Now then,

Welcome to This Is Nowhere a new rock music and pop culture website.

Over a few pints late last year we were talking about the elephant in the room. It was a giant pachyderm with a picture of Bob Dylan on the end of its trunk, a snap of Hadouken just above its anus and its feet on photocopies of all four Beatles. The large eared, long toothed mammal, which also had stickers of Kate Nash and Peaches Gandalf on either tusk, was impossible to ignore. “Is it just us”, we mused, “or outside of the niche press is there literally nothing that caters for the intelligent music fan between the age of 21 and, well, 73?” So to cut a long and tedious story short, after much shouting at each other and dramatic flouncing in and out of the room, here we are.

Over the next couple of months we will be running as a blog site before our summer launch. During this time we will be introducing you to a stellar cast of opinionated bloggers, consummate taste makers and provocative interviewers who will be covering the must-hear new bands and current releases. On top of this we will have cutting edge audio visual content on the most noteworthy music and pop culture from the last 30 years. In short we will be an essential read guide to the best in new albums, reissues and related books, comics, graphic novels, TV series, DVDs and the like, concentrating on quality over hype. We will inject a strong mix of opinion, humour, intelligence and passion back into journalism utilizing the best writers for the job. If you don’t actually believe that Jack Penate is the best thing since Nirvana but you’re still not ready to slump into yet another feature on ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ then we could be the thing you’re waiting for.

First and foremost the emphasis will be on quality writing that avoids the all-filler no-killer route that so many magazines have gone down. We’re just as sick as everyone else at how cotton-brained the lifestyle publication industry has become – giving more time over to pet psychology, advice on how to wear scarves and how to make free range squid marmalade than anything of interest. If these mags were any more stupid you’d have to milk them.

But to be honest we’ve got problems with the general music press as well. Does anyone actually think that reviewing two hundred albums a month is a good idea? And who thought that reducing the word counts to the size of an average product description in an Argos catalogue was a good idea? We must have missed that meeting. Instead we thought, why not just concentrate on the top thirty releases and reissues per month and let some of the best music writers from the last 30 years - from the cream of the new school to hardened survivors of the punk wars – really get to grips with them. Anyway, look at it this way: we’re not having a launch party, we’re not having a teaser campaign, we’re not issuing a sub-Banksy decorated press pack. However what we are doing is spending all the money we have on scribes and photographers who are experts in their fields – travel, graphic novels, how to survive a six storey fall and the ensuing coma, extreme Asian cinema, mountaineering, practical Satanism, performing an auto-tracheotomy, counter-terrorism, steam trains and scuba diving but mainly just music.

In a list that’s growing day by day we’re already proud to say we’re looking forward to contributions from the following: Andrew Mueller, Aidan John Moffat, Simon Reynolds, Pat Long, Joel McIver, James Knight, Professor Simon Frith, Leonie Cooper, Tommy Udo, Miss AMP, Andy Stimpson, Swells, Holly Hernandez, David McNamee, Jeremy Allen, Taylor Parkes, Ned Raggett, Joe Stannard, Niall O’Keeffe, Simon Price, Petra Davis, Chris Roberts, David Stubbs, Alex Macpherson, Neil Kulkarni, Angus Batey, Stevie Chick, Manish Agarwal, Louis Pattison, Brother John Robb, Chris Taylor, Leo Lonergan, Dayal Patterson, Kicking_K, Frances Morgan, Norven Kane, Derek Walmsley, Melissa Bradshaw, Mike Diver, Dan Curley, Steve Lamacq, Charlie Ivens, Jimmy Martin, Big Ben Myers, Dr Rock, Peter Robinson, Sam Strang, Rebecca Nicholson, Kev Kharas, Alex Denny, Gareth Dobson, Emily Mackay, Steven Jelbert. And believe us we’ve got some big guest writers signed up for the launch of the website.

Yeah, that’s exactly what we said when they said yes. Suck it up.

Cheers,

John Doran, Music Editor