So a few days ago, completely without fanfare, this blog had it’s fifth birthday.

It was all the way back in February 2006 that I first decided to put out a music blog.  Back then, it seemed to be the thing that everyone was doing.  My own motivation was rather more personal: I’d recently gone through a break-up and wanted something to throw myself into.  It rapidly became more than that though.  It grew to a fair size, was assimilated somewhat into the ecosystem of music blogs and gained a bit of a recognition of press via places like The Guardian and even the BBC.

That blog is not the same blog as it is today.  The numbers pretty much fell off of a cliff when I stopped posting less than legal songs, relying only on what was legally distributed.  Which I expected, but what I didn’t expect is that they would never recover.  Numbers stagnated, and due to a number of reasons through 2007/2008, my interest waned somewhat, leading to a more sporadic posting pattern than the original near daily updates.

Somewhere in the middle of this, I found myself becoming more and more at home within the indiepop scene, and this started making up the majority of what I wrote about, and still remains that way today.  Now I don’t know how familiar you are with this scene, but it’s not exactly large.  Indiepop drove the numbers even lower, but honestly, by this stage I was perfectly fine with that.  I was writing about music that genuinely excited me, and if it’s only to a small audience, that’s absolutely fine.  That’s the nature of the scene, and being part of it at all is a lovely thing.

It’s kind of funny looking back on some of those earliest artists that I wrote about.  Some of them have gone on to great success.  The Los Campesinos! demo we all raved about set the tone for three stunning albums and their growth as a remarkable live band.  Johnny Foreigner went from recordings that sounded like they were put together in a dustbin and being first on at the Dublin Castle to being hands down one of the best British bands around.  Kate Nash was someone I wrote about a lot in the past, and though she went from superb songwriter to mainstream hit factory, it was still nice to see.  More recently championed bands like Allo Darlin’ and The Pains of Being Pure at Heart have gone from strength to strength.

On the other hand, a lot of those early bands have sadly fallen by the wayside too.  The Young Republic, the first band I ever covered, recently announced that they were no longer functioning as an active band.  Hartley Goldstein, the second artist covered, never released anything further and walked away from music altogether.  One of my absolute favourites, 4 or 5 Magicians, recently called it a day after doing their thing for five years without ever obtaining the success that they deserved.

I’m not sure what the future holds for Another Form of Relief.  I still like doing this, but it’s no longer the full-on venture that it once was.  I’ll always be writing about bits and pieces that I like, but I don’t feel obliged to follow a schedule, or find the “next big thing” anymore.  My interests within music have evolved over the years too.  The more I find myself involved in the indiepop scene, the more I want to explore new ventures like putting out records and putting on gigs, particularly on a local level.  How feasible these things are, I don’t know, but it’s something I’m keen to discover.  There’s also something a little archaic about a blog these days too.  So much of what I would have spun into full posts (odd Youtube finds, announcements of new singles etc.) is now just thrown out on the AFoR Twitter, so you’d do just as well following there as following here.  Still, there are some interesting things coming up (I want to explore those 2006 bands and what happened to them in more detail) as well as some new stuff I want to push upon you, so I do hope you’ll keep reading, whatever the next five years might bring..