A SAD LAMENT (2)

Everything has a shelf life. Some great things come and go in what seems like the blink of an eye, while some really evil things hang around for centuries doing untold damage to society. And I know that one day, TVV will be no more. I'm not sure when exactly that will be, but when I do stop shoving up badly spelt words, sentences and paragraphs that more often than not make little sense to anyone other than your humble scribe, I hope it will be a dignified exit completely in my own control.

But nowadays, I'm less and less sure if that will be the case.

I've previously highlighted the fact that a number of music blogs have been removed without any advance warning as a result of increasing pressure surrounding the dmca notifications. Indeed it was the sudden removal of a long-loved blog that was one of the prime driving forces behind my determination to make a success of Paul Haig Day II. Coxon Le Woof was one of the real inspirations behind me starting up TVV back in late September 2006, and I know that I'm not the only one who really misses To Die By Your Side, a blog that not only featured some incredibly well-written and informative posts, but featured some very rare and impossible to find versions of songs that were often taken from exclusive radio sessions. The disappearance of Coxon's work, and indeed those of a few others, was highlighted in a report in The Guardian newspaper - and although I have referred to that piece before, I am not ashamed at all to do so again. Click here for more.

But something else has happened in the past couple of weeks that has angered me more than any other incident since the dmca battles began, and that was the removal of the blog Acid Ted that was a work of art created by ctel.

I know that many of you will be familiar with Acid Ted. Ctel maintained a blog that was truly outstanding in its field - an A-Z of the dance genre. An incredible 1300 posts in exactly two years, during which time he also made himself available to do some guest postings at TVV. Not only that, he saved the blog itself when he stepped in at very short notice to take over for a week when some nasty gremlins forced my PC to crash with the loss of all music files. I did pay tribute back in February when ctel called it a day....

But less than two months later, ctel came out of retirement for one day only - 6th April 2010 - specifically to take part in Paul Haig Day II and also to put up a final posting about his own hero, Andrew Weatherall, whose birthday was the same day.

Two days later he switched on his PC and discovered that Acid Ted had been removed. He had received no advance warning about any offending tracks. I know that it was nothing at all to do with any of the Paul Haig material. It wasn't likely to have been the Andrew Weatherall material either as this was far from the first time ctel had featured his music and I don't recall any problems over the previous two years. It was also bizarre as other than the tracks on 6th April, no other mp3s were widely available as ctel, like the rest of us, removes his mp3s after a period of time.

The tragic thing is that having stopped doing the blog on a regular basis, ctel didn't bother having anything backed up, and so when blogger pulled the plug, it had gone forever. All of the hundreds of thousands of words that went with those 1300 postings, not to mention the thoughts and views of those who took the time to leave comments behind, thrown onto a cyber-bonfire.

And one day, the very same fate might befall TVV. OK, so I do back up the blog and could resuscitate it elsewhere reasonably easily, but I just think I'd be so hurt and upset about its removal from here that I'd rather pack it all in and become, as I was before I started all this, an avid reader of other folk's efforts. Hopefully it will never come to that.....

One other thing that angered me about the removal of Acid Ted was that ctel had a button which you could press and make a donation to a couple of charities that were very near to his heart after the sad and tragic loss of his very young son after a very brave battle against cancer. That was ctel's way of looking to do some good out of his blogging - asking people that if they enjoyed listening to the mp3s he offered that they would consider giving a thank you to charity.

And following on from ctel's example, I'm going to now do the same. I've been proud to have the badge that TVV is an ad-free zone, and while that will continue to be the case, I am going to offer readers the opportunity to make the occasional donation to charity in lieu of the free downloads. I'm hoping ctel himself will choose the charity for me, and as soon as I've got all the arrangements and permissions in place, you'll spot a wee change up at the top right hand side of the blog.

Here's a random choice of tunes that I feel like playing today:-

mp3 : LCD Soundsystem - All My Friends
mp3 : The Teardrop Explodes - Culture Bunker (Peel Session)
mp3 : R.E.M. - New Test Leper

Happy Listening.

LUNCHTIME UPDATE

If you read the comments you will see that Coxon has brought back To Die By Your Side. Only he's now thrown away his alias and tells us that is Richard who is the author.

In any event, I've changed the link over on the right-hand side and hope you'll all head across and give him a rousing welcome back to blogland.