I launched clicks-and-klangs.com around 1999 as a place for me and similarly minded people to write about adventurous music in an accessible way. I’d been editing a Captain Beefheart fan site for a year or so and wanted somewhere that I could go a bit further than Captain Beefheart and cover a wider range of music [side debate: does any other music go further than Captain Beefheart?].

I produced a monthly issue with extended special features focussing on artists such as Faust and John Fahey, and a weekly streaming radio show.

It felt pioneering and especially exciting when you get to interview one of your lifelong heroes (Howe Gelb) but it was hard work and the realities of family, paid work and not being arsed anymore kicked in a few years later. In 2003 I left a parting note:

Updates have been out of the question ever since I became a father at the end of 2002 and my life has been taken over with nappies and pureed parsnip. Consequently Clicks and Klangs has been put on the back-burner for a while.

At the time of writing I have approximately 18 years until young Reuben leaves home and 34 years until I retire. Sometime between those two events an all-new Clicks and Klangs will be launched to pick up exactly where the old one left off.

And who’d have thought that it would indeed return 23 years later, albeit not exactly where the old one left off?

I lost the domain to a generic shopping / spam site for a couple of decades, always regretfully as I was fond of the name and of that period in my life. But now, in a move of interest to absolutely no one but me, it’s back, and this time it’s personal.

It’s now a portfolio of my photography, short films set to favourite tunes, sketches and reminiscences, and an outlet to sell prints of some of my favourite photographs.

It’s an attempt to step back to those pre-social media days when people had lovingly maintained niche home pages and the internet looked like a very different place.

I hope you enjoy some of it ;o)