So, last weekend marked the sixth annual uk.music.guitar national get-together. I’ve been to four of the six and find myself developing an almost complacent expectation that the event will be exciting, amusing, interesting and inspiring in equal measure. A number of external glitches conspired to threaten the very existence of this year’s event, but that just made the success of the whole thing seem even more important than normal.
The focus of the weekend, as ever, was the Saturday evening “Guitar Idol” (named with tongue firmly in cheek), our musically diverse marathon gig where anyone can perform a song of their choosing, backed by an ad hoc band. The only obstacle is the lack of formal rehearsal… you practise your own part and trust the rest to nods, hand signals and the adrenalin of the evening. I don’t think I played particularly well on my “spots” (insufficiently focused practice in the preceding weeks) but that’s no problem. We’re all our own worst critics, and the emphasis is on fun.
As I mentioned this time last year, it’s difficult to describe just what the National (notWigan) means to us. Plenty of online communities have their occasional meatspace manifestations, and each event is, I’m sure, similarly cherished by its loyal attendees. And look at ours… it’s a bunch of people from a Usenet newsgroup! Does anyone still use that dusty old text-only relic from the pre-Myspace days of the Internet?
The truth, of course, is that UKMG is so much more than just a newsgroup. There’s a chatroom, regular offline meet-ups, musical collaborations, a whole range of specialist services and abilities and, most importantly, a whole network of “real life” relationships. Quite simply, it’s a community. And that’s why I find the whole Web 2.0 more exciting than anything I’ve seen since I first started using the Internet back in 1997. A lot of the early excitement faded in the flood of corporate involvement and the one-way artist-fanbase (or vendor-customer) relationship, but the democratic community aspect is coming back. I know from experience what can be achieved with the right mix of online and offline, and the various Web 2.0 technologies have enormous potential for making things even more fun.
There is a lot of stuff here i have been thinking about too. I don’t really think that there can be anything else quite like UKMG. The UK is small enough for us to do it, we play rock music together – loudly and then add to that the usual Usenet meet stuff of food, drink and topical chat. I think what I am getting at here is that the last three are easy, the first two possibly make UKMG one of a kind. I don’t think you’d get quite this atmosphere at comp.sys.pc.linux.applications.debugging.machinecode
Anyway, you played fine, Adrian. We pretty much all did.
Nige.