A Museum Of Scottish Rock Music?
Isn't this bizarre? I get this very odd feeling of deja-vu but here we are again. Back in the early 1990s, Perth & Kinross District Council, having hit a brick wall with the idea of a Scottish Cinema archive/research centre based in Perth's Art Deco cinema, had money to burn from the end of some regional funding and they came up with a great idea.
It was Rockmine, stick it in the building emptied by a publicly funded library that was about to move to a new venue bankrolled by a major whisky company - and make it a visitor centre/archive.
According to the media, a line of rock celebs said it was a great idea. There was funding, there was impetus - but I thought it was a pipe dream that no-one had seriously thought through. With 80% funding in place, I said, "No".
Now, here we are with a new idea to do exactly the same thing.
My questions are very simple - why are the doing it now?
And why didn't anyone contact me?
Rockmine is Europe's largest independent rock music archive. It's a vast one-stop resource for publishing, radio, TV, film and the press but also fans. Built around four enormous collections: the written word, ephemera/memorabilia, audio and video. Click the link above to get a feel for the size of it.
The Rock Mall is now focussing on museum grade items - promo photos, press packs and rock film memorabilia. Other items of memorabilia can be found on my
eBay shop.
Today's fake news is tomorrow's fake history. Rock music is full of legends but that isn't good enough for Rockmine. For more than 30 years, I've gone behind the myths to uncover what really happened. I've carefully deconstructed stories that could have cost millions if published to reveal the truth. Sometimes, however, the truth is even stranger; like the KGB plot to kill Elvis.
Rockmine Publishing (now called Rockmine Books) currently has one publication, "Rock and Pop on Television". It runs to 1,926 pages in ePub format and features more than 28,900 entries, 50,000 song titles and 637,000 words. Taking the form of a daily almanac, it's also fully searchable by show, presenter, artist/group and song title.
Although I've updated it to more than 50,000 entries it will not be available as a new edition. It will be used purely by me for research for TV and media productions. Instead, a new publication titled, "I Fought The Law" will be available later in 2021. Again, it takes the form of a daily almanac listing arrests, court cases, lawsuits and even jail time involving musicians over the last 6 decades.
The intention has always been to make Rockmine TV an aggregator for any rock music related video. The idea was you'd find all the Eurovision Song Contest Winners, all the U.K. Number One singles, a selection of Rock Festivals plus various other topics, genres and styles in one place.
