Miscellaneous - Editorial

  by John Clarkson

published: 4 / 4 / 2002

Article

Hello, and welcome to the April edition of the Pennyblackmusic magazine. One of the problems that any editor has to deal with is how to keep his or her magazine or fanzine up-to-date and relevant. In recent months, we have been receiving a lot of promos at Pennyblackmusic. With each one that comes in, we've put a sound sample from it on the site, and then passed it on to one of our writers, in the sometimes vain hope that he or she will like it . It's been great, but, as a result, it has also meant that we have had to deal a lot more with what we define as "middle of the month syndrome". If a promo comes in at the beginning of the month, we can normally get it out to a writer in plenty for him or her to do a review before our monthly up-date at the beginning of the month. If, however, it arrives later in the month, perhaps towards the middle or the end, then the chances of this being done become less likely. While Pennyblackmusic is a British website, it has an international status. Many of our writers live abroad. We have three Canadians, two Americans, two people living in Sweden and a Dutch writer amongst our staff. It can take a week or ten days at a time for a package to reach them. Also , even one of our team lives in Britain, they may want to play it over a few times and. not unreasonably, to have the promo for a week or two before committing themselves to a review. We were, therefore, left with a "grey period" in which, depending on the timing of the arrival of a promo, it might take us six or seven weeks to getting a review on-line. To combat this, we have decided from now on to run two up-dates a month. The first up-date will take place at the beginning of the month and will be for reviews and all other articles (interviews, features, live reviews, the Website of the Month, Favourite Album etc), while the second one which will take place at the middle of the month and just for reviews. We ran our first mid-month up-date in the middle of March with 22 new reviews. This time around we have added another 34 reviews to the Pennyblackmusic database. There are plenty of other new articles as well. In our lead interview this month Anthony Strutt talks to Neil Halstead, the frontman of both Mojave 3 and Slowdive, about his work with both those bands and also about the release of his debut solo album 'Sleeping on the Roads'. Elsewhere we have interviews as well with controversial punks the Parkinsons and Firewater ; rising indie popsters Bear Suit and Dressy Bessy, the popular nineties group Dodgy and the increasingly eclectic Sheffield new wave group, the Repomen. In the first of a two part series, we have been talking as well to Robin Hitchcock about the reformation of his seventies band the Soft Boys to celebrate the 21st anniversary of their psychedelic masterpiece 'Underwater Moonlight'. Next time around we'll be speaking to Robin about his solo career and his work with his new band the Egyptians. Long term readers to this magazine will know that a couple of years ago we ran over the course of sixteen instalments a biography of the C86 group, the Flatmates, written by the group's guitarist and songwriter, Martin Whitehead. Martin also for many years was the owner of the eighties indiepop label Subway, which alongside the Flatmates, also released records by the likes of the Chesterfields, the Razorcuts and the Soup Fragons. Martin hopes to release his Subway biography later this year, and, as a prelude to that, for our label interview this month Tommy Gunnarsson has spoken to him about the rise and spectacular fall of his label. We have new features as well and there are profiles of the Dead Can Dance, former Wonder Stuff vocalist Miles Hunt, and the electronica label Ampersand Records. There are live reviews as well of Freeheat and Echo and the Bunnymen and the recent British Ikara Colt and the Parkinsons tour. In our Favourite Album slot, Cila Warncke examines Spiritualized's 'Ladies and Gentlemen, We are Floating in Space', while our Website of the Month is twee.net, one of the best sites on the web dedicated exclusively to indie pop music. As usual, this magazine is the work of many people. Sincere thanks go out to James Alexander, Laura Branch, Malcolm Carter, Andrew Carver, Tommy Gunnarsson, Alex Halls, Benjamin Howarth, Chris Jones, Geraint Jones, Peter Liddle, David McNamee, Scott Miller, Cara Ross, Mark Rowland, Maarten Scheithart, Caleb Smith,Olga Sladeckova, Anthony Strutt, James Swinburne, Cila Warncke, Denzil Watson, Matthew Willson and Gary Wollen, all of whom have contributed articles to either this up-date or the last reviews up-date. Thank you to Neil Landowski, Richard Banks, and Mo Robertson as well for their continued support. As well as the writers above, we also have two new writers this month. Andy Snowball is one of the former editors of the Southampton University newspaper, while Julia Willis is a long term music fan. Andy has contributed the Coloma review, while Julia has written the Miles Hunt profile in the 'Features' section. Both live in the London area. Thank you to both of them. We will be up-dating the reviews section on approximately the 18th April and then the features and reviews in early May. In the May edition, we will be running interviews hopefully with the Mission, Simpatico, Saloon, Ikara Colt, Eighties B Line Matchbox Disaster, Paula Kelley, Sharp Practise and there will be the second part of our Robin Hitchcock interview. There will be label interviews as well with Shinkansen (definitely !) and Iris Light. We will have a new Favourite Album and Website of the Month, while Gary Wollen will be writing about a recent Track and Field all day event. Thank you as always for reading. Best Wishes ! John Clarkson Magazine Editor www.pennyblackmusic.com