Sometimes the promise of a job far exceeds its reality and my time as a freelance designer on the Ministry of Sound’s periodical magazine is case in point.
The magazine was put together at the organisation’s huge warehouse headquarters attached to the back of the club in Elephant & Castle, and on my first day there I was early, still groggy, and met at the tube station by a large division of The Nation of Islam who were there to protest about Stephen Lawrence’s murder and the lack of justice or conviction for his killing. I calmly searched for the street exit signs as hundreds of tight suited MLK look-a-likes shouted and waved placards at a nervous white man in glasses heading for the sunlight.
I was hired by Cas Spencer (at least I think that was his name) to do the grunt work at the back of the magazine that he didn’t want to get his fingers dirty with. There were about a hundred pages of club, music and product reviews that all needed fresh content for each monthly issue.
When I met Cas on my first day in the studio I had been freelancing for two years and had already art directed and designed a magazine from scratch which he’d seen in my portfolio but, his first words to me were still “Can you use a scanner?”. Dickhead. It was all downhill from there. He pointed to a scanner on a far away table in a corner and left me to it.
On the table was a huge pile of slide transparencies in plastic sleeves that I had to digitise and input on the magazine’s pages. Most professional photographer’s were still using film then which was a bonus for me because I was getting paid over a hundred pounds a day just to scan hundreds of pictures of gurning fuckwits. I knew how to use a scanner alright and set about batch scanning the slides sixteen at a time.
After a few weeks of this I would sometimes come in a little worse for wear and nod off while the scanner did its work, only waking at the loud sound that the scanners mechanics made returning to its start point. I would wipe the spittle from my chin, have a swig of cold coffee and begin using actions I had set up in Photoshop to adjust the light and size of each image at the click of a mouse.
The magazine’s editor was obsessed with having a caption on every single image in the magazine, so each picture I was putting on those club pages featuring thousands of beer swilling, flip flop wearing fools had to have caption. To make sure that the editorial team knew to write in a new caption I would use lower case x’s and add the location to save them asking me where it was. After a couple of issues I got a little tired of this procedure and started adding my own captions which I felt were much more apt for the content like “blah blah gurner” “dribble stagger stagger, crawl crawl” “I can’t feel anything I’m gonna do another”. My particular favourite was “Somewhere a village is missing an idiot” which actually made it into the magazine because of a lazy sub-editor.

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Remember, this was The Ministry of Sound, one of the most famous nightclubs on the planet at the time so I had naively expected that the staff of its flagship magazine would be living their lives to the full just like the people within its pages. Alas, this was not the case. Up to this point most of the office conversations during the day related to the latest episode of ‘Friends’ or the clothes worn by Sarah Michelle Gellar in ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’.
That is until ‘Julian’ joined the staff as the roving club reviewer, a job that he undertook with an insatiable Gonzo spirit. In other words, my kinda man. Everyday on his arrival, which was always late, he would come over to sit at my desk and regale me with stories of shaking his tail with his hands in the air or up a skirt. This was the kind of spirit that I had been waiting to arrive here, but it didn’t last long.
Bang in the centre of that mammoth open-planned operations room, where everyone connected to the club worked, was a small square glass office less than fifteen feet across. Sat in this dictatorial office, and ever present, was the Ministry’s creative and marketing manager Mark Rodol keeping an eye on each and everyone of us. If you were summoned to this office you knew your time was up and after a couple of weeks of being reprimanded for behaviour that really only befitted his job, like going out clubbing a lot, Julian was called to Rodol’s office. When he got up and marched towards the glass cube we exchanged smiles and I stood to salute him in full view of a warehouse full of hypocritical bean counters. I haven’t seen him since.