I will no longer be involved in promoting regular events at Live Lounge after the end of this year. Daniel Allman will be running the shows from January 2010 and I’m sure that he will do a brilliant job.

After a long association I have a great deal of personal gratitude and respect for Flavio Olim, manager of Live Lounge, for his commitment to the establishment of his business as the pre-eminent live music venue in Jersey. I’d also like to thank Justin Vooles, Dave Spars, Dave Findlay, Sara Montalvao, Wilson Nash, James Evans, and Sam Falle for their support and hard work over the last fourteen months.

Perhaps the most important reason I started promoting these events in 2008 was not my enthusiasm for music which is, as anyone who knows me will affirm, very great. I was seeking a form of collective participation and belonging in reaction to a loss of confidence and a growing sense of life without direction. It was the kind of self-preserving instinct that propels one who feels rejected and alone to go where there are friends and like-minded souls in order to feel less alone. By choosing to work with a diverse group of mostly young musicians I was able to achieve something in dedication to one whose life touched mine for a brief while and who brilliantly encourages and cares for the future of her students.

The need to find a new way of being, which has slowly but surely reoriented me, leaves the so-called online social experience feeling distinctly beside the point. Familiarity with the customs of social network websites is a vital tool in a promoter’s kit but I suspect that absorption in those media tends to reduce a person’s vital connection to what is really important. I have for some time been ambivalent with regard to the boons and curses of online society and my personal history of online creativity is strewn with instances of deletion and occultation of traces.

I am a man of letters, not by choice it seems, and so I plan to write when I can. It is my aim to rediscover the complex human pleasures of poetry and story telling. It will be for the printed, bound medium that is never to be lost, lest we all be lost with it, that I intend to focus those efforts.

Here at the end of the shortest decade there ever was, we find ourselves in a surreal world where dreams and actions continually regenerate one another. Let us be kind, and wise, and remember the words of John Cage: Anything can follow anything else (providing nothing is taken as the basis).