A New Journey...Sounds Good!

Join me as I start on new adventures

Hi, I’m Simon. I’ve been writing about music and culture for 20 years or so. There was the student-rag phase and a monthly column in one of Wellington’s free weekly community papers. There was a long run as a music reviewer for The Dominion Post and inside that nearly nine years of daily blogging for Stuff.co.nz.

I started my own site - Off The Tracks - still going…there’s a weekly podcast and I share my creative writing as well as reviews and other things.

But it’s not just music that drives me. Books, film, TV, podcasts, magazines - it all sounds good to me. I’m obsessed with working through full discographies, complete catalogues of a filmmaker, finding out whatever I can about pop-cultural icons and perhaps more interestingly the figures that slipped through the cracks, the moments and players forgotten to time.

I’m starting a new gig - here at Substack. A newsletter for you - three times a week is the aim:

One post about music

One post about books/literature/writing

One post about film/TV

I’ll share my passion with you. You’ll tell me the things you want to read, the type of music you’d like to know more about, the cultural passions that drive you. We’ll have chats about this, we’ll build a community. I grew a passionate and vital community when Stuff was all about the blogs a decade ago, I carried a lot of that and built on it through social media and to my own site. But the trolls will always follow. And so comments were turned off and so were some readers. Let’s get that back - only the things that sound good, only the truth; just the right distractions for your ears and eyes and heart and soul.

Sounds good?

I reckon…