Between the last post in this series and this one, the actual 10th anniversary of Freaky Trigger has been and gone. There’s something sadly typical in that, I think.
As ever, if you’d like to simply read the old articles I’ve selected rather than my reminiscences, just click on the tab up top right of your screen, with the robotic gentleman having a fight.
December 1999: With the “Top 100 Of The 90s” forcing me into a regular schedule, I was starting to get more confident – and better – at writing essays. The review of Fight Club I did stands out for its ambition and relative lack of posing. It being a film review, and some months out of date, I probably knew nobody would read it, and so I felt more able to use it as the stage for a statement of intent and belief that I’m basically still holding to. I was too kind to the film, though: now I just remember the crap bits not the exciting ones.
January 2000: The themes in the Fight Club piece are pretty much constant throughout FT’s history, whereas I don’t think I ever followed up this Kraftwerk article and its vaguely Carmodic thoughts on Europe – probably why it still feels fresh to me.
February 2000: MJ Hibbett’s “Are You Local?” is one of the funniest things we’ve ever published and an enduring favourite. Mr Hibbett is currently preparing a theatrical entertainment called Dinosaur Planet and has a new album out in May.
What was I up to at this point? I was starting a blog. Or, as I put it, “Blue Lines is a web-log of sorts. Most of the web-logs I’ve seen have either been diaristic or somehow themed by content: this is neither. It has one rule and one rule only – it is to be made up of notes and short bits I’ve written on the tube, and nothing else.” This remained true for around thirty entries – I got quite adept at writing in my leatherbound notebook on a bumping tube train. After that I quietly dropped the requirement and for the rest of its short but happy life Blue Lines was a general blog running alongside, but separate from, Freaky Trigger. I updated the blessed thing by hand at first – in March I heard about an app called Blogger and decided to test it out with a second blog, which was to prove considerably more successful…