I've been a bit light on the old blogging front over the past few weeks, as I've been concentrating on resurrecting a website I first created and ran in mid 2000 - when the internet was new and exciting.
It's now called - www.kirkcaldybands.com and it's a kind of tribute site to the music scene in the town where I went to high school and college. I don't really know if Kirkcaldy was that special at the time (I only knew Kirkcaldy, maybe other local scenes were good) - but looking back on it, there were an astonishing number of local bands - some pretty good. We spent most of our spare time (and we had A LOT of spare time) in the years 1985 and 1986, going to see these local bands, and being members of some of them.
The scene was also pretty good in that, there were very few cover version bands, so we were all writing our own material - pretty creative really. I've enormously fond memories of these days, and I created the original website as a way to preserve and celebrate those times and that music.
The website was a pretty big success in the year or so after it was first uploaded. I got mails from astonished members of these long forgotten bands. I got in touch again with some people who were really good friends in the mid '80's.
Things kinda tailed off after that and I began to resent paying the fees to keep the website up, so I took it down, around 2003. Having gotten into blogging, I checked out the price these days of webhosting and I was amazed at how much webspace you can get for how little money. Even better, you can opt to host your webpage on Linux - take that Microsoft - and it's cheaper!
So I decided to lock myself away in my apartment last weekend and re-create the website. I literally locked the door on Friday and did not emerge until Monday! I struggled a bit to find a good website creation tool, and finally paid $40 for Rapidweaver. I'm not sure if the word "rapid" means something else to the guys who created this software - "rapid" it ain't! It is a huge RAM hog - I'm using it on my favourite computer, the little Apple iBook G4 that is pictured on my first blog entry. But it is taking around 5 minutes each time to save anything. The activity monitor goes crazy whenever it does anything. That aside, it is a pretty easy to use tool, and I think the website looks good. Great URL, a lot better than before.
I'm now in the frustrating position, having created the site, of knowing that it'll take a bit of time for anyone who may be interested in it, to stumble across it. I managed to edit the wikipedia entry for Kirkcaldy (childishly easy - no wonder sites get vandalised - I was looking up a page about a Labour Party Politician the other day, and it said "he is a fan of Celtic Football Club, he is a wee jobby" - nice), so there is a link to it there, and I've been playing with meta tags, so people who are drunk and sticking their own name into google to see what comes up, may stumble across themselves (or is it just me that does that?). I've sent mails off to some of the people who contacted me last time - but of course, the mail addresses are 4-5 years old and (this time around), there is a time difference too.
I'm really in the market for obtaining more material for the site. The MP3's I made from old tapes and the scans of posters, flyers, etc. - are really just mine and my mates. Sad to say, when the website was last active, I came to realise that most other people who played in bands in those days, were a lot less careful with keeping their material. This has had the bizarre effect of making my own band ("The Surgical Wars" - I know, terrible name - it could have been "Hot Knives" - that would have been much, much worse) seem much more prominent in the line up of the bands than we should be, we were really just bit part players, compared with some of the other bands. It's just that we have a ton of our own material and I don't think other bands kept as much of theirs. As it's over 20 years now since these bands roamed the earth (or Kirkcaldy), the material is getting rarer, and rarer. I hope we can turn up more material - I'm intrigued to see how the response to the site may have changed since the last time it was up - the internet changes so much, that 4 years of being away is a long time. I've started what I'm calling the "Kirkcaldy Bands Treasure Hunt" - to see if the people who stumble over the site may have any material they can send me - anyone who will spend any amount of time on the site is bound to have been around in those days, I can't imagine anyone else would find it remotely interesting. It'll be fascinating to see if I turn up anything - I'd love to re-connect band members with any of their old material that they thought they'd never hear again, I'd also love to find some material I tapes of some of the local bands that people borrowed in the '80's and never gave back. I love the thought of re-discovering an preserving and making widely available dusty tapes from the 1980's vortex, before they rot away altogether.
I was just thinking - when I was playing in these bands (the pic above is of me, from this era) and I knew of a guy who was researching the Kirkcaldy Bands of the 60's (i.e. 20 years before the '80's), would I have thought that was cool, or sad? I thought - sad for a while, but now I think - cool! Answers on a postcard to Kirkcaldybands.com.
And - OK, if you download any of the music (particularly our band), some of it is pretty dodgy. I think you would have had to be there at the time to really appreciate it. But at least we were out there at the age of 19, creating music and having fun. We could have been kicking in bus shelters, or (much worse) in our bedrooms, playing board games! It might have been crap, but at least it was our crap!
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