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It was 1993 and I was homeless, living in a squat, working for bands by selling T-shirts at their gigs - I'd hitch hike to where they played to get paid £20 for
by buro9 6y ago
It was 1993 and I was homeless, living in a squat, working for bands by selling T-shirts at their gigs - I'd hitch hike to where they played to get paid £20 for the night before sleeping rough nearby. During this I collected names and addresses of their fans so that if the bands got new T-shirts there was the potential to contact the fans and let them know.
One of the bands - Elastica - wanted to shoot a music video and needed 100 fans to be in London in 2 weeks time... the band asked me if I could send a letter, I had 2,000 names and addresses and I got a few friends to volunteer and we hand-wrote 2k envelopes in 5 days and posted them with a phone number to call if you wanted to be in the video... then we went to the management company and manned the phone. They got their 100 fans and had a waiting list of another 200.
The band management company asked how we did this and whether they could put us on a retainer to do it in future as they had big plans for another band - Blur - and I pointed out that it was infeasible to write so many envelopes so often. But I believed a computer could do this, so if they bought me a computer and covered postage and packing, I would build a way to keep in touch with the fans of their acts.
They bought me an IBM 30386 and I had it in the upstairs of the squat. There was a hole in the roof so this part of the room was covered in tarp, and we stole the power from another loft as the hole in the roof granted crawlway access to other lofts. I had never used a computer before as I came from poverty, but I got a book from a library, a reference book on basic, and used that to programme a simple database based on text files, with index text files that I could then mail merge into envelope labels. Scaled that slowly up to be a full database (single user of course), and then a stock control system as staying in touch with fans meant we expanded into selling T-shirts mail order - which produced a surprising amount of revenue.
That was the start... and by then it was 1994 and a lot of the bands that were nothing were about to be something.
- shimmmaz 6y agoThanks for that. What a great story. Please update if you will be writing a longer version.
- phist_mcgee 6y agoWow. Please share anymore stories if you have them, this was a fantastic read :)
- plant99 6y agoYou human, are inspiring!
- forinti 6y agoThere might be a book in there.
- mabbo 6y agoI'd watch a film of this story.
- jacquesm 6y agoThat's a fantastic story, really. Thank you. Please do write up a long form of this and post it somewhere where it will last, so it can inspire others. If there ever was a 'hustle' story on HN this is it, much better than wanna-be growth-hackers and marketeers who are mostly selling themselves rather than their accomplishments.
- fiftyacorn 6y agoWas Damon Albarn was Justine frishman of elasticas boyfriend at the time? I remember Dave rowntree of blur also wrote some Linux drivers
- buro9 6y agoYes. And Damon used to come to the Elastica gigs, but because Parklife had suddenly made them mega famous he always had to sneak in the rear doors of venues or climb drain pipes to get into dressing rooms to be with Justine. Dave did graphic design and 3d work as a hobby but this was much later.
- atmosx 6y agoHaha, amazing!
- garymoon 6y agoSuch a story! this is very inspiring and I would like to read what happened next!
- hankmander 6y agoHow could you stop there? I would continue reading this story for the rest of the day.
- nvr219 6y agoHe was going to keep writing but the loftmate unplugged his power.
- mattl 6y agoI think you may have sent me a letter.
- fpig 6y agoWow, that's an incredible story! Write more please!
- ArtWomb 6y agoTotal Legend! Honestly, I listen to loads of British bands circa 1990-1994. And from Stone Roses at Spike Island 1990 to Oasis first gig at Glastonbury in 1994, there is a veritable time capsule of those epic days on YouTube. I concur with the sentiment here that if you ever wanted to Kickstart a documentary I believe the response would be tremendous ;)
- holtkam2 6y agoThis was the best post I’ve ever read on HN. I hope you write more!
- Kosirich 6y agoThis should be in the top HN news article. Thank you for brightening my day after getting some shitty news.
- axetheone 6y agoThis one of the best stories/things I've ever read here in Hacker News and I don't say this lightly. Really amazing and inspiring story! :D