It all began after the 2008 economic crash. Jake Applebee, a graphic designer, and Thomas Frost, a journalism graduate, were both in Bristol with no money, no jobs, and nothing but time. In 2009, they made a magazine. The first issues of CRACK were assembled in a bedroom and distributed by hand across the city — a free publication that fused DJ culture with guitar music, pop with the experimental, in a way that nobody else was doing. They had no business plan, no investors, and for the first two years, no revenue at all. The early advertising came from local businesses, and distribution meant loading magazines into a van and driving them across the UK in runs the founders have described, with characteristic understatement, as hellish.
Growth came through a combination of editorial ambition and sheer stamina. In 2012, they secured the first independent music magazine interview with Flying Lotus ahead of his fourth studio album. By then, the team had expanded from two people to a tiny room at the top of an office complex in Bristol — with only two chairs, so the first intern worked from the sofa. The decision to go monthly and launch in London simultaneously was, in retrospect, either brave or reckless. It worked. In 2013, the team co-founded the Simple Things festival in Bristol, which drew 5,000 attendees in its early years. In 2015, a Berlin edition launched. By the time the 100th issue arrived in 2019 — with Thom Yorke of Radiohead on the cover, shot by emerging photographers rather than established names, because that is the CRACK approach — the magazine had also launched a New York edition and expanded into client publishing.
The photography has always been central. Rather than hiring legendary photographers to shoot legendary subjects, CRACK pairs emerging visual artists with major musicians and builds each shoot as a genuine collaboration — research-driven, narrative-rich, and designed to tell a parallel story to the accompanying interview. A$AP Ferg with Dapper Dan. Sophie in a surreal studio setting. J Hus, Dean Blunt, Helena Hauff, Slayer, Fever Ray. In 2019, the magazine published The Crack Magazine Archives, a book documenting a decade of shoots and the stories behind them. The approach, as one editor put it, is not to follow the easy path but to go out of their way — to say that emerging photographers are at the level of capturing icons.
Today, CRACK is the biggest independent free monthly magazine in Europe, reaching an audience across print, digital, and social media from its headquarters at 31 Berkeley Square, Bristol. The team also built Everything is Music, a digital museum app mapping over 250 geo-tagged pins across Bristol and Bath's musical history. That a bedroom project born from a recession could become an internationally recognised platform for contemporary culture is, as the founders would be the first to admit, a story about luck, grind, and chaos in roughly equal measure. But it is also proof that the most vital music journalism still comes from people who care more about the music than about the business model.
Explore CRACK at <a href="https://crackmagazine.net/" target="\_blank">crackmagazine.net