2002

If someone had told Nendie and me 10 years ago that at the age of 25 we'd be running our own Creative Business, we never would have believed them, not in a million years. Nendie and I founded Hardcore Is More Than Music in 2002.

Hardcore Is More Than Music is a Social Enterprise* that creates jobs in media and creative industries for young people from black and ethnic minorities and working class backgrounds. We produce a quarterly magazine to platform their creative ideas alongside well established writers and artists.

Our organisation is based at grass roots level, working day to day with young people but also devising projects with cultural institutions like the ICA and the Tate. Our aim is to bring the world of fine art and media together with inner city culture, particularly focusing on those young people who don't have any other outlet for their creativity.

Our mission statement is to promote social inclusion, to offer employment opportunities and professional media experience to socially excluded young people and to provide a forum for young people in the mainstream media.

My dad Shashi came from Nepal in 1970 and set up a Litho Print Studio in Acton. My mum was a social worker from Manchester. I grew up in the shadow of the Heidelberg GTO, a gigantic machine, and filled my after school time doing accounts in my dad's workshop.

I met Nendie at Chelsea College of Art on our first day there. We were both in the fine art department. Nendie was obsessed with gigs and music, and I was taking a lot of photography at the time.

Going to gigs together was much more exciting than the traditional environment of the art studio. Gigs harnessed young people's creativity, be it through the posters fans were making, the music the groups were playing or just the good conversations that you could hear all around you. At that time we were both working on projects that seemed to be about social spaces. I had bought a badge machine and taken it around schools, inspired by Babara Kruger and her slogans, and Nendie was touring a mobile moshpit around the country.

We wanted to reconcile all the creative things we saw going on outside college with the work we made for our course. So in May 2002 we printed 1000 copies of a fanzine on my dad's Heidelberg to take to the festival All Tomorrow's Parties. The festival bought life to our ideas and we got our first commission from the band Wire to produce their 'inaugural robes' for Graham Lewis's coronation as King Of Elgaland Vagaland.

Around this time we decided we wanted to do our first exhibition and we hired Lauderdale House, an Elizabethan mansion. As our work seemed to seemingly be more about participation Nendie approached the drama group which rehearsed at the house to collaborate - GLAD, the Gay and Lesbian Amateur Dramatics Society. Nendie had crafted a steel astronaut centrifuge and Brian Eno wrote music for the performance. While a soldier was harnessed into the wheel and spun, GLAD performed a series of lifts and improvisations about the NHS. Tom Ward form Theatre De Complicite helped workshop GLAD leading up to the exhibition. The performance was quite strange and no-one knew what to make of it but we both pleased, with retrospect, that no injuries were incurred.

We produced 2000 copies of the second fanzine and started putting it out in record and fashion shops round London.

2003

In March we ran a half-term arts school with Abbey Arts and the ICA at Pimlico School. We met Ronald Cummings-John who was peer mentoring. Probably the most precocious and talented young person to ever walk the planet!

In May, we were commissioned to cover the South by South West music festival in Austin, Texas by The Face magazine. While camped out in Texas we arranged to make a film with local Mexican teenagers.

On our return to London we produced now the third issue of the fanzine and built a mobile poster library to take to schools. We called it the Pinkagon after the Pentagon.

After graduating we won a Social Enterprise Grant for £10,000 from The Prince’s Trust.

Our business mentors Jenny Duck and Oliver Jury were incredibly supportive and put us in touch with lots of people that could help us. Our ambitions had grown larger than just creating a professional magazine; we now wanted to create jobs for young people to do what we were doing and to have the opportunity to work for life in the creative industries. We had realized at art school that there were not many opportunities for young people from non-traditional backgrounds to get into the art and media world. This was not just because of a lack of resources but also a lack of confidence and contact with people who might give them jobs and recognize their cultural insight.

We entered our third fanzine into the Guardian Media Awards and won BEST DESIGNED PUBLICATION and were runners-up in BEST SMALL PUBLICATION.

"Winner: Hardcore is More Than Music, Chelsea College of Art and Design. What the judges said: "With a tight budget and using only black and white (except the cover), Hardcore demonstrated that good design is all about clever and witty use of design, typography and photography, as a visual language - with loads of energy, a great variety of pace and endless ideas.""

We put on gigs at the ICA for Oxbow, Biting Tongues (Graham Massey), Noxagt, Nought and Spykid.

2004

After winning our prizes from Tthe Guardian, the newspaper commissioned us to produce a supplement on young people for the Saturday edition. A million copies of the 32 page supplement were distributed with the Guardian and extra run-ons were also distributed by London Calling and Cargo. We decided to theme the supplement around the idea of a modern day Dick Whittington. We wanted to show the entrepreneurship that we were encountering amongst young people - businesses operating from kitchen tables, kids with 5 phones - one for business, one for their girlfriend, one for importing trainers, one for college mates and always one for their mum!

I appeared on one of the final episodes of Kilroy to promote our work.

At Stowe youth centre Nendie organized a huge music workshop bringing together Grime and Techno Producers: Graham Massey of 808 State, Jon E Cash (Black Ops), JJ Lewis and Spykid and Alasdair Roberts (Rough Trade). Ali came all the way from Glasgow and Graham from Manchester, and as we had hired in four complete music systems there was a lot to organize and carry! Simultaneously, I was designing Issue 4 of the Fanzine. We decided that we would step up to magazine format and produced an A4 black and white, 100 page magazine. We were especially proud to introduce the perfect binding which gives professional magazines their square spine.

At Christmas we were invited to meet Tony Blair as part of 'the Big Conversation'. We showed him our magazine, discussed job opportunities in the creative industries and argued about the effectiveness of ASBOs at lunch at 10 Downing Street. Trevor Nelson co-presented the lunch and I was struck by how similar he looked to Nendie. We decided that Nendie and Trevor Nelson were the inverse of each other.

2005

In late 2004 I met Jackie Hazel at a Prince's trust networking meeting. When Jackie passed away earlier this year it was a huge shock to both Nendie and me. We are extremely grateful to have known Jackie - she was a very kind person and she helped us to start our work in Stonebridge Estate in North West London. Jackie helped us apply in late 2004/5 for a £20,000 grant to work with young people in Brent and on Stonebridge, creating job opportunities and producing a magazine. We worked with the Urban Partnership Group which is funded by the London Development Agency and the European Social Fund and our new office was based at Life FM community radio station on the Harrow Road in NW10.

We were able to employ Rita Ogole, one of 9 sisters(!) who lived on Stonebridge, to help us get to know young people on the estate and to work on events. In February we put on an exhibition called BEZERK to publicise the work of the magazine to young people on the estate. We invited Turner prize winning artist Jeremy Deller and i-D / RWD photographers Tim & Barry to exhibit their work. The show was a huge success - it managed to bring together the rarefied world of fine art and the world of Grime as Tim & Barry projected portraits of Grime stars onto the windows of the gallery. At night it was like watching a film from the street or a drive-in. The opening was so rammed that the police had to set up a roadblock to stop more people coming in. For more pictures please click here.

In September 2005, three thousand young people from innercity LDN attended our event at Tate Britain. This was one of the highest turnouts on a Saturday ever in the museum! From 12am to 6pm, one thousand young people (200 from Stonebridge) made an 100 page magazine in one day. Groups were set up in the main gallery of the Tate and MCs and Grimestars alongside youth workers led all sorts of discussions about the personal stories and the political ideas which the young people held as important. NEW ERA caps launched a competition to design the HARDCORE IS MORE THAN MUSIC signature hat. Using digital photography, transcribing interviews from Mini disc and making posters and flyers streamed straight onto the flat plan on laptops, the young people produced the draft of a magazine crammed to exploding with ideas like a propagandist newspaper.

There were music performances, sponsored by BBC 1XTRA on a stage downstairs at the entrance. And the following MCs ran the workshops for the magazine: ASHER D, BRUZA, CAMEO,JME, SKEPTA and DJ WONDER.

The event was steered away from the stereotypical conversations about gun crime and drugs to talking about young people's friedships and aspirations in the world. JME told an inspirational story about getting support from his parents to produce music. Sandra Jackson from THE STUDIO MUSEUM in New York came to see the event form NYC (for one day!). We hope to replicate this event in NYC and LA with a group of young people from London producing a magazine in Harlem and in Compton with 1000 teens in each of these suburbs. For pictures from the event please click here.

In October 2005 Nendie won through to the last ten out of 3000 entries in THE PLAY'S THE THING, a competition to write a play for the West End, screened over two weeks on Channel 4 in June 2006.

Nendie's play Ramases has Disappeared tells the story of young people from innercity London and is inspired by Ronald Cummings-John, a writer for HARDCORE IS MORE THAN MUSIC magazine who also now produces Asher D. Tired of two-dimensional and sensational portrayals of the street like Kidulthood and inspired by Spike Lee's writing in Do The Right Thing and the humour of the young people around us we have set out to progress Nendie's script into a much more ambitious project.

2006

Based in our new office in Paddington Development Trust at Westbourne Studios, HARDCORE IS MORE THAN MUSIC is currently developing the ideas from the script into a series for television. We aim to produce a documentary series, followed by a one hour single drama. The series will follow the progress of up to 20 young people with little or no previous acting experience as they learn the art of screen acting, and perform in a full-length TV drama. Along the way we will change that negative stereotype that dogs young people in the innercity. The TV audience will gain unprecedented insight into the lives of young people in London today - there are a lot of problems but we are overwhelmed by the talent we come across working with young people. The entrepreneurial and creative ideas we come across blow the art world out of the water. The future is thrashing out its identity in these sometimes ghettoized and almost always under-resourced areas of London.

Currently we are producing 20,000 copies of Issue 8 of the magazine for distribution here and in the USA and I am designing a range of merchandise to promote the work of HARDCORE IS MORE THAN MUSIC. Check the Shop if you would like to place an order.

*HARDCORE IS MORE THAN MUSIC is under application to become a charity. All profit we make goes into the funding of interns and our job-creation scheme.

Words: Nina and Nendie

2008

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