About
Brief Autobiography
You can email me at Thomasmj99@aol.com
My Name is Thomas, I am from a battlefield in Blighty and I study English and Creative writing at Bangor University. My main musical intrests are pop and Alternative but I listen to just about every genre going and will happily write about any. My favourite song of all time is ‘I want you Back’ by The Jackson 5 because It is THE perfect song. ‘Off The Wall’ by Michael Jackson and ‘Revolver’ by The Beatles are my two favourite albums.
My ambition in life is to write, much like I am doing now, whether it be for a newspaper, magazine, blog, website, book etc I don’t really mind, and I dont really mind if I’m paid for it cos I’ll probably get a ‘proper job’ as well once I leave uni - maybe full time journalism or teaching. I have dreamed of writing for Mojo since I was 12 though…
How I review
I will try to review as many new albums as I can but I will only review a record after I have heard it enough times to form a confident assesment. I probably won’t review older albums in my collection because if I did one I would have to do them all and that would take forever. However occasionally I will do a ‘classic album’ review, which will represent some of my favourite all timers.
The albums will be rated from 1 to 10, and the scores will reflect how well I think the artist has achieved what they wanted to achieve and how much I enjoyed it. I will try and be objective to an extent but ultimately total objectivity is neither possible nor desirable and the overall score shall reflect my opinion at the end of the day. No album is completely perfect so a mark of Ten will be only given to albums I think are as close to perfect as is possible, albums that are fully realized, well executed, will have a great impact and shall stand the test of time. 1 is the other end of the scale, an album with no redeeming features that I can spot. 5 is the halfway point and will be given to albums I think are completely average, neither good nor bad.
About Blog
Right, so this is my first post in my new blog. Firstly I don’t often read blogs – I find them quite pretentious, often arrogant and almost always un-intresting; I promise that this blog will be none of those things. Nonetheless I am a writer, perhaps one day a journalist, and so I have been advised by many a university lecturer and many an online guide that a blog can be a very useful tool and a good way of building a habbit for writing reguarly. So as I have plenty of time over the Summer, I thought why not!
This will be primarily a blog about music, music journalism and perhaps one or two other things as well. I have been writing and reading music Journalism since aged ten when I wondered into a book shop in cromer and came out with the Guinness book of hit singles – a music lover’s bible. I spent years stuck to it, fascinated by the thousands of artists, most of whom I wouldn’t hear for years. About 2 years later I started picking up magazines such as Mojo and reading classic writers such as Lester Bangs and Cameron Corwe. Through this I started to develop my own listening tastes.
My main intrest is pop music and alternative/indie, but I listen to everything from Metal to doo wop, Punk to jazz. This will be a blog about old bands and new bands, popular music and obscure music. But I suppose I can talk about that later on. This isn’t a blog about me, It’s about music…..and so…..
