The Belle and Sebastian
The Sinister mailing list started in 1997 as a mailing list about the
band Belle and Sebastian, quickly
became a mailing list about people who like
Belle and Sebastian, and is now at the time of writing I suppose a mailing list
about people with an affection for a mailing list about Belle and Sebastian.
But it's also still about Belle and Sebastian. It's a quieter place these days,
but because it's considered by some to be a good example of the homegrown nature
of communities on the internet in the mid-1990s before corporate music poked
its head in, it's
still stubbornly here. It's also here for the thousands of people who shared their
lives on it in the 1990s and since. It might be the oldest continously-existing
mailing list on the Internet for a band. It used to run on a big scary server with
big fans and scary beeping noises, now it runs on a computer you can hold
in the your palm of your hand. You can still join, you can still read the
archives, you can still post to it.
If you're browsing, interested in the band or interested in independent music history or what the internet was like in 1997, you can find list archives in the link below.
For now you can't subscribe until I fix a cog or two should hoards of people appear at my door demanding its revival, but the archives are still available and you can search them for very important things such as "Mrs Murdoch" and "George Henry Dickie".
For your historical amusement, there's a link to the old webpages below, resplendent with broken links, pointless information and historical anachronisms: the old pages. There's a farcically amusing log of one of the earliest online chats with a band, sheet music, obscure lyrics, a Tigermilks register, and some photos of list members as babies and list members in the 1990s, which from today's perspective is nearly the same thing.
by Honey
