As the Idler prepares to publish it’s 100th edition, Tom Hodgkinson takes us back to where it all began

The idea for the Idler came to me in a flash one morning. It was 1991, I was 23, and I was lying in bed in my rented room at the cheap end of Portobello Road, feeling lazy and unsuccessful, reading the diaries and essays of Dr Johnson. I discovered that for two years in the 1750s, he’d written a weekly column called “The Idler”, and in these pieces he discussed his own indolence. What a beautiful name for a magazine that would discuss work and life and redefine idling as a good thing, I thought.

It wasn’t my first magazine project. I’d done quite a few. The first was The Penguin, a magazine about penguins, which I co-edited with my friend Simon Richmond. We were nine years old. Then there was the Kings House Times, produced with my friend Philip Woodford. Then the Sixth Form Rag when I was 13. At university I co-edited a magazine called Broadsheet with James Parker, now a writer for the Atlantic.

I suppose it runs in the family. My parents were both Fleet Street hacks, working at the Sunday People and Daily Mail, and my Dad got quite a long way towards launching a health food magazine in the eighties. My brother Will produced a fanzine when he was 16 (it featured an interview with a young Bobby Gillespie).

I’d also helped on other mags, including Phat, a magazine aimed at “young gentlemen of the hoodlum persuasion”, which was edited by another brilliant friend, the late Gavin Hills, who later became a well-known contributor to The Face. Phat was a sort of precursor to Loaded, and emerged from the skateboarding scene of the early nineties.

I’d met Gavin while working behind the counter at Rough Trade record shop and its subsidiary, Slam City Skates, a skateboarding shop, in 1989. I was there for a year and met many talented people. Another was the skateboarder and designer Ged Wells, who would later design our snail logo. I was so impressed and inspired by the creativity and entrepreneurialism of the skate scene.

Unlike many of my Cambridge contemporaries, who went into boring jobs, these young men and women were forging a creative path through life. They had enormous freedom. They had t-shirt companies, put on nights at clubs, ran magazines, made art. Gavin’s first mag was called Experiments in Social Engineering and came packed in a pizza box. He launched a short lived t-shirt brand called King Mental.

What a brilliant place to work. We had non-stop fun. My record collection expanded: it was the time of Sub Pop records, Mudhoney, Nirvana. On Saturdays visiting bands would play in the shop: the Beastie Boys did a gig. I wore Vans and skate t-shirts.

The idea for the Idler sloshed round in my mind and I started to make it into a reality. I was inspired by the 18th century, by magic mushrooms and by American antiwork fanzines I’d bought in the eighties – things like Processed World and Temp Slave!.

Another brilliant friend, Gavin Pretor-Pinney, had become a graphic designer. He’d worked on magazines as an undergraduate at Oxford and had designed the first edition of the Modern Review, a sort of TLS for popular culture. I asked if he’d like to help me. He said yes. It was the start of a fantastic working relationship that lasted fifteen years. (Actually we’d worked together before. At fifteen, we started a band called Cursed Earth. The multi-talented Gav was lead singer, songwriter and guitarist, while I plodded in the background on bass.)

Assembling issue one was not difficult. I was surrounded by talented young journalists and writers and artists, some of them from Oxbridge, and some of them from Slam City. We formed a happy gang. Marcel Theroux wrote a very funny spoof nature column and his brother Louis produced a terrific account of Charles Manson’s parole hearing. I went off to interview Terence McKenna, the magic mushroom guru, who was a cult figure at the time, having been sampled by the Shamen. Gavin Hills wrote a witty guide to drug-taking and James Parker did music reviews. Zed Nelson contributed photography. The sub-editor was Clare Margetson, now a senior editor at the Guardian.

To produce a magazine, though, I needed to learn some of the rudiments of business. Magazines don’t sell themselves, and as John Cooper Clarke is fond of pointing out, “respect don’t pay the rent”. I was on the dole at the time, having been sacked from my job as a researcher at the Sunday Mirror Magazine, a post which I had not particularly enjoyed (though I now realise it taught me a lot).

I attended a free small-business course in Portobello Road which was put on for dolie wannabe-entrepreneurs. The guy there advised me just to get on with it and print fifty copies, just so we had a magazine of some sort. In fact I ended up raising £800 from friends and family, selling lifetime subscriptions. That was enough to print 1,000 copies.

Gav knew all about magazine production. And he had an Apple Mac. We printed the mags and, with a view to getting some publicity, Clare Margeston and I delivered copies to each of the newspapers and one evening I dressed up in brown suede pantaloons and a white neckerchief, looking like a poet from 1800, then went into Soho and dropped copies off at various members’ clubs. “Nice to see a well-dressed man,” said the proprietor of Blacks, a club based in a Georgian townhouse on Dean Street.

I went back to Rough Trade shop, where they kindly let me use their photocopier and franking machine and also introduced me to a distributor of anarchist books and magazines called AK Press. They loved the Idler and saw us as an anarchist magazine. The anarchists have long been enemies of conventional jobs, seeing them as a form of indentured slavery, more or less well paid.

We got some press. The Telegraph said: “It’s good, but editor young Tom Hodgkinson, 25, will need imagination to keep the joke going.”

We began a series of publication parties which took place at the Salon des Arts, a small members’ club in Kensington. My friend Tim Barnes would DJ and we’d all get fairly pissed. My Mum’s then boyfriend came to some of these and remarked, possibly slightly misogynistically, on the “high standard of crumpet”. Translation: there were lots of beautiful and talented women there. I held talks there, too. Management guru Charles Handy came, and the late Nicholas Albery, director of the Institute for Social Inventions.

Issue two starred Homer Simpson on the cover and this was an inspired choice. It was 1993 and The Simpsons had just started airing on British TV. The focus at that time was all on Bart. No one had really thought about Homer. It took Gavin Hills’ genius to isolate Simpson père as the outstanding character of the show. Our sub-title – “and he’s not being ironic” – was a swipe at the Modern Review, which was all about post-modern irony and not taking anything seriously. We at the Idler, by contrast, wanted to produce a cheerful magazine.

This is an extract from XXX: Thirty Years of the Idler by Tom Hodgkinson. To read the rest of the story, and get a gigantic hardback full-colour A4 coffee table visual history of the Idler, click here and buy direct from us. When you buy this way, you get the book for half price. The full price is £40 but it’s a mere £20 direct (plus P&P).

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