The Spike Magazine

The Spike is the brainchild of two South Londoners - Jessica Hope and Gaika Tavares. As partners in crime, they can be seen freeloading free booze and sniggering at cock jokes. Or being smart-arses. One mumbles a lot and the other can turn on the 'media smile' with alarming ease. Come and buy us a drink and we'll let you find out for yourself which one's the good cop and which one's the bad cop. It should take less than twenty seconds. We also put on club nights (KungFu Monkey) and fashion shows (Model Citizen). Gaika's the promoter and Jessica's the.... well, she's the virgin promoter and sensible one. Supposedly. But enough about them..... it's all about our vanity project....
The Spike was, in all brutal honesty, borne out of necessity; a necessity, if you will, to reflect all that is good and intellectual and interesting and urgent about Manchester. You see, we’re all culture vulture lefties and young, urban, social whores who like to be entertained, have serious chats over even more serious drinks, choose to look at and pore over stunning design and art and snigger at cock jokes. Not necessarily all at the same time, but it wouldn’t be impossible. Yes, there’s a very definite dynamic that keeps us ticking.
So, arrogantly, we thought that we could condense this into a spankingly good bi-monthly magazine that wasn’t obsessed with dumbed-down ‘lifestyle’ articles which squash Mancunians into the tiniest of pigeonholes, wrap them in some über-super-dooper veneer of a lifestyle that belongs in a US sitcom fromage-fest and spit them out in clichéd and overtly simplified prose which has yet to grasp (and actively hides from) multi-syllabic words. Team Spike was borne out of the realisation that Mancunians and all those who choose to reside in the city are pretty damned clever. But you’d never know that by reading some of the stuff out there.
So, what we did do was to collect our most talented chums together, which include writers, designers, fashion people, photographers, graphic artists, illustrators and we set our minds to putting together a marvellous magazine called The Spike. Look out for it at the end of January 2007
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