Spotlight on Marcus Barnes
Being arrested and charged for publishing a magazine about the art you love sounds like a story from Communist Europe or some Middle Eastern theocracy. But it’s exactly what happened to writer, commentator and artist Marcus Barnes. In the UK. In 2011.
A keen graffiti artist who’d had the usual minor run-ins with the law, when Marcus decided to celebrate the culture with his self-published magazine, he thought he’d stepped back from the front lines.
But after publishing just two issues, with a run of 1000 copies stocked by hip hop and graffiti shops, police decided that Marcus’ magazine and blog were not just a celebration of street art but an incitement to do criminal damage. “I was on bail for more than three years until the case went to trial at Blackfriars crown court on 2 February 2015,” he wrote in the Guardian that year. “I was in court for two and a half weeks at a cost of £28,000 per day.” Eventually the jury found him innocent of the charge - and Marcus could get back to his life as a freelance music and culture writer without the spectre of jail hanging over him.
Ironically Marcus’s beginnings in journalism could hardly have been more mainstream. As a junior reporter for the showbiz gossip pages of tabloid newspaper The Sun, he spent his time charting the hi jinks and love lives of celebs in the West End’s glitzy clubs - until an epiphany on an Ibiza dancefloor in 2010. “I was in Space, and this DJ I’d never heard of, Seth Troxler, was playing. I’d been in Ibiza for a week and already I felt like my heart had been cracked open. When he started to mix in one of my favourite tunes, Jaydee’s ‘Plastic Dreams’, I grabbed my mate and tried to explain to him what the tune meant to me, what it meant to hear it in that context. I realised, ‘I want to write about this, that I was so sick of writing about showbiz dross every single day. This is what I love.”
Soon he was freelance, writing for the electronic music press in the UK, and within a decade was a regular writer for the Guardian - not just about music and artists, but on the deeper culture that surrounds the global scene. Indeed, one of the pieces he’s most proud of was about how the huge explosion that decimated Beirut in 2020 had affected the city’s nightlife industry. Having visited previously on a job for Mixmag to cover the stunning Uberhaus venue, a spectacular outdoor space designed to resemble the ribcage of a gigantic whale that was destroyed in the blast, he’d been able to maintain the relationships and the trust of the local community in the city and revisit them when times were darker to tell their stories.
And relationships have always been at the centre of Marcus’s work. Like many music and culture journalists, he has found his skills transfer to arenas beyond the traditional press. “Something I’m most proud of is being able to connect with people and brands and organisations and tap into what makes them tick, absorb their essence, and translate that into words.” For the past decade Marcus has complemented his journalistic work by writing biographies for artists including Chase & Status, Leftfield, Nicole Moudaber, and Jamie Jones and copywriting and editorial work for brands including The Night League, the team behind Ibiza venues Ushuaïa and, in a pleasing bit of symmetry, Hï Ibiza (on the same site as Space). Marcus also oversees the social media output of supplement brand Happy Tuesdays, which leans heavily into rave culture, and which under his supervision has grown from a couple of thousand followers to a highly engaged community of over 48k on instagram alone.
Now a father and living in Reading, Marcus is more strategic about his nights out - but still very much to be found at the events that matter, particularly those where brands intersect with the culture. When we talk he’d just been at a Nike event hosted by Kitty Amor; “even though she’s really blown up,” he enthuses, “she stays really true to her mission and the social responsibility behind it.”
And while Marcus confines his extraordinary street art to paid commissions nowadays (for the likes of streaming company Viaplay and club space Sankeys East), his mission has never really changed. Next up he’s delivering a talk on the evolution of festivals and the importance of DIY culture at Dorset festival We Out Here.
It’s what he loves.
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