I’ve been thinking about starting a music blog for a while. While it’s true that the world doesn’t necessarily need another music blog from the point of view of a chronically unsuccessful musician who just wants to talk about the mechanics of how and why people make music, there definitely seems to be a shortage of blogs that delve beyond surface details with any real purpose. I mean, they do exist – but the percentages must be skewed to something like 95% shite, 5% gold.

Fresh from a round of attempting to gain coverage for our most recent release, what has struck me is that there are a lot of small outfits that look cool but essentially offer the same thing – usually a half-hearted, copy-and-pasted press release masquerading as a ‘review’ or the fabled Q&A or ‘Getting to know…’ features that seem quite exciting for the musician at first, before the realisation dawns that you’re just answering the exact eight questions that have been asked to hundreds of acts before you. You’re sausage meat and your music hasn’t really been listened to at all. To make matters worse, they’ll want to charge you for the pleasure of spelling your name wrong several times and asking what flavour ice cream you’d be (if, of course, you were an ice cream). Yes, it’s true about the metrics, the Spotify playlists, the Facebook tag, the retweet, and the Instagram likes – but just as Bryan Ferry said, there’s got to be something more than this.

Of course there’s nothing wrong with any of the things I’ve just mentioned. And there’s nothing wrong with writers getting paid either. But this is not that.

Also, if you haven’t guessed already, I’m not a writer. I’m just a fan. I love music. I love listening to it, I love the process of making it and I love to talk about it. And that’s the idea here – to blather on about stuff that I find great and that I think other people might just find great too. There are a few people I’ve met whose work I think is exceptional, and it’s here that I’ll be making my first tentative steps into the music blogosphere. Sure, there will be reviews (only positive) – but what I’m really hoping to do is have a dialogue with some great musicians, songwriters and artists that hopefully shed some light on what they do, and how they do it. I grew up on stories of the Beatles overdubbing shitloads of grand pianos playing that final chord on ‘A Day in the Life’, Pink Floyd huddled in the control room creating a criss-cross of magnetic tape whizzing around mic stands to create the cash register loop on ‘Money’, or the alarm clock apocalypse that opens ‘Time’. It’s the process that I always want to know more about; the alchemy that kinda results in something beautiful.

As for right now though, I’m in a hospital bed watching my oxygen levels slowly return to normal after an acute asthma attack. So that’s it. Send me some music. Somewhere in between not dying from the physical stresses and strains of asthma, or not dying from the physical stresses and strains of looking after a 15-month-old baby that never sleeps, I might just get round to listening to it.