Play on – my life in music

Earlier this year I decided to create my own little piece of the internet. Outpost 10 began as somewhere to write about the things that interest me, revisit some old stories and generally make a home for bits of my life that I felt were worth preserving.

I had kept a blog before but looking back, some of its tone and content belonged to a different period of my life. I didn’t want to simply copy everything across and pretend nothing had changed. If I was going to revisit any of it, I wanted to do so with the benefit of a few more years lived and perhaps a little more perspective.

One thing I definitely wanted to bring with me was the musical history.

Music has occupied a huge part of my life for decades and the old site contained a section documenting the various bands and projects I had been involved with along the way. The basic idea was worth keeping, although this time I wanted to approach it rather differently.

Rather than simply listing names, dates and recordings, I began going back into the memories themselves: the people, places, friendships, mistakes, successes, strange turns and occasional bits of chaos that came with them.

What started as a history of the bands gradually became something more personal.

Some chapters have been enormous fun to revisit. Others have required a little more thought. There have been plenty of highs and lows over the years and part of the exercise has been learning how to write about events honestly without allowing old disagreements to become the story.

The result is Play On, a growing collection of chapters charting my life in music from my own perspective.

These are my memories of the road travelled rather than an attempt to speak for everybody who travelled parts of it with me. Other people will inevitably remember certain events differently and that is part of the nature of memory itself.

There are still plenty of chapters to write and probably a few memories waiting to resurface as I go. I’ll continue adding photographs, recordings and other bits and pieces where they help bring the stories to life.

If you were there for any of it and remember something differently, or simply have something to add, then comments are always welcome.

I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I am enjoying putting it together.

Play On