I have published a blog on and off for about eighteen years now and as you might imagine, my life has changed considerably during that time.
I started Northern Stories in 2009 as a place to write about my day-to-day musical activities. At the time, those consisted of putting on gigs in local venues, doing a bit of DJing and playing in bands. Like many people writing about their own activities, I had a tendency to overshare.
There was quite a lot of drama, particularly during the first few years. There were also some very opinionated and self-indulgent entries, along with sections documenting past projects in frankly mundane levels of detail. Looking back now, parts of the music and venues sections can read a little like a “look what I’ve done” CV.
The bands never stopped but the venue activities and DJing gradually did. By around 2016 I had moved out of the city centre and stepped back from the local music scene, or at least that particular part of it.
During Covid, I left Facebook completely and immersed myself in the world of digital privacy. That naturally led me to think more carefully about how much I posted online. I unpublished quite a few older entries and began to feel somewhat embarrassed by the person I appeared to have been.
I decided that I would only write when I genuinely felt I had something to say. Much of what I did write concerned my band Dawn of Elysium, so it made more sense for those articles to appear on the band’s own website.
I eventually returned to Facebook because networking for and with the band was proving difficult without it. By then though, my outlook had changed. I no longer took myself quite so seriously and I certainly did not feel the same need to document everything I was doing.
A little later, my interests expanded into homelabs and self-hosting. Inevitably, I began looking again at Northern Stories with thoughts of migrating it, redesigning it and bringing it onto my own server. I had barely touched the site for years but a handful of people still told me that they had enjoyed reading it.
For all that I found some of it cringeworthy, Northern Stories had become a document of my own history and, to some extent, the Bradford music scene around me at the time. I wanted to preserve that. I was simply no longer happy with the way it was presented.
The more I thought about relaunching it, the more it began to feel like an albatross.
I loved the idea of creating an online space that belonged to me and existed away from the noise of social media. The difficulty was that the person who had written Northern Stories was no longer quite the person I had become.
When I started the site, I felt as though I had something to prove. I was almost desperate for people to know that I had a voice and that I had done these things. I am older now and my perspective has changed. I am still proud of much of what I have done but I no longer feel the same need to present it as evidence.
Eventually, I realised that I did still want a personal website. I just did not want to rebuild Northern Stories.
That led to Outpost 10.
Outpost 10 is not intended to erase the past or pretend that Northern Stories never happened. Some of the stories from here will undoubtedly find their way over there in time, although perhaps with a little more perspective and rather less unnecessary detail. The music projects remain an important part of my life and I have already begun revisiting them through a series of more personal chapters.
There will also be writing about music technology, recording, self-hosting and whatever else happens to interest me. There is no content strategy, monetisation plan or attempt to become an influencer. It is simply my own little corner of the internet.
Northern Stories will remain online as an archive for now but all new writing will appear at:
Some of you have followed my ramblings here for a remarkably long time. I remain genuinely touched that anybody found them worth reading and I hope you might join me at the new outpost.
Northern Stories 