GFP is 16 years old today.
It’s a slow weekend afternoon and the sun has just reached the edge of my bedroom window where it catches the leaves of a plant. I’ve never quite known the best place to keep this one, but I like it right here, and how vivid the green becomes when it occasionally meets the light, absorbing the goodness that makes it grow.
I’m sipping a coffee, leafing through the pages of a book I just bought in town: Deborah Levy’s Real Estate. The book, it turns out, is the final part of her ‘Living Autobiography’ trilogy, a series in which she “considers home and the spectres that haunt it.” I hadn’t checked what it was about when I picked it off the shelf, but I've read her work before and sometimes these spectres give you a nod.
Shortly after writing the opening paragraph above, I put my computer down and read the first page of the book. Here, Levy writes about going out to buy a banana tree in Shoreditch, at the same time she is seeking out a house for herself, building one in her mind: a place where she could “make a world at her own pace”.
I’ve been in my own house for a little over a year now, the plant at my window has been with me throughout. We are both surviving at our own pace, holding out for sunlight. One year ago today, as the details of these rooms were new, as I was going through the process of un-blurring that slowly follows big change, I realised that it was GoldFlakePaint’s 15th birthday. On a whim, I messaged the tattoo shop at the end of my road and an hour later I was getting this blog's three words written permanently on my arm in ink. Fifteen years was something rounded and substantial,I thought, it held a certain kind of weight and seemed only right to mark my skin to mark the occasion.
A year on, as the sun moves across the plant, begins to move around the walls of this room I have formed into my own, GoldFlakePaint is on the cusp of its 16th anniversary. The hair on my arm has grown back to sit above on the ink that has faded a little. We call this the passing of time.
Sometimes, over the years, I’ve called this day a birthday, as if GoldFlakePaint is a living and breathing thing. I'm lucky enough that I have often thought those things to be true.
I launched GFP on May 14th 2010. My home then was a bedsit in a town in the south west of England. It was a lonely place, one large square room with high walls and a kitchen tucked away in a corner, big sash windows I could open fully during the summer, to let the air in. There was a bathroom out in the hallway, shared with the few other people who lived in the space, mostly older folk who lived alone.
It was not what I expected my life to look like in my mid-twenties, but it was a place of my own. I wrote my first ever words about music lying there on the green faded carpet, discovered a joy that was either buried beneath layers or arrived like a fork of lightning. I took those pencil lines soon and re-wrote them for a screen, turning them into the early blog posts that would, without putting it lightly, change the whole trajectory of my life. I began chasing something, a burst of light that would take me away from that room, my hometown, north and north again.
Today, I’m thinking of all the places I've called home since those early days; all of the doors GFP has been carried into and out of. Some will be yours, but I'm thinking mostly of mine. I think it's eleven - eleven separate homes in the sixteen years I've kept this blog, magazine, platform, community ticking over. I'm thinking, too, of the people who have been part of that journey, either fleetingly or with a heft that's left an impression in the surface dust. So many of the artists and songs that I’ve written about over the years remain a big part of my life story, settling into the memories of a place, somewhere between the floorboards, drifting in and out of rooms now long left behind.
That’s how I always heard them, is what I mean, and it's how I learned to write about them too. I took the songs I found and placed them inside of my home, looked at the shape they took, how they moved between the rooms, in the air. I’m not sure that makes much sense to anyone else, but almost every song I’ve written about over the years became a companion of some kind in the world around me, either for a few minutes or in a way that remains all these years later.
It is hard to believe it was sixteen years ago that GFP launched, harder still to believe that it has gone on to carry me across the world, taken me on adventures I never thought possible, introduced me to my favourite people. That it grew a community of its own, in some small gentle way, has always been the greatest gift.
It’s different now than it once was, but we all are. I still hold it very dearly, and appreciate every small bit of joy it continues to funnel into my life. There have been times over the years I’ve felt like letting go, but it hasn't felt that way recently and I don’t feel like that today. I think there is still a place for it. I think – I truly believe! – that regardless of anything else, it sometimes places a little joy into this strange world, and that keeps it living and breathing.
To mark the occasion today, I messaged a few friends whose music has woven itself into my own journey over the years and asked them for a suggestion of one beautiful song. A simple request that has become one of my favourite things we've every published.
You can read that feature and listen to the mixtape that came out of it, right here.
Also, I've made some new GFP caps. Finally. Maybe you’d like to buy one for the approaching summer. They're available on Bandcamp right now, for UK and US friends only (sorry).
But this is 16 years of GoldFlakePaint – and I am raising my toast to you.
Thank you so much for being here. Through love and loss and in between, it has always meant the very most to me.
Tom.
~
