I’ve been reading this thread and… suddenly I feel in a writing mood…
Back in the very end of the 70’s to the beginning of the 80’s I was living in a small town in the south west of France (not the best place in the world at the time to get music from the UK…). I remember the fights to get some (old) copies of the NME or the Melody Maker (quite expensive for me at the time) just to be aware of what was out or newly released. Then, when I knew what I wanted, it was another fight to have this or that being found, ordered & delivered to the small town record shop where they didn’t even know the names of the bands (also, I had to convince a minimum of 4 other people for buying the same vinyls, as the record company or the distributor would not take the order for less than 5 copies…)
This process was lasting very long, I remember waiting sometimes months to finally get a, for instance, some records by New Order or Depeche Mode, or even a 12’’ by an obscure band called… Freur.
When I was lucky, there was a gig 2 or 300 kms away from my place, and after hours of negotiations with my parents (and if I had the money…) I was sometimes allowed to go to the gig… I don’t even speak about how to get the tickets in these times.
Once a year, I could manage to go to Paris (900 kms from where I lived), for 2 or 3 days, where were the only record shops where I could buy “easily” what I wanted (well…if they were not sold out). A goldmine for me but for the price of gold… and I was soooo happy.
And sometimes, in some open air marketplaces, some weird people were selling in a kind of hidden way (from the back of a car…) some bootlegs on these C90 tapes with a sound quality that would be called now inaudible.
In this time, fax machines, mobiles phones, laptops, internet & mp3 were just sci-fi, but if I remember well, the earth was not inhabited only by dinosaurs back then...
So, time changed a bit. I’ll write now about a band called Underworld, with its kind of community of superfans mainly here, in this board. This band, Underworld, in the last few months, updated their site, gave us hours of music (studio or live), were kind enough, just in case some people missed it, to re-upload in their site some “pre 2005 archive”, gave us also images (moving or fixed), made webcasts for us from their studio or even from gigs (and some of the webcasts were apparently very uneasy to settle…), and also… mmm?… we, the superfans, had to pay the tremendous amount of 10£ to get nearly 54 minutes in two parts of completely new and amazing music… and what else?… ah, yes, two batches of gigs in Europe and Japan, during which, minimum once every gig, Karl shouted something nice for the superfans, for listening, downloading, buying RRP or just being there… and?... also quite every day in their home page (and/or in the member section) there are few words or even sentences directly addressed to us, and not always in a cryptic way (anyway, just in case someone misses it, some people in this board is, generally right after, “decoding” it, repeating it, “did you see?”, “did you check it?”, “did you get?” etc etc… well, just in case, indeed… generally people with more than 500 posts… very easy to find…).
About the “Live in Tokyo” cd set, I remember I read Karl’s sentence about keeping an eye on eBay, and few time after I read here that the cds appeared. Believe it or not, but at the time, I never ever went on eBay. So, reading that the cds were there, I registered, struggled a bit with this paypal thing, of course I missed the 1st batch, then made a mistake with something I don’t know and apparently bought 2 sets instead of 1, someone instantly in this board wrote me that this wasn’t fair, I apologised, cancelled (or tried to…) my double order, missed another batch, tried again successfully and… finally received an email by Danielle saying that she’ll be very happy to send me the famous cd set in few days… which I got 3 days after, 27th February… I really believe that if somebody like me (a “n00b” if I learned well from this board) could get this cd set, everybody could have done the same, easily.
I’m buying music since 1975 (I was 10, and my 1st record was Kraftwerk’s Autobahn) and I can’t imagine spending one day without listening music, working or not. But I never saw or heard any band as close, nice and careful with their fans than Underworld, neither saw anything as fantastic as a gig by these people, and here by Underworld, I don’t speak only about R&K, but also about Danielle, Mike, Mal, Yannick and some other I probably don’t know, official or unofficial (including the “nearly-2000-posts-ones” in this board and a few others here…), and to these people I can’t imagine saying anything else than : a million thanks to make all this easy and possible, and for being so kind (and sometimes patient, I guess...). Nothing else, really.
So, reading this thread (and a few other occasionally…) I’m balancing between being very disappointed to utterly mad, and I can even feel a bit ashamed about what the people I named above could think when reading some of the posts here… maybe probably that they should do the only thing they didn’t do yet, like : putting the cds in a bag with few beers, taking a car, a train or a plane, and deliver the cds personally and only in each superfan hands and, of course, having a nice chat with him/her for an hour or so in front of a pint. Probably…
I hope this post was not too long… but even if I like Moaner a lot, moaners, sometimes, drive me mad… maybe I’m too old, or coming from a period where the words “easy”, “now”, “quick” or “click” were not very familiar in matters like gathering infos and acquiring music… Don’t know…
Thanks to everybody happy to read and write posts here, not complaining or moaning too much and re-reading their posts before saving them, imagining what these nice people at uwlive could feel when reading here.
VoilÃ*.
Ps : hope my English is not too poor… boring with a post that length…
