Pilrig74 Archive
Pilrig74 website, 2024 © Mark Howitt
Blogging has been around since the late 1990s. The term ‘blog’ - a shortened form of ‘weblog’ ie web log - was coined by web developer (although that underplays his achievements) Peter Merholz. He’s still blogging today on the elegant stripped back peterme.com There are now more than 600 million blogs and 77% of internet users still read them.
I first dipped my toe into the blogging waters in September 2007 when I wrote a review of a Brian Wilson concert at Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre. However, having taken no notes during the evening, I was afterwards unable to write anything of insight on the concert itself, so instead offered up a review of the audience.
Brian Wilson in the studio making Pet Sounds, 1965 © Michael Ochs
There was the halfwit behind me who took advantage of every lull to shout "We love you, Brian", the bloke in front of me who spent the bulk of the show fiddling with his digital camera (as far as I could see he had only managed to take a photo of the pavement outside the theatre), an office Christmas party bouncing about at the front of the stage waving pints of beer at Brian Wilson (that's not going to help his well documented mental problems brought about by the pressure to top Pet Sounds) and countless sad sacks wearing Hawaiian shirts.
Over the following months I refined this style of anti-review, contra-review, call it what you will, reaching a pinnacle when I wrote a review of a revival of William Wycherley’s The Country Wife at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in London without actually attending, or even being in London at the time. In fact all I did was appraise the poster advertising the play.
Patricia Hodge and Toby Stephens in The Country Wife, 2007 © Tristram Kenton
The rest of the advert is just pure unadulterated (but predictable) theatre critic guff. Needless to say David Haig is ONE OF THE GREATEST COMIC ACTORS OF HIS GENERATION and Toby Stephens is A TOUR DE FORCE. Overall the play is SHOCKINGLY GOOD (which suggests that the Sunday Times critic had particularly low expectations) and although I do not doubt that Patricia Hodge is SIMPLY DELICIOUS it is hard to believe that she could ever trump her performance of almost 30 years ago as Phyllida Erskine-Brown in Rumpole of the Bailey.
It’s possible that subconsciously I had been influenced by the then recently published English translation of Pierre Bayard’s book How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, although naturally I hadn’t read it.
However I began to realise that while this was mildly amusing (to me, if not to anyone else among the 77% of internet users who read blogs) the joke wore thin quickly. So instead, I started to write about concerts that I’d been to, films that I’d seen, books that I’d read, TV shows that I’d watched, music that I’d listened to and plays that I’d been to. And I wrote as best I could, as an accountant more used to working with spreadsheets and with no journalistic training.
From 2007 to 2022 I wrote over 600 articles and published them on my blog, the Pilrig 74 Arts Review. These covered theatre (including dozens of productions at Edinburgh’s Traverse and Lyceum), music (mainly, although not exclusively Dexys Midnight Runners, Prefab Sprout and Morrissey), cinema, books, and TV (for several years I was obsessed with Hollyoaks and in 2010 irritated by an advert for Calgon). But I also wrote about being snowed in, George Osbourne, running shoes, the number 47 bus, Subbuteo Angling and curtains. As E.A. Bucchianeri wrote in her 2011 novel Brushstrokes of a Gadfly (again, I’ve not read it), “Art is in the eye of the beholder, and everyone will have their own interpretation”.
Dexys Midnight Runners, Birmingham, 1980 © David Corio
Pilrig74 has been floating about in the ether unloved for a couple of years. I’ve spent the last week reviewing 15 years worth of reviews and selecting 70 or so which I have curated in an archive on this site, link here and at the top of this page. To allay any fears, only two Dexys articles made the cut (although similar to a nut allergy warning, other reviews “may contain references to Dexys”) and I managed to limit myself to three Hollyoaks pieces. The critique of the Calgon advert survives too.
Whether my writing has improved since the Pilrig74 days is not for me to judge, but, just as with that review of the Brian Wilson concert, I’m still drawn to the peripherpy of subjects rather than the heart of the matter. There are plenty websites out there that actually review films / concerts / plays and might even manage to name the actors / songs with a degree of accuracy. Surely of far more interest is …
… the woman in the row in which I was sitting who, the moment the lights went down at the end of the play got up, forced everyone to stand so that she could get out before the curtain call. There was little sympathy from anyone when she tripped and fell on her arse into the row in front.
As it transpired the first article I got published - that is, on a website not run by me - was about a concert that I didn’t go to. In August 1982 The Associates were scheduled to play Edinburgh’s Assembly Rooms. My friends and I had tickets but on the evening of the concert, guitarist Alan Rankine walked out, leaving singer Billy Mackenzie no option but to cancel the show. I wrote a piece about it shortly after finishing work as an accountant last summer, yes a mere 41 years after the non-event, and to my delight Bella Caledonia published it.
Anyway, 17 years after I started it, the time has come to retire the Pilrig 74 Arts Review. It was fun while it lasted. Unlike How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read and Brushstrokes of a Gadfly, I did actually read it all.