Devolution Magazine

Devolution Magazine is the UK’s only truly independent alternative lifestyle magazine covering everything from demos, albums, and live reviews through models, photographers, fashion and artists to events, interviews and features, thus encompassing the whole world of the alternative subculture. We focus mainly on Punk, Metal, Goth and Rock but being independent we will cover anything that interests us as people and will consider any ideas you put to us.

What Do We Mean By Independent?
The magazine is conceived, produced and distributed from a two bedroom house just south of Oxford, there are two of us who produce and distribute the whole thing but we couldn’t do it without the help of a really dedicated review/features team. There are several writers/photographers, a couple of contributors and our promotion team of Devo Boys and Girls all of whom toil endlessly, like ourselves, for the love of their scene. We have no financial backers, no shareholders and no business partners to make product demands or to interfere with the content.

How Did Devolution Originate?
Back in 2003 we were depressed with the current music press. At the time what we considered to be their failings towards the scene as a whole was that there was a raft of amazingly talented musicians/artists/designers out there who were not getting and could not get any press coverage or advertising due to the financial and editorial pressures that publishing houses put on magazines to shift more units, this inevitably leads to only covering big names that people know about and jumping on bandwagons. We decided that we would write our own ‘zine highlighting what we loved about the world we have chosen to live in, the culture we embrace and the people within that scene who in one way or another inspired, impressed or made us proud to be who we are. Since the humble beginnings of Devolution as a photocopied ‘zine and over the last seven years, we have expanded not only in print and pages but also in quality, content and design skills, always pushing ourselves to produce something we could be proud of without ever compromising the reasons we started.

Where Are We Now?
Now we are a glossy magazine full of colour, we put on our own annual events such as the Devolution Xmas Party and The Alt Collective lifestyle event, we have independent stockists as far away as Australia and as close as our local news agent and we have recently got ourselves a bar code and will hopefully soon be getting a more nationwide stockist. We travel the country supporting events big and small with our own stall of magazines and merch and we have started a CD replication and printing arm to help independent bands and companies create eye catching yet affordable small print runs of CD/DVDs with which they can promote themselves on merch tables or to record labels. Even though we have evolved and grown, more than we could have ever predicted, we still hold true to the reasons we started writing. There is a big section of unsigned and independent music in every issue, all the bands that play our events are unsigned and every track on our cover mount CDs are from bands we feel deserves to be heard by you. The same applies to the talents of the featured artists, models and photographers and to our Devo Boys and Girls. There is of course more established music in there too, after all we like the big bands as well but that is the point, we are a small family of writers, photographers and models and we cover the things we love, the things that make us who we are and we are proud to be associated with every one of them.

What Does The Future Hold For Us?
We want more, we want the magazine to be bigger as there is so much out there that we do not have the room to cover or do justice to, we hope to bring new ideas, music and experiences to you our readers young and old and to continue to help build the scene we live in. We would love to reach more people by increasing our readership and by finding more stockists to help spread the word. To be able to put on more events around the country and to make the events we already do be bigger and better. We have fought everything from recession to exploding computers and we have only ever got bigger, better and more determined. Here is to the next seven years!

The UK's only truely independent Alternative music and lifestyle magazine, made by people with passion for people with passion.