Didn't Want To Have To Do It ...

Your Heart Out is I guess what you would call a fanzine. A music fanzine. Created by fans. For fans. For fans of all sorts of music. For people who were increasingly frustrated about what was out there to read about music. Too much classification. Too much specialisation. And that's being generous.

It was also about wanting to give something back to the wider musical community. So many people are using the web to share their passion and enthusiasms. While you can debate endlessly the whys and wherefores of easy access to just about anything, there is something liberating about being able to hear or learn about music that was hitherto the preserve of a lucky few. We liked the old Johnny Rotten line about music being for listening to, not for shutting away in a cupboard.

Interestingly the proliferation of music being posted on the web coincided with a decline in the quality of writing about music. There was a sense too that the ease of blogging was distracting from the creation of structured writing.

So for those and various other reasons Your Heart Out was started. The idea was to produce something in pdf format that could be downloaded free, and either read onscreen or printed off and read on the go. I am not a fan of reading detailed documents on a PC, and like sitting in an armchair with something to be read.

The hope was that by producing it in pdf format that by sending it to 20 people they would pass it on to 20 people who would then pass the link on to 20 other people, and world domination would be there for the taking. Life is never straight forward though, and these are too-much-trouble troubled times.

The idea of Your Heart Out being rootless, not hosted anywhere specific, was appealing. Friends and comrades did help posting recommendations. We also started a MySpace page to help spread the word, and provide easy links to some of the music we were writing about.

The next step was to set up an archive here where all our editions could be accessed easily.

And now we've given in to the temptation to start this site. As Oscar Wilde said ...