'Both of us are quite outspoken'
Launched into choppy waters, can personality keep Peaches' style mag afloat, asks Stephen Armstrong.
They are one of media's more unlikely partnerships. Peaches Geldof - 19-year-old paparazzi favourite - and James Brown - 43-year-old ex-men's mag editor and TV pundit - sit side by side on a large grey sofa in a Soho office and flick through their joint magazine, Disappear Here.
They call it a "women's mag that appeals to men", and the first issue boasts a column by Tony Benn, wind-up calls to the BNP, Geldof interviewing Vivienne Westwood, Pete Doherty at the opera, fashion shoots and lots of new bands. "When I read Cosmopolitan, Company or Marie Claire I feel so patronised," Geldof, the editor-at-large, explains. "I'm not spending my time worrying about how to give my husband great sex so he stays with me. This isn't the 1950s. Women's magazines have no sense of humour. That's why I read Vice, GQ or Heat. I don't mind Heat. It's so insulting but in a really funny way - unlike Closer or Now, which are basically pointless."
Not entirely coincidentally, Disappear Here was also the name of a celebrity magazine Geldof created for an MTV reality show - which garnered plenty of (mainly negative) column inches but not too many viewers. Geldof and Brown met on the programme - he was the mentor who critiqued her work - but both insist the new title is connected to the TV celebrity version by name alone. Brown, the editorial director, denies that the magazine is a reality show stunt.
"The TV programme was a bit of a disaster," he says, "but while we were making it, I realised Peaches would actually be a really good magazine editor. Both of us are quite outspoken, which can cause friction with your peers, the industry or even the press, but it means you're very focused on a particular world-view and that's what a magazine editor needs to have. It's about letting the reader into that world."
Disappear Here is jointly owned by Brown, Geldof and her manager, Andy Varley, who refuse to reveal just how much of their own money they have spent on the venture. Dan Jude, a staff writer, joins from the MTV show, but other contributors were recruited by Brown from his recent stint as a judge on Miss Naked Beauty, or through people he knows - such as his friend Vince Power's daughter Nell, who files her copy during school lunch breaks. "I think it would be great if our inbox filled up at 4pm when all our contributors got out of school," he says. "I knew more about what the NME should be doing when I was 16 than when I was actually working for it."
Geldof, meanwhile, insists this is a permanent switch from being the subject of magazine coverage to writing for mags herself. "This is basically my job. I write for Nylon magazine in New York, and present a TV show for them, and I'm still doing other things around it, but this is the main focus of my energies," she says, although her Nylon column has not been universally well-received. "I want it to be a blank canvas for young talent - whether that's writers, photographers, graphic designers, artists or the bands and designers that we cover. I grew up with a lot of these bands, and they can't get a platform - or if they do it's in the NME, which is so paranoid about record sales that they'll turn on a band two weeks after putting them on the cover."
"Nothing in this magazine comes from the PR industry - it's basically Peaches and other young journalists raving about stuff they love," Brown adds. "My main criterion was - if I've heard of it, it probably shouldn't go in. I had doubts about interviewing Billy Childish because he's been around for such a long time, but Peaches said he was Kurt Cobain's big influence and we should feature him, so we did."
Issue zero - Disappear Here is a phrase from Bret Easton Ellis's novel Less Than Zero - will be given away free this Thursday to 50 unnamed record shops, bars, boutiques and clubs in London and New York, Geldof's adopted home city. It has 120 pages of editorial, no advertising, will be distributed by hand and serves, Brown explains, as a taster for the quarterly ad-funded issue one in March 2009. Having launched and then sold his own magazine company, I Feel Good, after a notorious sacking from GQ - when the mag praised the cut of Nazi uniforms - he's confident it will attract revenue and is here for the long haul.
"This first issue cost less than three first-class flights to New York and it's got more content than the first issue of Jack - which won tons of awards and took £1m in ad revenue in its first 12 months," he says. "Dazed & Confused, i-D and even Reader's Digest launched like this and they're all doing very well. The only problem with Dazed is that Rankin is now taking pictures of the Queen. They're great pictures, but that isn't the fanzine attitude."
Although Disappear Here will follow the fanzine/style mag template of paying aspiring writers and photographers next to nothing, it's launching into waters that are notoriously choppy. In 2005, more than six such titles hit the newsstands and record shops, including Good for Nothing, edited by former Sleaze Nation journalists, and Little White Lies, a movie magazine created by a group of graduates. Almost four years later, only Little White Lies is still afloat.
Danny Miller, its publisher, says, "We survive through the other work we do around the magazine ... We sell around 15,000 copies of the magazine bi-monthly, but it's the contract publishing work we get through using Lies as a shop window that keeps us afloat. I think we're well placed to survive the recession."
Clearly Geldof, Brown and Varley have plenty of other work and are not relying on the magazine for their income. Brown is understood to have made a fortune from the sale of IFG and works as a consultant, while Geldof makes money modelling and laughs at her agent's £300 haircuts.
Assuming all goes well, however, they hope to build other revenue streams into the company. "Vice magazine started as a free giveaway and now it's an international brand," Geldof explains. "It's got tours, bars and TV shows. That would be easy for us to emulate. James knows Vince Power and consults for AMC concerts, who organise the V festivals, and we're both always being asked to give our names and contacts to various ventures. Now we'll be able to do it for ourselves."
