Introducing...The Wigan Music Reviews Archive

One of my biggest regrets of 2011 is that music coverage from The LINC pretty much died a slow and sorrowful death.

Not only was there very little new stuff produced last year; the result of my job changing to focus more on web development and social media which robbed me of valuable time I could have spent writing about music, but six years of archived content was practically wiped from the face of the Internet when we moved to our new Content Management System.

Though I was upset about not being able to write much last year, I was even more upset that all that coverage of the local music scene in Wigan would only ever be seen by the handful of people with access to my office computer and vowed that as soon as I could, I’d do something about it.

It was only after reading The Tower, a manifesto from Chris Guillebeau looking at legacy work  that I really got thinking about the legacy Wigan’s bands, and those who wrote about them, have left behind that people would no longer be able to read about. 

Though music reviews probably weren’t what Guillebeau had in mind when he talked about legacy work, I still nonetheless felt that preserving the recent history of Wigan’s music scene was an important enough project to take on.

So I did.

This New Year’s Day, I launched the Wigan Music Reviews archive, featuring reviews, interviews and articles focussing on the local music scene originally published in The LINC Magazine and on LINC Online.



With a wealth of great content from 2004 – 2010, I’ll be posting one new piece in chronological order each Sunday morning until every last piece has been published.

Though it’s early days yet I’m already really proud of this project; chronicling a it does a host of memorable gigs and exciting projects, the demo and albums bands worked so hard to get off the ground and much more besides.

And though I’m supposed to say there’s some great writing on there since most of it will ultimately be mine (and that’s fair enough if you ask me, some of my best writing will be eventually be published on the site), there really is some fantastic writing on the site from others who contributed to The LINC over the years.

Don’t believe me? Take a look for yourself at http://wiganmusicreviews.wordpress.com