January 9th:
Hello readers! It seems ages since we last spoke – in fact it was last year! (Heh heh, that gag never gets old, even though we’re entering our fifth year now and I think I’ve used that gag every time!) How many AAA albums did you get for Christmas last year? Hmm there weren’t many really were there (see our ‘review of the year’ for which ones you should have got – and what to spend your xmas money on if you’re lucky enough to have any). One thing there was a lot of last year was AAA DVDs: documentaries, concerts, album analysis, you name it, they made it – and we reviewed it (as part of our mammoth 58,000 word blockbuster released on the last day of last year).
So what does this year hold in store? Well we’ve already done the ‘new year predictions’ thing a couple of times already (see http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/news-views-and-music-issue-86-top-ten.html) so we won’t bother doing that again (for the record we got most of it disturbingly right, given how badly the Coalition have behaved in the past year). Truthfully we don’t know what to expect this year but we’re afraid of what might be. My health has been falling apart quite rapidly in the second half of last year and so I apologise in advance if I can’t keep up to the same pace and word count we managed in 2012 (we only missed two issues the whole year, amazingly, our best yet even though healthwise 2012 was probably my worst year). I also fear what hoops the Coalition will have me jumping through now that they’ve decided even those who they themselves have declared too poorly to work have to undertake ‘voluntary’ labour (is it just me or has the word ‘volunteer’ changed overnight, to the point where it now means ‘you have a choice between doing and this and keeping your benefits or starving?!) I’ve also heard that Cameron will be change of the latest G8 global conference: what a joke, he wasn’t even flipping elected! Don’t be surprised if lots of other countries would the world suddenly start exterminating their disabled and unemployed as well...
That’s all threats for the future, however, At the moment the present is looking pretty good. Last year we passed the halfway point of our desire to review and record every single track on every single AAA album, a process that at our current pace (and the AAA current pace of releases) should see us finish somewhere around 2017. I’d hoped to reach 30,000 hits collectively by the end of last year and to my amazement beat it hollow (we passed 40,000 just before posting this article!) We’ve done mighty well recently it seems, not least because of the record amount of comments from ‘Mr/Mrs Anonymous(es)’ on our ‘blogspot’ site and a publicity campaign on Twitter that’s now boosted our last ‘special edition’ to become the second highest viewed post on the site (with ‘Kinda Kinks’ still a nose in front at the time of writing). Thankyou to all, it’s great to see you here. Please stick with us if you can – the journey of discovery behind these AAA albums has been a fascinating process so far and I look forward to uncovering the stories and theories behind everyone’s favourite AAA albums by the time we finish (of course if you hate all the AAA bands then – well – I apologised for wasting your time but then arguably you’ve come to the wrong place!
Actually we were having quite a flood of comments (by our standards anyway) the week over Christmas anyway– in fact we’ve had twice as many this year already as we had across the whole of last year and its not even mid January yet! Thankyou for your comments and yes we do mean to work on having some pictures or photos on here one day (the wwww.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk site is better for that sort of thing by the way), but it’s so flipping complicated – if we ever get to the point where we’re making money/getting great big audiences then we’ll look into solving it. Until then I’m afraid its just a bit too heavy on the budget for us (and the copyright issues behind pictures are a minefield even if I did know how to publish them in the first place!) We did particularly well over Christmas too, which makes sense I guess with more time on people’s hands and darker nights outside – although quite why we should have reached the second highest peak we had all year on Christmas Day is unknown (were your presents really all that bad?!) Anyway, thankyou all – and here’s to even greater success in 2013!
By the way, you may also have noticed an ‘extra’ issue we released at the end of last year, all to do with the world ending on December 21st 2012. That didn’t come to pass (hopefully our alternate reality selves from our last April Fool’s Day issues managed to solve the problem at the last minute!) and yes we do look a bit stupid (though not more than normal – and not as stupid (or dead) as everyone else would have looked if we were right) - but that’s not to say it won’t in the future so we’ll leave the post up for any future Armageddons that might occur (after all, we’ve got David Cameron in charge and out of all the world leaders there’s ever been he’s the one I trust to keep us safe the least).
Oh one other thing, after a lot of debate I’ve decided to end the ‘anniversary’ column from these newsletters. I missed one at the end of last year by accident and as nobody seemed to notice (or care) and as we’ve covered the whole year four times over now already I figured it had probably run its course (I fear I might be obliged to cut some corners anyway somewhere here, given how ill my poor chronic-fatigue filled body still is at the moment). If you want to know whose AAA birthday you share or what events happened on or around your special day then please have a look at any of our past ‘introductions’ between 2009 and now.
In other news, a big thankyou to CITV for having an ‘old school reunion’ weekend that made my Christmas. So many of my old programmes were on for the first time in 20 years and hadn’t aged a bit – it was truly remarkable seeing so many old friends after all this time! In fact all that was missing from my childhood was the first Monkees TV series, The Beatles films and lots and lots of Hollies and Wings albums (something I’m rectifying as I type this...) Anyway I mention this in case you, like me, were of the right age to enjoy it and fancy signing a ‘petition’ to have more of these programmes on our screens (perhaps with their own TV channel?) You can sign it here: http://twitition.com/fh63e#.UOi-gCjl22A.twitter And if that can be such a success then why not more repeats of music-related material on a less narrow view of the music world than VH-1 and a more retro channel than MTV? (a load of the DVDs we covered in our last issue will do – and surely they can’t all be up for copyrihg tissues). Hmm, just a thought...
As ever, please see the link below to visit our ‘Alan’s Album Archives’ newspaper, full of the AAA news stories tweeted or facebooked by the AAA official newsfeeds we follow. Not that there are many this week – everyone from the AAA list must be away for Christmas and the New Year...
http://paper.li/f-1347835090
Finally, please have a lovely, pain-free, trouble-absent, stress-bazookaed new year and let’s hope that justice, humanity and love overcome us one and all – whatever our world leaders do to try and destroy us. We send this to you with much love and with the message that somehow, anyhow, we’ll get through this and come out the other side with the world in a better state than it was in 2012.
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