Bye Bye, Myspace.

So...the much maligned and even more talked-about apparent 'Myspace update'.

It's been a bit like watching a family pet turn from a spritely, mischievous puppy into a elderly crippled, half-blind old hound which can do little more than sleep in front of the fireplace, passing wind occasionally just to remind you of its existence.

Finally it seems, after several unsuccessful attempts to navigate the new layout and fix what they'd done to my profile (which initially took bloody ages to put together), I face the unsavoury task of taking it out for it's last walk in the woods with a cocked shotgun over my arm at the end of the year.

At one point it was THE place to go to to explore new music, and back in 2006-2007 or whatever, I happily signed up, customised a page for myself and literally watched the new & upcoming acts roll in before my eyes, eager to communicate and spread word of their existence.

Nowadays it seems that the only bulletins & announcements that bands post on Myspace are to advise their followers to go and find them on Facebook.

It's not without a certain degree of hesitance that I'm to cancel my account on Myspace at the end of the year; I met a lot, and I mean a LOT of great people through it and it was almost certainly the main reason for the majority of my DJ bookings. But right now, I seem to talk to a lot more people who've cancelled their Myspace account than those who still possess them. These are the people I still clung onto my account for in the first place, so if they're not still battling the sluggish, bandwidth-hungry, non-musician friendly, graphics-intensive advertisement board that was once King of the Social Networks, why should I?

It'll be a clean account deletion-the worst thing I could do is simply abandon it to be a perpetually out of date board of information where only half the graphics I'd painstakingly designed show due to the new layout. It just looks awful; awful to the point where any attempt to fix it wouldn't be enough to rescue it. I did try; it just decided to throw errors up at me whenever I chose style templates for the bloody thing. Nice work...

So there you go. A new year, a new 'back to basics' approach to self-promotion. Just me, my website & Twitter.

Oh, and this blog & podcast of course. But definitely NO FACEBOOK, okay? Most of you know my views on that bloody thing already.

Interview with Jim Hawkins & Gavin Baddeley from May 2010

I came across this footage while digging around in the back of the World Goth Day closet this morning.

It's a recording of an interview I had with Jim Hawkins on his morning show on Radio Shropshire from May 2010 about the Goth scene, which also included renowned occult author Gavin Baddeley on the telephone.

Typically, I sounded like a clueless idiot answering the simplest of questions; clearly it wasn't a good day for my brain and tongue to be in cahoots with each other. However, it's not a bad recording and should be shared rather than lost.

A couple of interviews from November...

I found out that 4Shared has a great little player widget which allows you to stream audio. With that in mind, here's two shows containing interviews from November 2010 with both Rhombus & Pretentious, Moi? respectively that shouldn't be lost forever in the ever-growing archive pile.