NEWSLETTER

THE APPALACHIA ISSUE In his State of the Union address in January 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a "war on poverty." In part, he said, "[We] must pursue poverty... wherever it exists-in city slums and small towns, in sharecropper shacks or in migrant-worker camps, on I...READ MORE

FATHER BEITING'S HOUSE Father Ralph W. Beiting put the Vice staff up in his guesthouse while we were in Kentucky. He's been trying to rescue Appalachia from poverty for 50 years now. He should change his name to Monsignor Sisyphus...READ MORE

MAN OF THE MOUNTAINS My Odyssey in Appalachia The first part of the house out here was made in the 30s. There was two families raised in that house. I had 11 brothers and sisters. I'm the seventh son. I had four sisters and they're all gone but one. My bedroom was in the back part of the house. That part ...READ MORE

HOMER'S HOMES This is the shack that Homer and his 11 brothers and sisters were born into....READ MORE

FAMILY PLOT Homer Buries His Kin I'm the oldest caretaker of this graveyard. It isn't that big. The first person got put in here a long time ago. Luther Thompson. He's a great-great-uncle of my family. My step-pap was his brother. That's the second grave yonder next to Luther. That was his br...READ MORE

TEN YEARS' BAD LUCK Things Turn Around I lived in Columbus most of my life, though I was born down here in Kentucky. I moved back up here four years ago to help my dad. He lives next door. He's getting a little older-you know how that gets. He's not doing real good. When I got here, I wanted to get...READ MORE

TIDBITS A Monthly Look At Things We Love - The Poverty Issue NEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK This was the only black guy we saw the whole time we were down there and he wasn't fucking around. That's an airbrushed portrait of Left Eye, Aaliyah, and Tupac...READ MORE

LOAD SIXTEEN TONS AND WHAT DO YOU GET? A Broken Back I had 22 years in the coal mines, all underground. I started down there when I was about 22. I thought it was the greatest thing in the world when I was young. In fact, up until the time I was injured I'd been planning...READ MORE

AFTER THE MINES Motorcycles Are My Retirement Plan I started working in the mines in about '69 or '70, when I was 17 years old. I just worked part-time during the summer. In '73, I hired on full-time. I worked 22 years there. I started out underground, then I moved to the outside for 18 years. I was a preparat...READ MORE

STEVE & DONNY The Farley brothers live out in this trailer with their mother....READ MORE

CRISIS AT THE COURTHOUSE What Exactly Is to be Done? The town elders have gathered at the Inez courthouse to talk about what the heck they're going to do to save their town from its veritable sinkhole of problems-everything from financial disaster to drug addiction to total isolation....READ MORE

THE GREAT FLOOD The Coal Industry Drops Thick Black Piss Over the Hills of Kentucky In October 2000, there was a flood in Inez, Kentucky. The EPA called it the worst environmental catastrophe in the history of the eastern United States. It was way worse than the 1989 Exxon Valdez...READ MORE

STRIPPED MOUNTAIN Before: The little building front and center is one of the few remaining homeplaces in the mountains outside of Mud, West Virginia. The majority of the town has been uprooted by the expansion of Arch Coal's Hobet-21 surface mine, which covers over 12,00...READ MORE

WALK IN MY SHOES I Dare You I'm originally from West Virginia. My sisters all moved down to Ohio for work and they just stayed there. I didn't go because I couldn't leave my momma. See, she had her legs took off from diabetes. It's called sugar diabetes. It's like a blood disorder that g...READ MORE

CLEAN MOUNTAIN AIR No More Pills in the Hills I'm a recovering addict. I was a junkie. My drug of choice was cocaine, crack... Whatever I could shoot up, basically. My dad bailed me out of jail, the workhouse in Columbus. He brought me back up here and after about a week he had me thrown in jail in Floyd ...READ MORE

MY MANSION A Home of My Own I grew up in what I guess you'd call a chicken coop. It was this place that used to be a chicken house. It had concrete floors, but we made a living place out of it. Eventually it burnt down. It was rough living there. It was hard when I was a child. I've work...READ MORE

MOUNTAIN MOMMA Destiny Steps In I'm 21 and I was raised in Louisa, Kentucky. I love it here. It's peaceful. It's quiet. I have two kids, Destiny and Jacob. They're one and two years old. I'm raising them on my own because their dad was unfaithful. He pays child support and he sees them once ...READ MORE

LBJ DAY A Hometown Girl Jots Down Her Notes This memoir of Lyndon B. Johnson's visit to Kentucky was handwritten by Inez, Kentucky native Shelba Pack Brown on April 24, 1964. We maintained the spelling and grammar just as it was because we like the way it sounds. That's all. It's not to be funny....READ MORE

FAMILY TRADITION The Appalachian Way Martin County, Kentucky is dry. That means unless you can make moonshine, you ain't getting drunk. If you want to crank it up, you need to head over the bridge into Fort Gay (yeah, yeah), West Virginia. That's where the Wildcat bar is....READ MORE

WELCOME TO NOTTS Don't let the bastards grind you down" was one of the key quotes from the 1960 Albert Finney movie Saturday Night & Sunday Morning. Finney's character Arthur Seaton was an angry working class young man who was intent on escaping the drudgery of factory ...READ MORE

THIS IS POVERTY And It's Really Bad for Your Health have lived in Radford since 1963 and I've seen the place change a lot. The fact of the matter is that family life has gone down and anti-social behaviour has become more of a problem....READ MORE

HOW TO MAKE IT AS A SINGLE MUM OF FIVE Living Next Door to Rottweillers I've lived here in Brockstow all my life. When I was 17 I got pregnant with Sinead and I had her at 18. I was with Sinead's dad Terry for three years and then he started taking brown (heroin) and stuff....READ MORE

HOW TO ROB By a Radford Gang Member The first day we were in Radford and St Ann's, we kept asking people about how the area got its reputation for violence. People like the councillor on Page 38 told us the reputation was undeserved and was manufactured by the media to make for a good story. All...READ MORE

TO LIVE & DIE In St. Ann's We went up to the St Ann's area of Nottingham late on Saturday night to talk to a family who live in a council house on a notorious road called Kingsthorpe Close. While we were driving there, the white taxi driver told us that he hoped we were wearing bullet p...READ MORE

IN MEMORIAM This was in The Meadows housing estate. A couple of weeks previously, Nathan Williams, aged 17, was shot in the estate's shopping centre. It was broad daylight and witnesses say it was after an argument over a pushbike. Here one of his friends pays tribute to ...READ MORE

DRUG DEALING Or The Dole We met up with this guy on Sunday afternoon in Radford. All the time we were talking to him, his wife was beeping the horn on his car really urgently and stressing out like she wanted him to leave really quickly. Then we looked down at his leg...READ MORE

COAL EVERY DAY Keeping the Trade Alive, Just Steve Brierly is a coal merchant with a business on Ilkeston Road. We met him outside the chip shop when he was knocking off for the day. The next day we went back to his yard and talked about how the whole industry was screwed...READ MORE

WE DON'T FEEL SAFE Since They Tore the Old Houses Down John Mullins lives in an area of Nottingham called The Meadows. It's essentially one large estate of small houses linked by tiny alleyways and passages with a shopping precinct in the centre. That's where they have the shrine to Nathan Williams pictured here...READ MORE

MINER'S WELFARE Life After The Coal Board Closed Down I used to work in Gedling pit in Nottingham in the early 1950s. It was very hard work. This was when miners were on “nine yards” duty with a pick and a shovel. In the pit you’d be in a hole 3'6" high and you’d have to hack nine yards...READ MORE

GARY THE LANDLORD A Drink At Radford's Busiest Pub The Marquis is a meeting point for The Radford Boys, which is a collection of men born and bred in the area. Most of them had fathers and grandfathers who worked in the old Player's cigarette factory, the Raleigh bike factory (where they used to make Choppers)...READ MORE

KILLING STUDENTS Friendly Fires Avoid a Mangling I first saw Friendly Fires live a few years ago at The Dublin Castle in Camden when the band were still at university and went under the awful name First Day Back. They sounded like an incredible cross between LCD Soundsystem and At The Drive In, but...READ MORE

GRIMEWATCH For this issue, Grimewatch jumped on the back of a stolen Mini Moto and rode all the way up the motorway without a helmet to the city of Nottingham to see what the local grime scene had to say. Nottingham isn't particularly well known for grime. They talk kind...READ MORE

PAPER BOY BLUES Rumble Strips on £7.50 a Week I started to get into pop music in the early 80s and, to me, Rumble Strips sound like all my favourite groups from that time of industrial disputes, yuppies and riots. They remind me of a melancholic Dexy’s Midnight Runners, a doo-wop...READ MORE

ELECTRIC INDEPENDENCE It is hard to believe that Norway's Skatebård could ever top the off-kilter brilliance of his debut, Skateboarding was a Crime (in 1989), but somehow he has. Released in 2002 on the Telle label (what happened to them?) to no fanfare whatsoever, that alb...READ MORE

NORWEGIAN KRAUTROCK Eating Pickled Eyeballs With 120 Days 120 Days are from Norway which is a very peaceful, prosperous country that's totally removed from the place that the rest of the issue is about....READ MORE

VARIETY CLUB Frolics At Sunday Lunchtime Gary Skyner (pictured above) does regular stand up comedy slots at Radford Variety Club's famous Sunday afternoon adult cabarets. Hosted by a couple of guys called Jesus and Pav, the show consists of two appearances by a stripper, adult bingo (bingo with lots ...READ MORE

RADFORD BOYS A Beautiful Humour I'm a Radford boy. I was born here in Sinnon Street, Radford, at home. There were no hospital births in those days. My father was a bricklayer. I'm a bricklayer. I'm a Radford boy. We're all...READ MORE

VICE FASHION - NOTTINGHAM KIDS Photos by Alex Sturrock Gareth Mann, 20 Where are you from?...READ MORE

THE COOBER PEDY ISSUE Welcome to CP For this issue of Vice we spent a week living in the amazing contradiction of an outback town that is Coober Pedy. We were curious about this particular place for so many reasons that it was hard to know where to start. You see there's gazillions of dol...READ MORE

UNLUCKY MINER Striking Out in CP I've lived in Coober Pedy for 28 years now, although it was never my plan. In 1977, I decided to move to Perth but didn't get any further than CP. I didn't come here to go mining, just to visit a friend on my way through to WA. When I first arrived, we had a b...READ MORE

LUCKY MINER Striking Gold In CP I've been mining for 25 years and although times are generally pretty hard about two months ago I found an opal worth about one quarter of a million dollars. I've shown it to everybody and no one has seen opal like this. I'm still celebrating!...READ MORE

THE LONE DJ Big Bad Kev Brings Music To CP Beyond the odd jukebox, it's not easy to get a music fix in Coober Pedy. We spent our first few days looking for a local band to interview, or maybe a record store of some sort, and found absolutely nada. Then, just when we were beginning to think that all hop...READ MORE

THE VICE GUIDE TO THE BARS OF COOBER PEDY Drinking is the national sport of Coober Pedy. It averages 45 degrees Celsius outside, the sports oval is a dust bath at best (and a mud bath at worst), and if you live here you're either unemployed or you work like a total miner ie. really, really hard. Any w...READ MORE

TOWN CLOWN One Hungarian's Strange Life In CP There's no way you can miss Irvin's place. His property sits at the top of a hill where he has somehow managed to acquire more random, insane shit than you have ever seen in one spot. Ever. We spent about four hours in his office, and even then didn't get thro...READ MORE

GRUB'S UP Waiting On CP Of the 4,500 or so people living in Coober Pedy, approximately 600 are Greek which means it's probably the only bit of desert in the world where you can get a killer lamb gyros with tzatziki and a side of three different types of saganaki. From what we could t...READ MORE

VICE FASHION - KIDS OF CP Photos by Travis Hogg Styling by Casey Freu First up, we have to make very clear that we had nothing whatsoever...READ MORE

LISTEN TO PROGAN STONE This is the first instalment of a new music column written by none other than myself, Progan Stone. Every issue I'll be filtering through piles of music to tell you what's hot. I'm not going to tell you what's not cause while negativity is always tempting, thi...READ MORE

THICK SKINS Tough Guy Of CP We met Rhino one night at The United Bar. Over a dozen Bourbon and Coke's and a Jager shot or two, we found him to be a truly agreeable and pleasant dude. At the end of the binge Travis, our photographer, asked him how he got his nickname and Rhino head-butted...READ MORE

VICE PICTURES The Poverty Issue There are no street names to speak of in CP, which obviously makes it impossible for people to have regular addresses. So, instead of saying, “I live at 11 Green St”, you say “I live at the tyre with the smiley face on it three miles west of the centre of town...READ MORE

SOUND UNDERGROUND Chilling In The World's Biggest Dugout I took some time off after compulsory military service in Greece about 34 years ago and came to visit my uncle in Coober Pedy. He told me how easy it was to find opal. I thought I would simply find my fortune and return to Greece within a year. I learnt that y...READ MORE

TIDBITS A Monthly Look At Things We Love - Coober Pedy - The Poverty Issue PET ROCK 1 The most successful communities in the world are those that take their natural resources and convert them into something that others have a need or want for. It would seem...READ MORE

TWENTY-SIX FEET UNDER Getting Lost Forever In CP People who live in Coober Pedy make city kids look like pampered assholes. Life in the outback is often harsher than a straight-up hash pipe, and death is something that you tend to become pretty familiar with-especially when you throw in an occupation like mi...READ MORE

LITERARY/I WANT MY DVDS Book/Movie Reviews - The Poverty Issue DYNAMO'S CONCRETE PLAYGROUND In which the chav David Blaine from Bradford mystifies and bemuses a bunch of other chavs outside Bradford Nando’s with card tricks, disappearing...READ MORE

SMALL TOWNS Welcome to Laisvall This issue was going to be called the Poor Issue. We looked at the numbers and found there were a lot of poor people in the north. Through out Scandinavia, that's where the economical depression has ravaged, it's where everyone is on welfare or on sick leave, ...READ MORE

SNOW PATROL I Love it Here I was four when my father got me my first snow scooter. I can't remember any of it, but it must have been something special because here I am, and all I can think about is driving my scooter all year round....READ MORE

DYNAMITE GUY Can't Stop, Won't Stop This habit of blowing things up started back when I was about 17. My dad was in road construction and always had dynamite and fuses in his basement. I would nick dynamite and...READ MORE

NO KIDS ON THE BLOCK Where Did All the Babies Go? There are two kids in this district. Two, in a community of this size! When I was a kid in '65 there were loads of children here. There were 175 throughout the village. Us kids, we would do what kids do. We rode our scooters. There were no age limits back then...READ MORE

MEET THE KIDS OF LAISVALL Simon, 15 Vice: How do you like living in Laisvall? Simon: It's ok. There aren't that many cops here. Not until Easter. What are your classmates like?...READ MORE

POLICING THE WILDERNESS Frostbite and North Koreans There are two and a half of us working in this area. Two and a half cops in an area the size of Holland and Belgium together. When I get off duty now, around four o'clock, there will be no one. Usually there are no cops around during weekends either. There are...READ MORE

BROKEN KNEES And Not Much More I used to be a concrete worker, but I've just gone through knee surgery. They operated on me using spinal cord anaesthetics, and I thought that was a bit uncomfortable. I didn't mind that big old needle. I've been through those kinds of things before. It was t...READ MORE

HOLD A GRUDGE? Not Me! I'm 20 years old now, and I am unemployed. I specialized in Economics in grad school. I never really felt like it was completely my thing, but I still kept going. When we were kids Laisvall School was still open, but there was only one girl in our class. It wa...READ MORE

AIR COMBAT Small Town, Small Planes I'm still in school. I'm 18 years old. I don't know what I want to do when I'm older. A few years back, I absolutely didn't want to work in the mine. I thought I wanted something better. But I'm not sure anymore. If it was still there I might feel differently ...READ MORE

CHOOSING POVERTY Modern Life Is War Are Always Touring Being on tour is pretty miserable. It's all about sleeping on floors, peeing in bottles and showering with no hot water (if you're lucky). It's a lot like living in poverty actually, and chances are that you'll blow what little money you make playing on booze ...READ MORE

ROYAL POVERTY Monarch Aren't Living Large Metal has always been small town poverty's own soundtrack. Still, Monarch aren't your usual acne-scarred, faux Satanists from the sweaty, hairy armpits of Northern Europe. Like Thorr's Hammer (which was basically the younger, poorer version of Sunn 0))) Monarc...READ MORE

COMINGS AND GOINGS I Miss That Crazy Dane I was out of school at 15 and went out at sea for six years. Then I came here because my brother worked in the mine. In those days, all the workers lived in barracks. It was like the Wild West out here. There was a lot of poker and boozing....READ MORE

THERE'S ROOM AT THE INN If You're Norwegian I bought this hotel six years ago. It was cheap because everyone knew that the mine was closing down. Back then, it was used as housing for the workers. The big guns didn't stay here of course. They stayed down at the real hotel. It used to be proper fancy. I ...READ MORE

LIVE BY THE PIPE Bob Hund Moves on to Greener Pastures Bob Hund, also known as Bergman Rock, has been around forever and ever. And right now we've been hearing a lot of rumours about them, including that they've started playing live again, for the first time in years. That's great news, but we've also been hearing...READ MORE

GET THE HELL OUT Small Town Girls Don't Stick Around My whole family worked in the mine. My dad, my step dad, and my mum. My grandfather still works there. He's taking care of closing the mine. I'm 23 now, but when I was about 15 I was a cleaner in the mine. It felt safe since my whole family was there. I knew n...READ MORE

VICE PICTURES The Poverty Issue Photos by Martin Runeborg...READ MORE

ALL BANDS ARE SHIT Except Jakobinarina Iceland is so expensive that if you're drinking in a bar in Reykjavik and it's your round, you might as well pull one of the kitschy Viking war-axes off the wall and use it to slice out your own kidney. This is because Iceland is blessed with vast amounts of n...READ MORE

RECORDS Music Reviews - The Poverty Issue CONVERGE No Heroes As well as all those songs that’ll rip your eyes out and put them back in the wrong way round, for some reason these dudes decided to include a 9-minute epic emo-metal-core...READ MORE