About

And I sing and sing of awful things
The pleasure that my sadness brings

That line on writing about music being like dancing about architecture killed me. Before I read that, I felt the exact opposite, powerfully and profoundly. The words lay down a sheet of paper, drew a picture, then hung that beautifully shaded outline in a frame. The music just filled in the colours. I chose to dance.

This is likely because I always recognised that I lacked the talent to be a musician. Like a million others before me, I couldn't write music, but I could write about music. And those writers! Hedonists, romantics, aspirational deviants. They weren't just writers. They were artists too. Bangs, Wells and Azzerad were Kerouac, Cassady and Ginsberg. Almost Famous was a documentary. Having internalised the essential grandeur of the music journalist, I set my course.

I read Q, before I knew better. I moved on to the NME, after I should have known better. Even then, when I shouldn't have had any idea of the broader context of the decline of print media, it felt like a publication, an industry, out of time. I still wanted in. Better to live in the shadow of greatness than the daylight of obscurity.

I've written about music intermittently since 2005. Some is archived here. Some is lost on defunct websites, some on dead external hard drives. Some of it is good, and some of it is not. All of it certainly exists.

I'm writing here now, just because. I still listen to music, and I still discover music through the written word. I like that, and I like being part of that. The aim is to post about a good song, write a few worthwhile paragraphs about it, and for the reader to gain something, anything, from that. I hope you'll be one of those.

AV