The Final Countdown, Part 1: Pictures & Background

You may or may not have heard of the Bowlie Forum. It was one of those Internet forum things, having its origin as the forum for Jeepster, then the record label of popular band Belle & Sebastian. After a while Bowlie cut loose from Jeepster (which in any case went into an undead state), but it retained its roots in B&S and indie fandom. It was an entertaining place to hang out and chitter chatter about stuff, but then the guy who ran it decided that he had enough, and he announced that it was going to end in August this year. Meetups had been a Bowlie thing, and The Final Countdown was to be the final Bowlie get-together, taking place about two weeks before the end. I must confess to having coined the name for this last meet-up, which explains why it was named after a song by LAIBACH. Apart from that I had nothing to do with the event's organisation.

The meetup took place in this pub-club in Brixton, at which Bowlie related bands got to play and other people played records between their sets. We couldn't get B&S themselves, as they are money-grubbing sell-out breadheads (and they have some kind of mysterious best-not-go-there feud with the guy who ran the Bowlie forum); instead we got bands that either had a forum member or two in the line-up or else were judged by the programmer to be the kind of thing we would like.

I will tiresomely go through the bands in future posts, but first I must salute the genius of whichever of the event organisers decided to project every image file ever uploaded to Bowlie onto a screen for a few seconds each. OK, so this led to me seeing many pictures of cats, but it also led to many oh-the-nostalgia moments.

Come back next time for unmissable discussion of the bands who played at this exciting event!

more awesome pictures