saying, “can you come and play, can you bring the magazine with you?” So it just became this kind of mad, mad scene.
And you were chronicling this movement every step of the way.
And because we were all in it together, we were kind of this very loosely affiliated group of writers and artists and DJs and promoters and musical artists and visual artists. We all were kind of finding our feet. And yeah, it was an incredible, incredible time for creativity. But it was a very different time to now because it was pre-internet. I mean I wasn’t ready to go into business. I wasn’t a business person, I was there because I love music and I just happened to understand how to run a magazine. But the biggest problem was finding models because we wanted to do these interesting shoots which needed girls and boys who would look great editorially. But I was looking for Black and Asian models, and the modelling agencies just didn’t have any, so we had to go and find them. And then once we gave them the shoot, and they realised that this was a thing they were able to sign deals and they then went on to do really big things.
So you were able to create a platform for them through 2G.
Yeah and that’s what I’m really proud of and it’s people like you discovering it now, keeping it alive. So I’m really proud. I think that’s an amazing thing that we achieved. Not only did we have an impact on the culture at the time, but 20 years later, you know, people are still seeking us out.