Wednesday, July 05, 2006
A fake band - nine years on
It all started as a joke between friends on holiday, nine years ago this month - and three years since we decided the joke wasn't funny anymore, there are still footprints all over the web.
Alcohol intake was part of the curriculum on the night my friend and I decided we'd pretend to be in a rock band. Like thousands before us ... and many since, except that we took it a bit further. After a few days the band had a name, Erdbeerseestern (which I'm not even going to try and explain) and a record label, Beed (ditto) followed shortly thereafter.
After a website lurking on user pages somewhere on Pipex, the band finally got its own domain, www.ebss.de, in 1999. Thereafter the site was the perfect outlet for our surplus creative talents: by mid-2003 there were 30-plus pages, covering a back catalog of 16 albums and as many singles, complete with artwork and lyrics. We even had a blog. Every song was an in-joke between a couple of friends who had grown up together in the same village, and then grown apart: by 1999 we were living on different continents, and we'd both left our home country, probably for good in both cases.
To make the lyrics more obscure, and because it was funny, we enlisted the help of internet translation engines - translating from English to another language, occasionally then into a third language, and then back into English. We'd then have trouble making sense of the lyrics ourselves, and can hardly imagine that anyone else in the world would get it.
Although we're not sure if anyone believed us or not, ebss made it into lots of directories listing alternative rock bands, and there are still 80-plus results showing up today in Google. For a few glorious days in 2003, our single Roof Rafters was the first result returned by MSN's search engine for a search on those words, and the site was topping 100 hits a day.
But all good things come to an end. We'd taken it to the max. There were no lucrative reunion tours to keep the band going, so we broke up ebss in October 2003, with a final in-joke ("it's not funy anymore", deliberate spelling). The site disappeared for good in February 2004, when the hosting ISP went broke, with the very last entry (plus many earlier ones) preserved for all time in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. So we were as surprised as the next air guitarist when someone in Poland took over and put up a site that was even more wacky than ours. Today, the URL still exists - as one of those many pages offering links to other pages.
What started as a joke became a passion - and to this day reminds me not always to trust anything you find out there on the wild web.
Alcohol intake was part of the curriculum on the night my friend and I decided we'd pretend to be in a rock band. Like thousands before us ... and many since, except that we took it a bit further. After a few days the band had a name, Erdbeerseestern (which I'm not even going to try and explain) and a record label, Beed (ditto) followed shortly thereafter.
After a website lurking on user pages somewhere on Pipex, the band finally got its own domain, www.ebss.de, in 1999. Thereafter the site was the perfect outlet for our surplus creative talents: by mid-2003 there were 30-plus pages, covering a back catalog of 16 albums and as many singles, complete with artwork and lyrics. We even had a blog. Every song was an in-joke between a couple of friends who had grown up together in the same village, and then grown apart: by 1999 we were living on different continents, and we'd both left our home country, probably for good in both cases.
To make the lyrics more obscure, and because it was funny, we enlisted the help of internet translation engines - translating from English to another language, occasionally then into a third language, and then back into English. We'd then have trouble making sense of the lyrics ourselves, and can hardly imagine that anyone else in the world would get it.
Although we're not sure if anyone believed us or not, ebss made it into lots of directories listing alternative rock bands, and there are still 80-plus results showing up today in Google. For a few glorious days in 2003, our single Roof Rafters was the first result returned by MSN's search engine for a search on those words, and the site was topping 100 hits a day.
But all good things come to an end. We'd taken it to the max. There were no lucrative reunion tours to keep the band going, so we broke up ebss in October 2003, with a final in-joke ("it's not funy anymore", deliberate spelling). The site disappeared for good in February 2004, when the hosting ISP went broke, with the very last entry (plus many earlier ones) preserved for all time in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. So we were as surprised as the next air guitarist when someone in Poland took over and put up a site that was even more wacky than ours. Today, the URL still exists - as one of those many pages offering links to other pages.
What started as a joke became a passion - and to this day reminds me not always to trust anything you find out there on the wild web.
# posted by Nesjo : 16:39
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