“Cowell now resembles Sauron well into the Third Age, and will soon shed his corporeal form and appear simply as a vast, unblinking eye – “that horrible growing sense of a hostile will that strove with great power to pierce all shadows of cloud, and earth, and flesh, and to see you: to pin you under its deadly gaze, naked, immovable”.”
Ten years ago, you hadn’t heard of blogging. It was before weblogs were even called blogs, before permalinks and Adsense, before people who have never run a community started calling themselves ‘social media experts’.
Maybe you weren’t even online back then. But we were and we were blogging. U2 were in the studio recording ‘All that you can’t leave behind’. They’d set up a webcam sending out pictures every few minutes. They’d built in a delay, because god forbid we’d see anything untoward. We were a small group of fans from Holland, Australia, USA and Sweden who had first met each other on IRC and then met up ‘in real life’ on the road during the Popmart tour in 1997. We were online 24/7, grabbing pics from the webcam and archiving them. We’d done the same during ‘Pop’. Back then occasionally there’d be some kind of response from the studio on our comments. Little messages posted on cardboard cutouts. It’s too long ago to remember the details. But it was fun. It could have been the start of a beautiful band-fan relationshop online. But U2 never really did take to the internet like we – early adopters – hoped they would.
U2log.com was one of the first ever blogs, one of the first ever single subject blogs, one of the first ever team blogs. (Hi team! How are you all these days?) I’m proud of that. Ahead of the curve means you’ll suffer the dialectics of progress at some point. We did satire, we did proper reporting, we tried to filter fact from fiction, we strived to be anti-agenda, independent, secular, different. We loved Pop*.
We are past our prime, I’ll be the first to admit. I’ve been running U2log.com mostly on my own these past couple of years. I’m always on the verge of kicking it in the head. I’m not the fan I used to be and there are many reasons I shouldn’t be doing this: Other sites are doing it so much better. I know too much, I know too little. I have other interests I should focus on. Still, I can’t let it go. Yet.
U2log.com is ten years old today. There’s a tour about to start. One more for the road.
* And screw the lads for being so insecure about that album. *grin*
One apartment. 24 different rooms. Hong Kong architect Gary Chang can change his typically tiny Chinese apartment into 24 different rooms using a clever system which allows him to slide walls around. He can come round my place any time to fix it up.
In another time and another place we were students with lots of time on our hands. We spend all week on the couch, reading the papers, drinking cinnamon tea and spice biscuits and taking the mickey out of each other. And then we got BBC 1 and 2 on our cable. Overnight we turned into fans, gobbling up the brilliant comedy (Spitting Image, Not the Nine O’Clock News, Fry and Laurie) and wasting many, many hours watching sports coverage as the Brits introduced us to their exotic games of darts, golf and snooker. Under the influence of the Beeb, darts and snooker took off in our country. We got a darts board and even tried our hand at snooker, in some of the new snooker halls opening up around the city. It was the era of Steve Davis famously ‘earning the right to be boring’, Dennis Taylor with his specs and Jimmy White. We liked White, but my favourite was Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins, because he played faster than anyone else, because he was a real character, because he wasn’t Steve Davis. Because he headbutted that referee.
Funny, unpredictable, volatile, Irish. Alex Higgins, legend, died of throat cancer on Saturday.
Posted: July 23rd, 2010 | Filed under:Various | | Comments Off
““And so, 25 years after West End Girls, here we are. I think it’s a tribute to actually not being about fame, and not being about celebrity, but being about songwriting and creativity.””
