Nottingham's 1990's culture magazine Overall is being brought back to life over two decades after it folded, thanks to a regeneration project by LeftLion, with support from the Heritage Lottery Fund...
Overall There Is a Smell of Fried Onions, named after a quote from nineteenth Century psychologist William James, ran for 58 issues from 1991-1997. Known locally as Overall, thousands of copies of each issue were distributed for free across hundreds of venues in Nottingham and the East Midlands. It included early-stage career interviews with the likes of Gilles Peterson, Ken Loach and Pitchshifter as well as regular reviews of ‘new bands’ who were playing their first gigs in Nottingham at the time like Nirvana and Radiohead.
Overall founder Paul Kilbride said: “I’m chuffed to be working with the LeftLion team on this project. We were there putting this magazine together right at the dawn of modern-day desktop publishing, but by the time the internet was widespread we’d finished. So it’s going to be great to finally get the archives up online for everyone to see after all these years.”
Other regular contributors to the magazine included journalist Martin James (who went on to become the biographer of The Prodigy), Gareth Thompson (Rock N Reel Magazine), Stephen Barker (CEO of The Creative Quarter) and Caroline Hennigan (Programme Director at Broadway Cinema).
The three main aims of the project, which will be completed by the end of January 2020, are:
- To create a free-to-access online archive of the magazine
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To launch a one-off printed celebration issue, which will be released in January 2020
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To put on a reunion party for those who were involved in the magazine, which will be held at the Angel Microbrewery on Saturday 18 January 2020
LeftLion Editor-in-Chief Jared Wilson, who is guest editing the celebration issue of Overall, said: “It’s been a lot of fun to look through their archives. I was a few years too young to be involved in this magazine at the time, but people have mentioned it to me ever since we started LeftLion in 2003. Looking back through what they did in an age before the internet, email and mobile phones, I don’t know how they managed it. Credit to the whole Overall team for what they did back then. I'd also like to say a big thank you to the Heritage Lottery Fund for helping to make this project possible."
If you were part of Overall magazine back in the day, or just remember it fondly, please join the conversation on the Overall Facebook Group.
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