Inside the independent magazine that wants to 'save Wales'

The adage of recent years is that com­e­dy is suf­fer­ing because life is sim­ply too ridicu­lous. With clowns in office and non­sense all around, our socio-polit­i­cal real­i­ty is so bleak and unmoored from log­ic that it’s beyond par­o­dy. There is no sit­u­a­tion you could fab­ri­cate, or char­ac­ter you could invent, that would be more ridicu­lous than what’s already hap­pen­ing. The peo­ple who believe that, though, obvi­ous­ly haven’t read The Paper.

An inde­pen­dent mag­a­zine found­ed by three friends from South Wales, Oliv­er Gabe, Owen Davies and Erin Math­ias, The Paper (Y Papur) is a bril­liant­ly weird pub­li­ca­tion that aims to cap­ture the ​“con­fus­ing, hope­less but hilar­i­ous” state of life in con­tem­po­rary Wales. Or, in the team’s own words: it’s ​“one hun­dred-some­thing pages of pic­tures and words by short, fat, genet­i­cal­ly worse-off people.”

Brought to life via a Kick­starter cam­paign, which had the ​“ridicu­lous luck” of Michael Sheen donat­ing almost the exact amount they need­ed to get it over the line, their first issue uses the con­cept of brain drain – peo­ple leav­ing Wales to seek oth­er oppor­tu­ni­ties and nev­er com­ing back – as a jump­ing off point. It seeks to exam­ine life in a place where the pub­lic ser­vices are knack­ered and the politi­cians are either hilar­i­ous­ly checked out or woe­ful­ly def­er­en­tial to Eng­land, but at the same time is also, arguably, the best nation on earth. A host of writ­ers artic­u­late this com­plex feel­ing through pieces rang­ing from con­flict­ed home-for-Christ­mas expe­ri­ences, to abject dis­patch­es from an Arri­va car­riage, to straight inter­views with award-win­ning restau­rant own­er Janet Wei and anar­chist pub­lish­er Ian Bone.

Some parts of the mag­a­zine nod to the more deranged cor­ners of local news, where you’ll find head­lines like ​‘man punch­es seag­ull for steal­ing chips’ or, a favourite of Erin’s, ​‘does any­one know the naked truth of the fer­al man?’ (cour­tesy of the West­ern Tele­graph). Else­where, it takes a side­ways look at the kinds of ​‘top 10 things to do in X city before you die’ lists reg­u­lar­ly pub­lished on plat­forms who would not have the temer­i­ty to award #1 place to the Warham­mer shop. In oth­er aspects, such as the cov­er, which chaot­i­cal­ly adver­tis­es every sin­gle fea­ture along­side a bunch of non-exis­tent sto­ries (“behead­ed for eat­ing crisps”) and a cut-out-and-keep of BBC pre­sen­ter Huw Edwards, it’s so idio­syn­crat­ic it can only be com­pared to the spir­it of Wales itself – some­times scathing, often absurd and, print­ed on A2 paper, delib­er­ate­ly annoy­ing to navigate.

For all its sur­re­al­ist com­e­dy, though, the sto­ries are as every­day as they come. It’s hav­ing a kebab on the train, fan­cy­ing some­one in the chip­py and try­ing to get on the right anti­de­pres­sants. This nat­ur­al bal­ance of humour and affec­tion is one rea­son why The Paper has res­onat­ed at home and beyond (it’s cur­rent­ly stocked in shops in Lon­don, Bris­tol and New York), and at a time when the role of the media in a dif­fi­cult process of rene­go­ti­a­tion, Erin notes that ​“the weird­est thing about The Paper is how nor­mal it is.” Most­ly, though, it res­onates because it’s a good laugh and a dar­ing exam­ple of what can hap­pen when you begin every thought process with ​‘wouldn’t it be fun­ny if…’ – and then actu­al­ly fol­low through.

As they look ahead to their next issue, we caught up with Oliv­er, Owen and Erin to talk about cap­tur­ing the mad­ness of the mun­dane, pre­serv­ing the con­ver­sa­tion­al voice of South Wales, and why they thought it would be ​“hilar­i­ous” to make some­thing ten times the size of Take A Break.

Could you tell me a bit about when and how the idea for The Paper first came about?

Oliv­er: Ini­tial­ly I was going to do it with my mate Dan [Evans, Des­o­la­tion Radio host]. We were liv­ing in a strange aban­doned house, which belonged to a promi­nent mem­ber of the Com­mu­nist Par­ty of Britain, and we both had time on our hands dur­ing Covid. I’d worked on some mag­a­zines before and I’d always want­ed to try doing one myself. Ini­tial­ly it start­ed as a way for us to expand the pod­cast – but basi­cal­ly we spoke about it for almost an entire year and pro­duced absolute­ly noth­ing. So me and Dan decid­ed it was nev­er going to hap­pen between us – he’s got a great arti­cle about blow­ing a gas­ket on Twit­ter in Issue 1 though. I was doing film stuff with Owen any­way so he came on board, and when we spoke to Erin about doing an arti­cle she gave us about nine ideas and we want­ed to do them all, so we asked if she wouldn’t mind becom­ing an edi­tor of the whole thing as well.

Do you have a man­i­festo or an edi­to­r­i­al agen­da per se?

Oliv­er: I don’t think we had any idea, to be hon­est with you. Some­body asked us on a pod­cast if we had a busi­ness plan and we just laughed our heads off.

Owen: We do keep say­ing that the goal of the mag­a­zine is to ​‘save Wales.’

Erin: Yeah, we had com­plete­ly unre­al­is­tic and stu­pid goals and hard­ly any real, prac­ti­cal goals. I sup­pose, because there’s so lit­tle going on in Wales, we could have basi­cal­ly done any­thing and it would have been new.

Oliv­er: I don’t think we were ever like, ​‘it’s going to look like this,’ but we spoke to loads of poten­tial con­trib­u­tors – our mates, basi­cal­ly – and you could just tell the ones who got it straight away. I don’t know what there was to get, but I remem­ber when we spoke to Lowri [Lux­ton] we came away think­ing ​‘she under­stands the paper’ with­out us ever ver­bal­is­ing or con­cep­tu­al­is­ing what it is. More of a feeling.

Erin: Retain­ing people’s voic­es was real­ly impor­tant, and not over-edit­ing peo­ple to the point where they all sound­ed the same. But that stuff didn’t real­ly come until later.

Owen: We did have exam­ples to start with, too. Erin’s account of [Wales’s Deputy Min­is­ter for Arts, Sport and Tourism] Dawn Bowden’s Sun­day morn­ing was just some­thing she’d already tweet­ed that me and Ol thought was real­ly fun­ny. We saw it as the voice of the mag­a­zine, almost. But there were very few pre-exist­ing things that typ­i­fied what we were going for.

It does feel like Wales, and work­ing class cul­ture in the UK in gen­er­al, is always pre­sent­ed through a lens that’s either quite patro­n­is­ing or total­ly abject. I remem­ber read­ing this BBC report once on pover­ty in Blae­nau Gwent and it was like ​“even weeds don’t grow here.” The Paper doesn’t ignore things being shit where that’s the case, but almost every­thing is com­i­cal one way or anoth­er. Why do you think humour is such a big cop­ing mech­a­nism for Welsh peo­ple, and how do you bal­ance humour when doing more straight-for­ward reporting?

Owen: I think for us, and for most of our con­trib­u­tors, [humour] isn’t a con­scious thing. In the edit­ing process we have made a lot of the pieces… not less fun­ny, but less sil­ly, because it was almost like every­one’s nat­ur­al instinct was just to take the piss.

Oliv­er: I think I’m too close to it to know whether there’s some­thing inher­ent­ly Welsh about that [sense of humour], but gen­er­al­ly it’s just peo­ple writ­ing about what’s actu­al­ly around them. The peo­ple who are involved at the moment are basi­cal­ly all our mates and our mates’ mates, so no one’s writ­ten any­thing out­side of their uni­verse. The humour is dif­fi­cult to talk about but it is a fine line. We want to be fun­ny with­out being seen as a joke, although we prob­a­bly are by a lot of people’s estimations.

Owen: It’s always a sur­prise when peo­ple do seem to take us seri­ous­ly, espe­cial­ly out­side of Wales.

I saw you’ve got it stocked at mag­a­zine shops in Lon­don, New York – how do you think it trans­lates out­side of a Welsh context?

Erin: All the feed­back has been focused on the fact that it’s very fun­ny and very Welsh, but I’m like, how do you know what that is? What’s your frame of ref­er­ence to under­stand this? There must be some­thing about the way we’ve pieced togeth­er all these bits and bobs that’s giv­en the over­all pic­ture of humour and life in Wales.

Oliv­er: I think it’s that thing where the more spe­cif­ic you make some­thing, the more uni­ver­sal it becomes. We’ve had a lot of peo­ple com­ment on how ​‘dif­fer­ent’ the mag­a­zine is but actu­al­ly, if you look at it, a lot of it is just about peo­ple’s every­day expe­ri­ences – play­ing Minecraft, walk­ing around the woods, being sad when you go back home for Christ­mas, that kind of thing. But you don’t usu­al­ly get that with mag­a­zines because the for­mat is always geared towards the idea of celebri­ty. We just treat our mates like celebri­ties, I suppose.

Owen: I think part of it was that we didn’t tell any­one what to do, we just kind of said, ​‘write what­ev­er you want,’ and that trans­lat­ed into peo­ple writ­ing the most sub­jec­tive things that they could. I think that’s one of the things that’s real­ly nice about it.

You’ve said before that the weird­est thing about The Paper is how nor­mal it is. Could you talk a bit more about that?

Erin: It’s that idea of the mad­ness of the mun­dane. We’re play­ing on the idea that Wales is ​“bor­ing.” Obvi­ous­ly we don’t think it’s bor­ing, because we’ve made a whole mag­a­zine about it, but the mun­dane can be mad and it can also dri­ve you mad.

Oliv­er: The two reac­tions we get are ​‘what the fuck is this and why is it so big’ or it sums up some­thing they’ve felt or thought about their entire lives.

Owen: A lot of the deci­sion mak­ing – and the size is a per­fect exam­ple – has basi­cal­ly been: ​‘wouldn’t it be fun­ny if we did this.’ Then, sud­den­ly, we’re print­ing indus­tri­al quan­ti­ties of a giant A3 magazine.

It wasn’t until I read it cov­er to cov­er that I deeped how this way of speak­ing is total­ly non-exis­tent in the media and cre­ative indus­tries. I take it for grant­ed because this is how I speak, and how most of my friends and fam­i­ly speak, but that South Wales voice is almost like an oral tra­di­tion now. You don’t real­ly encounter it out­side of con­ver­sa­tion. Lon­don-based nation­als are con­stant­ly pub­lish­ing 800w essays about the joy of hav­ing a cup of tea or what­ev­er, and The Paper feels like: what if that was com­ing from a fun­ny and real­ly spe­cif­ic experience.

Owen: Osei’s arti­cle about the ​‘Top 10 Things to Do in Cardiff’ was just like: what if a nor­mal per­son was writ­ing one of those arti­cles. Well, he’s not a nor­mal per­son [laughs] but: what if some­one who isn’t a jour­nal­ist was writ­ing one of those arti­cles? It would just be real­ly con­ver­sa­tion­al, writ­ten as you would talk rather than that weird jour­nal­is­tic voice.

Oliv­er: His write-up of the launch par­ty is one of the best things I’ve read about The Paper. It was real­ly pro­found, it shit me up. He goes ​‘the most endur­ing mem­o­ry of the launch-night was a mad feel­ing of shared­ness. The knowl­edge that every­one in this room was as strange as you were.’

Erin: I think that idea of an oral his­to­ry or an oral nar­ra­tive is some­thing that, again, we haven’t spo­ken about con­scious­ly, but have come at it like: if you can’t write just send us a voice note and we’ll write it up, to retain that voice. That approach seeped through into the edit­ing and the con­ver­sa­tion­al style of most of the pieces.

Oliv­er: We’ll accept writ­ing in any form. Lowri wrote her piece in her phone notes when she was on the train, which is why it’s writ­ten and set out like it is. Ini­tial­ly we edit­ed it like a stan­dard arti­cle, with punc­tu­a­tion, and she hat­ed it.

Erin: There was some­thing about the final­i­ty of the full stops that she did­n’t like. They made it seem way more seri­ous than what she want­ed to be, and on reflec­tion she was com­plete­ly right. So we just changed it back.

Oliv­er: Some peo­ple have been like, I’ve got a fun­ny sto­ry or my mate’s got a fun­ny sto­ry that I’d love to tell but I’m not a writer, so we’ve just hopped on the phone with them, typed it up and sent it back to them. Then they’ve been like ​‘I wouldn’t say that, I’d say it like this,’ and we’ve worked on it col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly. We’ve tried to have the least amount of bar­ri­ers pos­si­ble in place for peo­ple who weren’t already writ­ers. It’s made more work for us, but hope­ful­ly it’s bet­ter because of it.

Erin: True col­lab­o­ra­tion is hard, right? It would prob­a­bly be way eas­i­er to just be like, send us this and you have no say in what hap­pens to it after­wards, but we don’t want it to be like that at all. You’ve got to be hap­py to put your name to some­thing, haven’t you.

Were there any pub­li­ca­tions, past or present, that you were react­ing against or mod­el­ling your­self after? Like you inter­viewed Ian Bone who start­ed the anar­chist mag ALARM! in Swansea in the 80s, which had a lot of satir­i­cal rage and was also hand-dis­trib­uted – which you did when it came to deliv­er­ing copies of The Paper to local address­es. Was that an influence?

Erin: The only mag­a­zines I used to read when I was younger were Take A Break and Chat and all those kinds of mag­a­zines – and VICE, because it was free.

Oliv­er: I do quite like mag­a­zines because I’m a nerd, but there was no one direct influ­ence on The Paper. That’s fun­ny you men­tion the Ian thing, because I’d nev­er even thought about us hand deliv­er­ing them and how he hand deliv­ered ALARM. We just did it to save mon­ey! ALARM only works because of the way [Ian] was liv­ing. He’d spend days going through coun­cil meet­ing notes and stuff. He’s a mad and bril­liant man.

Owen: We went to his house to scan all the copies [of ALARM] but the only scan­ner we had was my girlfriend’s giant old print­er. So we cart­ed it to Lon­don on the Megabus and sat on his liv­ing room floor just chat­ting to him – and we’d gone out the night before for our friend’s birth­day, so I just remem­ber being sat in his liv­ing room scan­ning these things feel­ing so dis­gust­ing­ly hungover.

Oliv­er: While he was rip­ping into us like ​‘you two are fuck­ing use­less, look at you.’

Owen: He’d email us from time to time being like ​‘where the fuck is this mag­a­zine, what are you even doing?’ It’s worth bear­ing in mind that at one point, ALARM was hand-deliv­er­ing 6,000 copies a week.

Oliv­er: I saw him recent­ly, actu­al­ly. He’s still busy organ­is­ing a simul­ta­ne­ous world­wide anar­chist rev­o­lu­tion. Legend.

I hear the launch par­ty was a mas­sive laugh. What can you tell me about that?

Owen: We threw a vari­ety show. All the con­trib­u­tors did a lit­tle act. We had Welsh hymns on a tin whis­tle, a live Wales v Eng­land World Cup Final on Foot­ball Man­ag­er with com­men­tary (Wales won some­thing like 142 – 0), a moti­va­tion­al speech, some­one played the nose trum­pet top­less, a hot dog eat­ing race, and a per­for­mance from Cuban exile Ricar­do Bullion.

Erin: The ceil­ing of the venue was ripped down before we’d even got going which set the tone of the night.

Oliv­er: Me and Owen took so long on the hot dog race that we man­aged to turn the entire room – which had my whole extend­ed fam­i­ly in it – from pleas­ant cheery sup­port to blood boil­ing rage.

Owen: The vari­ety show was as good as the mag­a­zine itself.

Oliv­er: Chaos.

Erin: We’ll be doing anoth­er for Issue 2.

What’s the theme for Issue 2?

Owen: Terror.

Fol­low and pur­chase The Paper.

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