The Seven Year Pitch (A Much Belated Update)

Greetings readers, I hope you've been well. It had been a good 7 years since my last update on "Rock In The Fine City". In the hiatus, I really intended to just let the blog rest on its laurels. This was fine, until two days ago, when I happened to surf this site again and was notified that all my files from Photobucket (the third party host for the images on this blog) had been removed. This was the state of blogging during early '00, on an archaic html only platform formerly known as Blogspot.com (now Blogger of course) with no image hostings. I then tried to find the stored images through Google Images and realized that there were drastically rendered into very low resolutions. Left with no other options, I've painstakingly salvaged the blog by replacing those old Photobucket images with pictures of my LPs and CDs I snapped on my iPhone over the past day or so.

Many of the original images on the blog, however cannot be found anymore. Most of the images (especially of band photos) were from my demo tapes and old magazines which were no longer in possession, and also some CDs (Band of Slaves, Kelvin Tan and the very forgettable Starfish N Coffee- UPDATE: my friend Arthur supplied me a new Starfish N Coffee scan!) were traded/given/sold away. Because of that, some of the reviews and sections (like the Unsung Heroes) no longer have image features. Some sections were even removed (like Sepia Memories and Hall of Fame) because they were too heavily reliant on images. I have also decided not to have small stock images on the blog anymore, because all the html codes were on template (an archaic system I said) and it is too troublesome to incorporate these images. As a result, the blog now has become a lot less graphic intensive.

To compensate that, I've created a "Singapore Music Gallery" section featuring many of the albums (and more) in their photographic glory. I believe this will be of great interest to many readers, who would like to have a look at some of the key albums from the scene. Also, nice photos of actual albums now adorn the reviews instead of some shoddy coverart image. In the process, I have also did a fair bit of minor edit on the reviews.

In case you're wondering what I've been up to for the past 7 years, I've actually done alot (writing books, etc on). Instead of reviewing music, I've also made some music. Here are some of my works:

Drakar Taso     :     Modulus     :     Regulus      :     Les Illuminés

Unbeknownst to most readers here, I actually ran an alternate blog on another scene in Singapore: the Xinyao movement (新谣; Singaporean Chinese Folk Pop, predominantly in the '80s). This is really more of a gallery than a writeup of any sort, featuring rare vinyls, tapes and other material I used to have in my collection. The blog, started from 2012 and ended in 2015. UPDATE: I started updating again in 2018. Please do check it out here: The Xinyao Gallery.

Seven years have passed; lots of positive things have happened to Singapore music (check out Bandcamp). "Rockinthefinecity" on the other hand will stay where it is, on a refurbished archaic platform in the far flung corner of the world wide web, archived and serve as a little info hub for those people who still care about the "Singapore music scene of '80s-'90s". That's about it, farewell.