The site is back

I used to have a Spacemen 3 site at this address which I launched back in the late 90s. Then around 2013, something odd happened – I started to get mountains of rejected emails, all of which were obvious spam that claimed to have been sent by me in the first place. I assumed that someone had been using my email address as a fake “From” or “Reply to”, but it turned out that someone had hacked the site and was using my mail server to pump out unwanted emails. My internet host shut my site down as a precaution, and despite the fact that they also sent me a long list of instructions as to what to do to get it back up again, I never got around to it.

Before I started my site, there was a great one run by Chris Barrus. This logo may be familiar to some of you.

I know I wasn’t the only one that would visit this site frequently. It was hard to come by information about the band in those days, and Chris’ site was a great source of information and news back then. If you’re reading – thanks Chris, I don’t know if you appreciated how much it meant to a lot of us.

My old site overlapped with Chris’ for a while, and I tried not to duplicate his content. I didn’t bother with a discography, for example, since he already had a perfectly good one. What I did have was a colour scheme that made no concession to readability – blue text on a red background. You’d come away from reading a page with the first stirrings of a headache. I did eventually tone that down, but I never got rid of the version of the logo that I knocked up during the first days when I had access to a copy of Photoshop. Anyone who knows their way around Photoshop or similar will recognise it as the work of someone who has just discovered gradient filters for the first time.

That version of the logo has taken on a life of its own. I’ve seen it turn up as people’s forum avatars, on YouTube videos… it even made it into print in a Spanish music magazine in 2010. Sorry, pro-designers, I won’t use it again.

Chris’ site is no longer there, and with mine down as well, I have thought it a shame that there was no one place where people could come to find out about the band. So I’ve finally got something back together. There wasn’t a lot here to start with, but I’ve just added the page about Spacemen 3 gigs, which is more detailed and hopefully more accurate than the one on my old site. I’m sure there are still mistakes and things missing, but I’m hoping I’ll be told about them.

It’s good to be back.