I first met Katie Grand in the Wimpy on Corporation Street in Birmingham in the mid-80’s and we immediately bonded over a mutual obsession with The Face, i-D and Blitz. Oh, and we were both rather excited about the forthcoming movie adaptation of Absolute Beginners! I acted particularly smoothly on our first date - I bought a bottle of Blue Nun from an off-license and after drinking it I told Katie that in the dark she looked very much like Nastassja Kinski. I ended up moving in with Katie, her Dad and his girlfriend for a couple of years, it all felt awfully bohemian and exciting to my teenage self. Katie’s dad Roger used to pay her to do my ironing, it was great.

Fast forward twenty-odd years, we’re still very good friends and Katie is starting a new magazine, LOVE (her second magazine, no less). Katie did quite well for herself, as I always knew she would. On the eve of the magazine’s launch I thought it might be fun to have a little chat with her about it…

Nathan Gregory Wilkins: Can we start by discussing how you decided on the name of the magazine? I know that it was quite a lengthy process as we had exchanged quite a few text messages and emails on the subject before you’d decided [on LOVE]. What other names were considered?

Katie Grand: Well I really liked ‘Fame’, with its Warhol and Bowie connotations. I also liked ‘Plastic’. It was that idea that the name didn’t necessarily mean one thing, that everyone would visualize something different. Anyway, we couldn’t use either. ‘Plastic’ we couldn’t use because of Plastique Magazine and Fame we couldn’t use because of an American magazine of the same name.  It took about five months before we finally came to a decision. Another one we liked for a short while was Legend, and then when the lawyers said we could use it we changed our minds, it sounded wrong. There was also ‘X’ and ‘Sex’ (which rather surprisingly was available). We’d normally send the legal types five possible titles to clear at a time. It was quite a dreary and expensive procedure. ‘Starlet’ was another one we could have used, but when we got confirmation we felt deflated rather than elated so that had to go. Another big favourite was ‘Heroine’, but of course I was told absolutely no way!

NGW: So how did you finally decide upon LOVE then? 

KG: Well it was one of the first names that we mentioned, but we thought it was a bit mushy. Then myself, Stuart and Lee were in the office and because we’d got so fed up with whole process I decided we should just try some covers and see what the graphics looked like. We got the Courtney Love cover up and were trying it with Sex, X and a few others when I wondered what it would look like if we moved Love up to the top - and actually, it looked really cool. It’s kind of like a ‘Face’ type banner in a way. 

NGW: So why did you resign from POP exactly? I imagine it must have been a tricky decision to make, as quite unlike Dazed or The Face, it was very much your baby?

KG: The decision was easy because Bauer had made it so difficult for us to do our job in the environment that we were working in. It was unlike the previous jobs I’d had - at Dazed we had a huge office, and when you have lots of space people can drop by and it’s pretty creative. It was really miserable. I know this sounds terribly Ab Fab, but during summer when we were in production on the autumn issue of POP, the temperature in the office got so hot we started looking at health and safety regulations! We found that we were supposed to have 11 square metres per person but only had 5.6 meters each. It got very petty. We literally moved operations to Cecconi’s for two days in the end and finished the magazine al fresco from there. 

NGW: But it still must have been difficult to actually resign from the magazine you’d created?

KG: When I resigned from Dazed I remember calling Jefferson and sobbing, sat in a hotel room in New York. I was actually over there shooting. I’d gone a sort of sideways route with leaving Dazed as things hadn’t been going so well. I’d decided that I would take the job I’d been offered at The Face, but I wasn’t going to tell anyone that I was going to go to New York to shoot a cover for them. 

NGW: So you were actually in New York shooting for The Face?

KG: Yes, I’d not actually resigned. I’d put myself is a position of no turning back, where nobody could talk me out of it. It was very wrenching; it was very different to leaving POP. Rankin and Jefferson have a certain dynamism to their personalities. I was much younger and not quite as confident. I would wonder, ‘can I do this without them?’ I felt quite cold about leaving POP. Strangely it was when I’d already started working on LOVE that it became much more difficult, I cried a lot and was rather over-emotional. It had been eight and a half years. And it’s difficult because there are all of these rumours flying around about who is going to be the next editor, it’s very difficult to detach myself from that.

NGW: So how do you feel about POP continuing without you? Won’t it be a bit like Dallas without J.R. Ewing?

KG: Very funny, I wish I’d thought of that! I actually go from one extreme to another. It’s funny because when I left Dazed I seem to remember Rankin calling me to tell me that they were appointing Katy England as fashion director. So I called Katy England to tell her I was really pleased for her, which I genuinely was. She’s really talented and I was glad somebody that I respected was taking over something I’d been very close to and involved with from the beginning. It never bothered me and I was really happy with the choice they’d made. The biggest problem for me at the moment is that POP could employ someone that I think is completely venomous - which would leave a really nasty taste in my mouth. 

NGW: Because it’s something you started from scratch?

KG: Yes, and I’d like it to be good and I’d like it to have some credibility. Of course there are people that could take the position who I think are totally wrong. If someone were to take over the position that I consider a long-term enemy, I would be disappointed, but not as worried as I’d be if somebody really great took over. 

NGW: When you started work on LOVE did you already have a fixed idea of how it would look? 

KG: Not really. I think when we very first started... I wasn’t exactly depressed but I was certainly acting and feeling a little strange. I didn’t want to commission anything until we knew exactly what we were doing and there were very few people that I actually wanted to talk to about the magazine.

NGW: OK, so who did you discuss the magazine with, who were your confidants?

KG: Well I spoke to you a fair bit about the title. Joe McKenna was really supportive and totally got what I was trying to do very quickly. We had a night out and I got very drunk while he remained very sober. He was a big help. I was very conscious that before we’d said we were doing the magazine there was lots of speculation that I was leaving and was going to do something with Condé Nast. Then I don’t think until I resigned that I realised what a privileged position I was in and what a big responsibility it was. So visually to begin with I wasn’t really quite sure what to do, apart from that I was very aware that it couldn’t look like POP. So there were very straightforward things like it couldn’t be pink, we couldn’t use animals, we couldn’t use any Muppets. But other than that what was it going be? I’d been looking back at some old issues of The Face, all the Dave Sims covers, particularly his covers with Nirvana, Iggy Pop and Tim Roth and then also looking at some very old Avedon pictures. In fact Joe had also bought me a great Avedon book called Performance. What struck me was an idea that’s kind of been lost in recent years, that you can have an iconic picture of someone and it doesn’t have to be just a sketch of the person. We’re so used to retouching and the idea of perfection and it’s become far too easy to manipulate a picture to create a great cover. So that was the real starting point, in fact at POP I’d been thinking about doing a completely un-retouched issue. Not totally un-retouched but going back to the retouching the same way Avedon had done, or Helmut Newton; something much more subtle and timeless.

NGW: I know what you mean. A lot of images in modern magazines bore me in the same way that modern movies with too much CGI bore me. There’s no sense of wonder because you know what you’re looking at isn’t real.

KG: Well even I know my way around a warp tool and how you can give someone higher tits, a smaller waist and a smaller nose. So it was these kind of thoughts that were going through my mind when I really started to think about the magazines visual identity.

NGW: So lets talk about the cover and your cover girl Beth Ditto, was she your first and only choice? 

KG: I never wanted anyone else. I think maybe Condé Nast would have liked someone a little more commercial, as Beth is pretty much unknown in America. It was funny because when we did the first cover of POP I put all of my friends on the cover and it felt a bit like that with Beth, like putting a friend on the cover. I knew that I got on well with her that she’d give great quotes, she wouldn’t ask for photo approval and wouldn’t insist that her own hair and make up people worked with her. She was amazing, she turned up the night before the shoot, they got to work on dying her hair which took five hours, after which she turned up full of energy and enthusiasm at Mert and Marcus’ suite at Chateau Marmont in a floral kaftan, her hands aloft screaming “oh my god I can’t believe I’m here! Katie, I can’t believe I’m your first cover-girl!” 

NGW: Icons seem to be something you’re fascinated by. A lot of magazines try to pick up on people who are on their way up the ladder. This isn’t something that I sense interests you as much?

KG: Well I think that’s done so well by the newspapers. The Sunday papers in particular, and they’re weekly with a huge circulation. We when we sat down to work on the music section we talked about doing a band called S.C.U.M. - we couldn’t get them for love nor money. We got all of the big artists no problem. Lily, Duffy etc. The Lilly Allen interview is great; we got unlimited access to Lily, which was amazing. Anyway, the thing was we were really struggling with the smaller bands; the ones we could get access to had all been featured very recently in The Sunday Times, The Observer and the like. 

NGW: So do you feel that for a magazine that’s only published twice a year it a pointless exercise trying to keep up with the Joneses?

KG: My theory for long time has been “it ain't what you do, it’s the way that you do it.”  I always wanted to have “it ain't what you do, it’s the way that you do it” on all of the magazine spines but thought it might come across as too arrogant! Yes, i-D did do Beth before us, but they didn’t have Steven Klein, they didn’t have 20 designers making clothes especially for her and she’d never looked so iconic. And because of my background, it’s very visual so I’ll always think about the journalism last of all. That makes us different from what you might see in the newspapers. We are photography led.

NGW: You’ve already briefly touched upon what we might expect visually, can you perhaps go into a little more detail?

KG: OK. Well we’re easing off the retouching as I mentioned. I don’t want to say it’s more grown up because that’s makes you sound like such an awful old fogey! And because of the restrictions Condé Nast put on us when we were working on POP, they did stop a lot of photographers from working with us. It was an unspoken thing but they’ve actually owned up recently. The lack of restrictions now opens up all sorts of possibilities.  In a funny way though the restrictions were good because I would never have got to work with Alice Hawkins as much as I did or Alistair McLellan. There are of course some elements that may look a tiny bit like POP because it’s my thing and I have quite specific tastes. And at times I was trying too hard to make it nothing like POP, but fortunately time constraints take over and you start to get the feeling that actually I just don’t care, I just want it to be really good.

NGW: You mentioned that the Angelica Huston piece was particularly significant to you. Is that something you’re very happy with? 

KG: Once I’d decided that I wanted to go down a much more naturalistic route there were certain photographers that became obvious choices, one of them being Terry Richardson. Terry had come back to me a said he wanted to shoot Angelica, so it was his idea. 

NGW: He’d known her as a young boy, hadn’t he? When his father was dating her?

KG: Yes, though I’m not sure if they’d remained in contact. I tried to get him involved with the interview but he said he found the whole experience so emotional that he felt there was nothing more nothing to say, that any statement was in the pictures. And very sadly a short time after the shoot Angelica’s husband passed away. Although I didn’t speak to her myself I had been aware of a very delicate situation - she’d had to move the interview several times because of her husband’s illness. I had no idea of the seriousness of the situation until we heard the bad news. There was something about those pictures. Maybe because of what she was going through and the fact she had a connection with Terry, they were the furthest away from any images I’d seen for a long time. She’s got many of the same qualities I love about Beth, she’s hugely iconic, she’s not sample size and she’s an incredibly beautiful woman. Here is a woman that isn’t hung up on plastic surgery, on altering her natural appearance.  

NGW: She touches on that in the interview doesn’t she? She talks about how the only time anyone falls in love with you is when your hair is dirty and you look like shit.

KG: It’s a great line. I really love what those women stand for.

NGW: Something about the big features in LOVE that struck me is that Beth Ditto, Iggy Pop, Angelica Huston and Courtney Love have all operated very much on the edges on their industries. They’re essentially all quite unconventional figures. Was that a conscious choice?

KG: Well they’re all quite natural choices to be photographed for a fashion magazine. They have all played with fashion a little bit. And I do like an underdog

NGW: You have an incredibly impressive list of luminaries featured in the A-Z section at the front of the magazine. How easy was it to persuade them all to take part? Did everyone say yes straight away or was it hard work?

KG: This is something I learnt about at POP, particularly on the fourth issue.

NGW: Can you remind me why that issue was different?

KG: If you look at issues one to three it’s quite a jolly, accomplished, but rather cliquey magazine. For the fourth issue I came up with the theme of icons, so I phoned Stella McCartney and we met for a cup of tea to discuss it. Stella said ‘why don’t I phone M?’ (that’s what she calls Madonna). So she phoned Madonna who said yes immediately and as you can imagine this was quite a surprising new experience for me! Stella did some work with us and as a result we shot Chrissie Hynde and Charlotte Rampling. And then all of a sudden we were all about icons and when you use that word rather than casually asking somebody if they fancy doing a fashion shoot, everyone tends to say yes without hesitation. So when I started work on LOVE I knew this sort of thing was more than possible.  
NGW: Finally can to tell me about the brilliant photo of Agyness and how that came about?

KG: While I was having the dilemma of what we were going do with the magazine I said to Victoria, Fran and Tim that they had to deal with the front section. Fran actually came up with the A – Z idea, which I really liked because it gave things a strict structure and at this point there was no structure at all. I came in after a week and they’d produced a huge mood board with things we like that start with A, things we like that start with B etc. So I took a big marker and ticked the things I liked and crossed out the things I didn’t. Yes I liked the idea of Sofia Coppola, no I am not so keen on the idea of gardens. And as we whittled away at the alphabet we thought it would be a great idea if we had models dressed as some of our heroes. We had Tina Turner on the list for instance so we got Liya (Kebede) to dress as her, we wanted to do something with Veronica Webb and I thought she’d make a great Beyoncé. And of course Agyness was the Queen. That photo is actually inspired by the cover of Tatler that Vivienne Westwood did as Margaret Thatcher. 



NGW.

www.thelovemagazine.blogspot.com