Table of contents for Issue 75: Spring/Summer 2021 in Huck

HOP ON A TRAIN FROM LONDON’S WATERLOO Station, head south-west and in less than half an hour you will reach New Malden, a suburb situated on the outskirts of the capital. At first glance, this quiet residential area appears little different from other neighbourhoods. But begin to make your way down the high street and you will notice that the signs are filled with letterings from a distant land. New Malden is home to the largest South Korean community in Europe, and it serves as a commercial and cultural hub for Koreans living in the UK. Ethnic Koreans account for around one third of the area’s population, a figure estimated at around 10,000. For this reason, the suburb has come to be known as London’s very own Koreatown, despite the…

BEFORE DAVID COULD EVEN GIVE HIS RECORDS away for free, he became a friend of mine. He trusted me. We met in 1972, backstage at a gig at Birmingham Town Hall, where I’d been sent by a magazine to photograph and interview him. Soon after, I became known as his personal photographer, travelling with him around the UK and the US on his Ziggy Stardust tours. Believe me, I have some interesting photos of him that will never be published. This one was taken in 1973 for the Pin Ups album. I was the art director and we needed some pictures for the back and inside sleeve. We were able to get a studio but no one really gave me a budget – people didn’t do that then. David didn’t…

#1 IGGY#IGGY ❽ My brother Kevin and I preening in the bathroom mirror, shoulder to shoulder, shirtless. He wore black chinos and fingered his close-cropped hair into spikes, aided by dabs of the raw egg he’d cracked into a bowl. ‘The Blank Generation’ by Richard Hell and the Voidoids blared from his bedroom. ❽ “Such a vantastic line,” he said, rubbing Speed Stick into his armpits (he pronounced it with more v than f). ❽ “What?” I asked. ❽ “I was sayin’ let me outta here before I was even born.” ❽ It was the first day back at school, Kevin in his sophomore year at Agoura High, me in eighth grade at Lindero Canyon. In our heads we carried The Damned, Sex Pistols, Iggy Pop, Ramones, X, and Circle…

EMBERS RISE INTO THE NIGHT SKY. Kastro reaches a hand into the tall stone oven to light his cigarette. With a shovel, he makes room for the loaves of bread he has been preparing. In between drags of a cigarette, he sings folk ballads in both Greek and Arabic as he pours ingredients into a deep plastic mixing bowl: flour, butter, tahini, red wine, black sesame, sugar, wild honey and sunflower seeds – most of which has been grown on the farm that surrounds us, now all but invisible despite the glow of the full moon. There are currently around 100,000 refugees in Greece, and almost half are living in horrendous camps that have been locked down and largely abandoned due to the coronavirus pandemic. But just outside the small…

THROUGHOUT MY CHILDHOOD, there was always a bit of an edge regarding how we were going to get by. I was raised Jewish in Portland, Oregon, and we were considered the black sheep of my dad’s family because my mom was not. At school, I became conscious of the class difference between me and other kids – mostly in terms of the clothing I could afford. My dad gave me a guitar when I was 10 years old and I started taking lessons along with my two older sisters. He became our manager, and we performed around town as The Miller Sisters until I started high school. It was there I got a boyfriend, who was a jazz musician. We performed in shows together, but I began feeling less confident…

IT’S A SUN-SCORCHED MORNING IN NORTH HOLLYWOOD. Mikey Alfred has cheerfully flipped his phone camera to show me the bright, bleached front drive of his family home – a setting that couldn’t feel further removed from the cold, bleak surroundings outside my flat window. “I haven’t been there in two or three years but I like London a lot,” he says, almost sympathetically. The 26-year-old filmmaker and skateboarding mogul is dressed smartly today in a black buttoned-up polo shirt that features the branding of Illegal Civ – the company he founded 14 years ago. A few times throughout our conversation, his dad strides past in the background – in one instance briefly wishing his son good morning, in another carrying a skateboard under his arm. Though it’s only just turned…

IT’S EASY TO FIND LESEGO KONUPI ON THE BLOCK. A small bicycle figurine on his postbox reveals him as the owner of a certain rectangular house, which stands surrounded by grass in the middle of a small plot – just like his neighbour’s to the left, his other neighbour’s to the right, and most of the houses in Vosloorus, the township he lives in. The sun is rising slowly this morning, the sky is a crisp, cloudless blue, and the residents of Vosloorus – or ‘Vosloo’–are waking up to the cries of the Kunguru, a bird named after the distinctive sounds it makes. Situated 25 kilometers south-east of Johannesburg, the township is home to around 160,000 people. Lesego is already wide awake and full of energy, despite the fact it’s…

THE WOMAN WEARS A BLUE DRESS. She holds the naked man down on the bed: his knees are drawn up, his head is braced upward, he looks toward us, inverted. Another woman, by her left side, takes the man’s hair in her left hand. With her right arm she wields a short sword, tip pointed downward. She draws the blade toward her. It cuts through the man’s neck. Blood runs down through his beard and onto the bed sheets. The light bathes the scene in a sepulchral glow. The executioners’ faces are vengeful and calm. “Artemisia Gentileschi was raped as a young girl,” says novelist Gabriel Krauze, handing me the phone to show me the image. “You can see the pain and the suffering and the rage in this work.”…

ON THE AWE-INSPIRING RING OF KERRY ROUTE, in the heart of Ireland’s scenic South-West, you’ll find Killarney. The small town is one of the island’s most popular tourist destinations, famous for its lakes, sandstone mountains and 26,000 acres of sweeping woodland. It has a population of around 14,500, many of whom have resided in the town and its surrounding area for generations. Last year however, in August, it received a new, rather unlikely denizen: grunge pioneer, Mark Lanegan. Over the years, the 56-year-old – who found fame as frontman of the Screaming Trees, before embarking on a lauded solo career – has battled addiction, homelessness and everything in between. But now, 5,000 miles from Los Angeles, the city he called home since the late ’90s, he is hitting reset all…

THE THAMES – THE LONGEST RIVER IN ENGLAND – has been a hub of human activity for generations, with connected structures, such as navigations, bridges and watermills and prehistoric burial mounds, dating back as far as Pre-Roman times. Nowadays, it’s more famous for events like the Henley Royal Regatta and the Boat Race. But less documented are those rituals which take place outside of the London bubble. Photographer Chloe Dewe Mathews, who grew up near the Thames before relocating to Hastings five years ago, set out to capture the more hidden aspects of the river. While she would cross it every day via the Hammersmith bridge, she says that in her younger years, she knew very little about what went on there. “Often, we assume that we have an intimate…

Launched this April, We the Power supports grassroots organisations across Europe, paving the way towards community-led renewable energy systems. The goal is to make Community Energy – a system of energy production and distribution in which citizens produce their own renewable power and inject the profits back into local social and educational initiatives – a reality for the largest number of people. That would mean more jobs, a cleaner planet, lower electricity bills, as well as less tangible but crucial benefits: community spirit and social cohesion. One of the figures involved in the campaign is Agamemnon Otero MBE – a pioneer in community energy. In October 2011, he founded Brixton Energy, a project to install community-owned solar panels on several social housing estates. He then went on to create Repowering,…