Nuggets from CLUAS.com's first decade
This year CLUAS.com is celebrating its 10th anniversary, making us Ireland's longest running music website. Over our first 10 years a community of over 130 different writers have published over 1500 high quality gig and album reviews, feature articles, interviews and blog entries. From this extensive archive we have picked out 10 'archive nuggets', one for each year of our operations, showing the diversity and quality of what our community has contributed over the years. The full list of 10 'nuggets' is provided below. We want to expand this initial list with other nifty articles suggested by our readers, so contact us with details of what you think should be added!
In our first decade CLUAS has not only focused on delivering high quality content to our readers. We also - thanks to a slavish commitment to keeping our pages lean and mean - have ensured our articles can be downloaded faster than any other leading Irish music website. The speediness of our website is also helped by our commitment to W3C standards. The vast majority of our web pages are W3C compliant and, indeed, every nugget listed below is fully complaint to W3C's HTML 4.01 standard.
The articles chosen so far, one for each year...
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1999 - 'The eMusic Market', written by Gordon McConnell it focuses on how the internet could change the music industry. Boy was he on the money, years before any of us had heard of an iPod or of Napster.
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2000 - 'Rock Criticism: Getting it Right', written by Mark Godfrey. A thought provoking reflection on the art of rock criticism.
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2001 - Early career profile of Damien Rice, written by Sinead Ward. This insightful profile was written before Damien broke internationally with the release of his debut album 'O'. This profile continues to attract hundreds of visits every month, it being linked to from Damien Rice's Wikipedia page.
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2002 - Interview with Rodrigo y Gabriela, by Cormac Looney. As with Damien Rice's profile, this interview was published before Rodrigo y Gabriela's career took off overseas. It too continues to attract considerable visits every month to the article from Wikipedia.
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2003 - Witnness 2003, a comprehensive review by Brian Kelly of the 2 days of what transpired to be the last ever Witnness festival (in 2004 it was rebranded as Oxegen when Heineken stepped into the sponsor shoes).
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2004 - The CLUAS Reviews of Erin McKeown's album 'Grand'. There was the positive review of the album (by Cormac Looney) and the entertainingly negative review (by Jules Jackson). These two reviews being the finest manifestations of what became affectionately known, around these parts at least, as the 'McKeown wars'.
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2005- Michael Jackson: demon or demonised? Or both?, written by Aidan Curran. Four years on this is still a great read, especially in the light of his recent death. Indeed the day after Michael Jackson died the CLUAS website saw an immediate surge of traffic as thousands visited CLUAS.com to read this very article.
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2006 - Review of Neosupervital's debut album, written by Doctor Binokular. The famously compelling review, complete with pie charts that compare the angst of Neosupervital with the angst of the reviewer. As you do.
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2007 - REM live in the Olympia, by Michael O'Hara. Possibly the definitive review of any of REM's performances during their 2007 Olympia residency. Even the official REM website linked to it.
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2008 - A comprehensive guide to recording an album, written by Andy Knightly (the guide is spread over 4 parts).