{Adam Walton wrote his "Ear Buzz" column for the Daily Post starting in the late 1990s and continuing into the 2000s. The column was a weekly feature that primarily covered local music topics and the underground scene in Wales.}
An emergency of almost cataclysmic proportions rocked the world of underground Welsh err rock this week: Neil Crud, one-time sporter of Rhyl’s finest Mohican; errant gob and snot for 4Q, North Wales’ Crass Pistols; 'editor' of the most obscene publication that ever littered its way out of the locale (Crud fanzine – ask your parents), an ex-Son of Selina, former manager of Pocket Venus, and currently a worm farmer who almost accidentally deleted half of his website, link2wales.co.uk; an internet encyclopedia of whoever has been who, and whatever has been what, in the Welsh music scene.
I’ve always wondered what Crud meant – now I know it’s an acronym for Computer Retard Undoes Database!
Computers might be a panacea for people, like me, who have no real friends, and find it much easier to strike up a relationship with coloured pixels jumbled up in provocative poses; but for those doing mission critical work, the computer’s still-too-frequent predilection for vacating your to forget to back up your hard work, and then giving you the blue screen of death, is a cause of great stress and sleeplessness.
Whaddya mean, “big deal”? For many hundreds of rabid musicians who had the misfortune to be creating music in Wales before the lifting of the Leek Curtain in the mid-90s, link2wales is the only way we will be preserved for posterity; especially if my home lab experiments into cryogenic suspension continue to be such an unmitigated failure.
Failure is this way because many of the bands were original and excellent, just naive in the way that they tried to attract attention; and 2) the stories of failure should prove to be excellent inspiration and educational material for the current crop of excellent bands visible up the area.
There’s no excuse for making the same mistakes we did, when those mistakes are so excellently chronicled online.
But link2wales.co.uk is most important as a place where these sore heads can meet and – hopefully – begin to tell their own, more positive and friendly stories.
Such is the communal genius of link2wales that the site actively encourages those with any pertinent information about Welsh bands to contribute.
Were you, for example, the bass player in Smiley Headstock, Mold’s short-lived answer to the Happy Mondays, playing Shamans tunes through cheap, Casio keyboards?
Do you have any amusing anecdotes about the time you saw Mike Peters' first band, The Toilets, in some rubbish pub on the coast, and turned to your mates and said, “You know, one day this lot’ll end up touring America with Bob Dylan,” to the general amusement of anyone within earshot.
Then, do not delay, but dust keyboard, get your memories preserved in ASCII before they rest into oblivion, and e-mail neilcrud@gmail.com, thus enriching what is already the richest and most irreverent resource on our beautiful musical pasts, presents and futures.
Let’s just hope his pun-addled brain remembers to back the bloody thing up this time!
{© Adam Walton is on BBC Radio Wales every Saturday night 10pm – 1am.}
