Five Years!

No, not a tribute to the best song David Bowie ever wrote, unfortunately. Just a lame ‘happy birthday to me’ post to acknowledge the fact that, unlikely as it my seem, I’ve been doing this shit for five years.

Yes, it was on May 6th 2004 that I sat down before my old PC in my palatial rented room in Swansea’s Uplands district, mucked about a bit with the blogger template you still see before you and wrote:

So I’ve decided to do a music blog. Well why not?

REASONING:

1. It seems like every other fucker’s got one, and some of them actually have ones that other people bother to read, thus making the whole enterprise seem slightly less masturbatory.

2. Whether I like it or not I spend an inordinate amount of time listening to, and collating opinions upon, music, and opportunities to get a copy of my print zine together or post decent reviews elsewhere are few and far between, so what better form than a weblog in which to chronicle my day to day adventures in the world of popular music?

3. Maybe if I prove to be good at it, people might eventually start sending me free stuff (seriously – anybody out there who has the power to send me free records, please, go ahead, I’ll be sycophantic as hell, I promise..)

MY UNIQUE SELLING POINT: whereas most other music bloggers are fairly hip and down with all the latest tunes and able to brush aside huge swathes of MP3s ‘twas if they were matchsticks on a daily basis, my music consumption is far more eccentric and random; basically, I don’t have much spending money, I don’t have a fast internet connection, I don’t live in a cool, hipster-saturated community and I don’t listen to daytime radio. Hence the music I end up digging is almost entirely down to chance most of the time, so prepare for many wild tangents about stuff I recorded off John Peel, stuff I just borrowed from the library, stuff I bought in a clearout sale because I thought it looked cool, pointless mix CD tracklistings etc., as well as the occasional standard drivelling about new releases from my favourite currently active bands and so on..

Hmm, yes, well. I’m not too sure about that.

To refer back to my original three point justification for this weblog's existence: 1. fair enough I suppose, 2. dude, do you think maybe there's a reason for that?, and 3. thus far, this weblog has earned me about five free records that I actually liked, zero guestlist places, and a lot of publicists in my inbox trying to convince me to listen to 'americana' bands. Result! Of course, with availability of music not being such an issue these days, and with the increasing impossibility of anyone making a profit out of independent music, free stuff is scarcely the point, and I'm happy to pay decent bands/labels for their labour, so that's cool.

It should probably be pointed out that at the time I was unemployed and living in Swansea, so the idea of writing a militant no mp3s/no pictures blog about stupid shit I randomly stumbled upon seemed reasonable enough. Swearing a lot and throwing about phrases like “cool hipster-saturated community” also appeared to come naturally.

Despite having no social life, no money and nothing to do all day, I actually have extremely fond memories of that period of my life – denied the opportunity to obtain more than about one newly released album every couple of months, aimlessly wondering around town, across beaches and carparks and dilapidated terraced streets for days on end with my £20 discman, expanding my horizons to soak in the brilliance of Crazy Horse, of Soft Machine, of Black Sabbath, Miles Davis, Fairport and Pentangle, Can, The ‘Dead, Mingus, Fahey, Robert Wyatt, Love, The Byrds etc. I might have been logging onto ebay every day desperately trying to find a copy of the new Sonic Youth or Liars albums for under £6, but I sure wasn’t going hungry music-wise – where there’s a will there’s a way.

And, in such a culturally deadened climate, every single thing that happened that was even slightly noteworthy – going to a see a local punk band, chatting to somebody who seemed interesting, scoring some old metal albums or a Lucio Fulci movie from the depths of some crappy junk shop – became a towering incidence of excitement that I remember to this very day. I swear, sometimes I even find myself fondly remembering some occasion on which I had a particularly satisfactory cup of coffee, or one time when the weather was quite good.

It seems that during my first month on-air, I chose to write of my admiration for Wendy Case & The Paybacks, The Mummies, Ian Svenonious, The Shins second album and PJ Harvey, to rejoice in the fact that Arthur Lee was playing a show at a Victorian pavilion down the road from my house, and to critically evaluate a few Terrorizer cover CDs, stating my clear preference for satan/apocalypse themed black metal over ugly man-tantrum themed metalcore. Man, that kid was alright.

Cut to the present, which finds me still writing from a slightly dilapidated front bedroom in a student district, still having trouble with my internet connection, but otherwise I am gainfully employed, perhaps a bit more grown up, and able to go and see great bands every night of the week should I so wish, to play in bands of my own and to buy as many records as I like. I can listen to stuff online and download on a whim, raid other people’s iTunes for swag, dragging it back to my 140Gb and counting stash of digital sound, all whilst enjoying the, uh, myriad cosmopolitan delights of our capital city. So naturally it stands to reason that I can scarcely even remember what I was listening to/doing/thinking this morning, as awesome stuff and stimulus of one kind or another bombards me day in and day out.

Which is BETTER, obviously. End of discussion. What was my point again? – oh yeah, the weblog.

I guess it had a pretty slow start, and it’s always been a pretty inconsistent. Sorry about that. A huge thanks to anyone out there in reader-land who bothered to stick with us over those first few years. I seemed to have picked up the slack a bit recently though, bar the odd extended absence, and I’m enjoying writing for Stereo Sanctity more than ever.

Actually, I was initially going to use this anniversary as an excuse to do a self-indulgent post linking back to various notable posts and high water marks in Stereo Sanctity history, but the truth is, everything I wrote more than about, say, eighteen months ago, I find pretty cringe-worthy. Even pieces of writing I was really proud of at the time now seem pretty florid and hyperbolic and pointless and dumb, and I’d probably rather not draw any extra attention to them. So it goes though. I’m sure most bloggers feel this way when looking back over their old stuff – I’m sure I’ll feel the same way looking back over my current posts before long.

So, what I’m going to do instead to mark this dubious landmark is quite different:

For ONE WEEK ONLY, I’m going to pretend that this is like some proper weblog, like Fluxblog or something, and will be putting up a new post dedicated to an individual song EVERY DAY. (Well, maybe not over the weekend, because I probably still won’t have internet access, but every weekday at least).

Yep, new “content” every day this week, beginning tomorrow! Start your engines!

Labels: announcements, birthday, lameness, rambling