Louder Than War turns 15 with a live festival at the Manchester Academy. Founder John Robb reflects on the site’s DIY roots and the culture that keeps it loud.
Louder Than War and the Oxford Road Corridor are entwined. That’s why our Louder Than War Live festival, which celebrates our 15th year as one of the UK’s leading music and culture websites, is at Manchester Academy and at the heart of music and Manchester. It feels perfect that a great bill of bands we love like Sea Power, Pale Blue Eyes, Benefits, Evil Blizzard, Immersion, and many others will play across Academy stages on Saturday 14th March.
It will be a day of joy, great music, and a party to celebrate our existence and the people that have been sharing our trip. And, yes, of course it will be just off that long and winding road with its million stories from Marx to Madchester, from splitting the atom to forging Oasis, from the world’s first computer to the latest new band that have all made it the main artery for Manchester culture. This is a road where the ebb and flow of music that changed the world has been at the heart and soul of the sound and vision for decades.
On many nights it’s the Mancunian Sunset Strip without the warmth and plastic surgery glamour, but with its own unique soundtrack. Oxford Road is the main strip of Manchester music and culture. From Johnny Roadhouse to Manchester Academy and to all the venues like Deaf Institute or Gorilla, or the Ritz, that lie just off. It’s always been moving away from the pulsebeat, and it’s here on a road that I’m on every day that the Louder Than War music and culture website was conceived 15 years ago.
In the eighties music was documented mainly by London based inkies. Northern writers were always ‘stringers’ or ’freelancers’, and outsiders covering the ‘Manchester scene’, and were treated like second-rate writers because they didn’t live in London. The journalism, like music, was then looked on as an appendage to the big city, even if frequently Manchester was at the front of the pack.
The Internet boom shifted and changed everything. No longer was music media a cumbersome dinosaur that needed big London offices, huge printers and distribution. Everything could now be documented wherever you were, and as the technology zipped further forward, you could virtually run an international music website on your phone sat in HOME or in a cafe on Oxford Road.
You didn’t have to be in London. You didn’t have to be anywhere. You just had to be plugged into the culture and the now, and all that culture was on the doorstep locally and internationally as everyone came here to Manchester and the Corridor. Music was everywhere all at once, and you could tap in anywhere in the digital age without anyone’s permission, and this freedom was the basic premise of Louder Than War when it started, and this only increased rapidly over the years.
In many ways the website is a digital fanzine. I grew up in the punk days with Xerox zines, and they were wonderful captures of energy and art and wild graphics but were limited by the primitive distribution of how many gigs you could take a plastic bag full of zines around to sell. It was a curious part of those times wandering up and down the bar at various venues selling zines and their crazed missives about music and culture but they were perfect snapshots of their time and the democratisation of media and art away from the few and back to the many and Louder Than War still likes to reflect that.
We are a fan site written by and for the fans. We want the words to smell of venues and leap out high decibels at you. We want the holy words to be written by the people involved in the culture and we want the writers to do more than just document. Writers are now also connectors. They join the dots from bands to venues to managers and get new bands on their way and celebrate old bands who still burn.
We also celebrate the photographic image, and I would say that we have the best team of photographers on any music website. I’m often astonished about how good the photos look and that’s down to Melanie Smith, a photographer who is also our photos editor. She has a brilliant eye for a shot and is out most nights documenting the images that capture the magic of performance, and she applies this TV eye to her team of photographers. This is cool because we believe the image and the words are equally important. Music is a quicksilver culture and not always easy to capture but often the image can say everything, and the words can unpack the moment and that is one of the key fundamentals to the site.
We may exist within the DIY ethics of punk, but we have a huge readership. We are not part of any corporate machine or huge media juggernaut. And we prove that you can have a loud game-changing voice by being passionate and immersed in the culture.
Everything Louder Than War has achieved has been off our own backs, and by the good people that work in whatever way towards the common good of the site. Like another editor, Nigel Carr who has got the site’s SEO so on point that we often beat media giants like The Guardian and the NME in Google searches and get as many readers for our pieces…
Guerrilla word-fare! We move like ninjas at our own speed. This is the new media world – it’s not magazines in shops that hardly exist anymore. Media now hums zips and zaps in the air and is moving fast and furious and invisible across the ether and into phones and laptops. It’s fast and of the moment like all best pop culture and once read it then sits there in the background like a permanent record of the times we live in; like a digital Daniel Defoe diarising the spinning out of control 21st century and its ever fascinating soundtrack just like Oxford Road the ever changing backdrop to the musical adventure.
The story, of course, is not over and the next 15 years will be a fascinating ride, and we will be there in one form or other embracing the sound and the vision and also the technology to document the future as it comes at us…
