INTERVIEW: Andi Gladwin

Interviewed by Tom Denton.

MRB: Hi Andi, thanks for talking to us! It seems you have a very methodical, organised way of approaching the business of magic, and your career in general. Can you tell us about your thinking on that?


Andi: The only way to run a business (be it as a performing magician or any other field) is to be on top of everything. It becomes even more important when you do quite a few different things, like me. I run Vanishing Inc. Magic, have a performing career, I lecture to magicians, sometimes consult on magic TV shows, organise The Session and own an IT business.


MRB: A lot of people will know you from Vanishing Inc. You say on your website “everything on Vanishing Inc is performance quality and worthy of your time”. For you, what are the criteria that a product has to fit to make it worthy of being stocked? Do you and Josh Jay always agree on those criteria?


Andi: People are often surprised to hear that either Josh or myself (often both) perform almost everything that we release at Vanishing Inc. Where possible, before we release something, we use it in various performing conditions to ensure that it's something our customers would like and use. I think this shows in some of our more recent releases like Legacy and Timeless, where we've tweaked things along the way, based on what we've learned from our performances.


MRB: I think it's fair to say that a lot of the Vanishing Inc products, and the work that you're known for personally, is quite sleight-of-hand focused. Do you think that becoming a “move monkey” can be a bad thing for a magician? Are the hours spent practising difficult sleights more fruitful than the same amount of time spent working out gaffed solutions to the same problem?


Andi: I love sleight of hand magic. It's never a bad thing to learn lots of sleights as trust me, one day you'll need to use that weird pass to find a lost card, or a strange switch that you practised for months to rectify a mistake! The more sleights in your repertoire, the better equipped you are for any situation.


MRB: On a similar subject, how do you feel about the state of modern sleight-of-hand artistry? Of course, there are a lot of young flourishers around, and people happy to show off a few techniques on YouTube, but do you think that the art of real sleight-of-hand magic needs more attention?


Andi: We're in a great place. I'm twenty-eight and the kids in magic today make me feel old and terrible at what I do! There are some incredible young magicians out there and you're all really paving the way. Many of you are so good, you make me sick. And very jealous.


MRB: Of course, close-up sleight-of-hand comes to the fore in the convention you organise, The Session. Can you tell us why you decided to start The Session, and what it offers that other conventions don't? Also, as it has a capped attendance of just 130 magicians, do you think that there's the possibility of expanding at some point, maybe going down the EMC webcast route so that more people can get involved?


Andi: There wasn't really any great close-up conventions in the UK and we wanted to change that. We wanted to make a convention that we'd like to attend ourselves, so booked a great venue, great performers (most of which had never been seen in Europe) and organised the type of event that we'd enjoy being at. Luckily, other people enjoyed being there too and we're now in our eighth year!


MRB: I know you're a great proponent of the good old magic book, you've mentioned being greatly influenced by Marlo techniques. Are there any books, Marlo or otherwise, that you think get overlooked by magicians?


Andi: That's a tough question as there are many magic books that are overlooked. But in general, I think every Marlo book is overlooked. How many people have really read, experimented with and tried every move in the Revolutionary Card Technique books, or how many people have fully read the six Marlo's Magazines (each about 400 pages). Not me. But I'd love to one day.


MRB: And finally, I'd like to give you an opportunity to brazenly plug any projects you have in the offing. What can magicians look forward to from you in the forseeable future? Are you producing any more books or DVDs that you can tell us about?


Andi: We're finally getting close to releasing The Definitive Sankey; a 1500-page trilogy of Jay Sankey's magic. Josh and I have been writing these books for over four years and we're so happy to be nearing completion. It's in the final stages of layout right now.


And we've just launched another project that I've been working very hard on: the Vanishing Inc. iPad app. It's a way to watch and buy all the downloads from Vanishing Inc. We've built a custom ebook viewer too, which makes it a great way to read our publications!