Daniel Crockett has been in touch to tell us about a newly launched magazine that he’s involved in. It’s called Backwash and just like his fanzine Kook a few years ago, its touchstone is surfing. Not something we do ourselves I admit but we can relate to an obsession when we see one. If I can make a point without coming over all “some of our best friends are surfers” we love early Beach Boys records and one of our favourite books of 2015 was Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, reviewed on these pages, by Daniel in fact, back in November last year.
Here’s the lowdown on Backwash:
Backwash is an independent surf anthology.
One hundred and sixty pages of free-thinking perspective and photography.
Backwash is about impact. For each one that sells, we’ll be planting one tiny tree. It might be an apple, plum, pear or cherry.This tree will throw down roots, like we hope Backwash will, deep into the stony Irish soil. It will also reach up its arms, wide and bright, to the sun. Like anything great, it will start fragile and it may grow tall. If you want to go over there and see your tree, well you can.
Our motley crew has distilled this offering down, argued it out over whisky in foul Irish storms, survived on a diet of controversy and the sheer brilliance of our contributors and the surfers and bodyboarders before the lens. And of course the Atlantic and the North Sea, our home and from where we are proud to raise this flag and invite you, whoever you are or wherever you’re from, to join us. This is publishing without fear, living out in the bitter, grimy edges, glad for the community of wave-riding folk knitted together in these pages.
Each issue we’ll weave the spirit of a place through the whole and like the ragged thicket Issue One might create, we’ll give back something different every time, something relevant to the place itself. We reached out to friends from all over the world to reflect surfing as we see it, the first issue is dedicated to Ireland and the Irish themselves, purveyors of true magic.
