The Skinny Current Issue

"I just thought of a really good way to break the rules," Ros says in the group chat. "What if... someone else wrote my editorial." In that moment – twenty-past-eleven on print day, posing a question with a full stop – I knew that we were all in for a wild ride in this bit of the magazine. And before any of you say 'oh if I were in that situation I wOuLd jUsT uSe Chat Gee-Pee-Tee', please take your loser behaviour off to [redacted], [redacted], and bring your [redacted] with you. 

OK, so we've revealed some behind-the-scenes admin, wildly shifted between tenses and disparaged the audience – what other rules can we break? It must be the spirit of all these amazing artistic rule-breakers coursing through my veins that's encouraging this lawlessness. Linder Sterling has been punking the system for five decades; we spoke to the legendary artist ahead of an artistic tour this spring/summer that takes in Edinburgh and Bute. Glasgow-based art project Bank Street Media Labs are messing with the set-dressing in their own way, putting on cross-artform nights that are both free and good. Edinburgh DJ and producer Proc Fiskal's new album is full of bangers, but then his new video features someone playing an iPad like a lute. You can't make bangers with a lute, Mr Fiskal! This is anarchy! Rules, broken; precepts, disregarded. 

Elsewhere in the rule-breaking zone, we look at the returning Falastin Film Festival, chat to US punks and 6 Music Dad-scarers Mannequin Pussy, and chat about Mancunian indie auteurs Wu Lyf because they're famously very aloof and hard to get hold of. We also talk to an author about their new book – but I'm not gonna tell you who they are! And down goes another of the rules of editorial-writing! OK, it's Catherine Lacey and she's talking about her fiction-memoir hybrid The Möbius Book, turns out you're only allowed to antagonise the audience once every 500 words, and that's because that's an 'unwritten rule' it's somehow more important?

Sorry, I should have explained earlier – the theme of this month's mag is 'Rule Breakers'. It was going to be 'punk', but then we couldn't quite find enough things that were definitionally 'punk' to fill the space, and also we kept getting drawn into philosophical and semantic conversations about what 'punk' is. Is it 'punk' to write a book that's in two halves, back-to-back? No, but it is interesting and it does open up new possibilities. Is it punk to put on a film festival? Maybe, but putting on a film festival that wholeheartedly centres the stories and hopes of Palestinians is a break with some of the established rules around whose stories get to be told. Is it punk to be in a band that mostly communicates in coded messages, like a guerilla group with good tunes and the backing of several hundred stout gig-goers across the Salford area? Not necessarily, but it is a repudiation of certain ideas about how you're 'supposed' to do things.

Instead of forcing all that into the bounds of one idea, we're celebrating some art that moves across those bounds. Oh and there's also reviews and gig highlights and the Heads Up – oh, Listings! We redid the Listings spreadsheet this month and I tell ya, it did not take nearly as long to proofread as normal. Yeah there's a bunch of stuff in here, read on, you'll have a good time and that's about 600 words so yeah if you pop that in that should be all good, cheers. 

Yours sincerely, Rosamund West [dictated, not read]