by Craig Hamilton
On the evening of Saturday 17th December, 2011, I was talking with some friends on Twitter and we began swapping boring anecdotes about meeting pop stars. I told my story about once having served Queen’s Brian May whilst working in a record shop. Others told similarly banal tales. After a while, one friend casually remarked, “These stories are so boring. It’s barely worth setting up a Tumblr blog to capture them all.”
Something in me took this as a challenge. Within a few minutes I had set up
Rock & Roll Tedium and began posting some of the stories I’d just been told. I also set up a
Twitter account and sent a few tweets, opened a Gmail account, and posted a link on
Facebook. The whole process took about an hour, and I then went to bed.
On Sunday morning I was pleasantly surprised to find a handful of stories in the inbox, mainly from friends, and by the end of that day there were about 30 stories in total, all of which I had posted directly to the site. I was pleased and somewhat tickled, but I genuinely didn’t think much more about it than that.
On Monday, things had changed. I noticed LOTS of stories were coming in, so I checked Twitter and found to my amazement that Rock & Roll Tedium had ‘gone viral’. Tweets from music journalists in the UK had initially fueled the spread, but after that things had taken on a life of their own. Tweet after retweet, it went on all day long, snowballing, as I sat back at watched, a little baffled by it all.
On the Tuesday morning
there was an email from BBC 6Music, the largest alternative music radio station in the UK, and on Wednesday morning I found myself speaking to Huey Morgan live on the air. He kept me on the line for quite some time, reading from the site to his listeners and laughing like a drain. By the end of Wednesday 21st December, my inbox was groaning under the weight of hundreds of submissions, with the site not yet 4 days old.Christmas and New Year came and went and things ticked over. I was interviewed over Skype by The Village Voice in New York City, and all the while I expected each flurry of followers and stories to be the last as the internet moved on to the next new thing. Except it hasn’t. At least not completely, anyway…
You see, the stories just keep on coming, the Tweets and retweets go on, day after day, in various languages and countries. In just over 6 weeks I have had almost 1000 stories submitted and have picked up thousands of followers on Tumblr and Twitter….and all from something that started life as a half-hearted joke. Isn’t the Internet marvelous, and a bit scary?
The juggernaut of dull that is Rock and Roll Tedium is, of course, the reason I’m being given the opportunity to speak to you, the readers of the Old Glory Tees blog, and tell my tale. So, a warm ‘Hello’ from a cold and wintery Birmingham, England! Now, if you ever met a pop star and the story is dull….you know what you need to do.
LINKS:
Rock and Roll Tedium on Tumblr
Rock and Roll Tedium on Twitter
Rock and Roll Tedium on Facebook
Email Rock and Roll Tedium at rockandrolltedium@gmail.com
Pledge to do one thing a little bit greener this month. Maybe ride your bike to work, or use a refillable water bottle. Then, tell us about it in a comment on one of our social sites including this very blog post! That’s it! You’re entered.
