For many years, our recording archivist (who sometimes writes in third person) Bryce has been bringing musicians together and recording what happens. Since at least 1992, Bryce has operated on the theory that everything should be recorded. And because of this, there are multiple hard drives containing little heard music, cloud storage filled with shared recordings, and somewhere in his mother’s garage, there’s a box of cassette tapes of some of the very earliest recordings.

The idea has always been that if something is played in a rehearsal or a jam session, but not recorded, it might be forgotten. But if it’s recorded, it can be revived, rewritten, rearranged, and renewed. And it was with this spirit that Croydon Tourist Office was born, nearly 10 years ago, but the recordings of this nature go back so much further.

All of that changed in 2020 when we felt the need to be musically creative, but didn’t have the ability to work how we normally do: all in the same room, surrounded by microphones, tripping over cables, capturing what the spontaneity provided in that moment.

As mentioned in previous blogs, we’re still working on new music, pretty much through the file-sharing method that we’ve been doing lately, but that hasn’t stopped us from considering what we can create when we are able to be back together again.

We have been kicking around ideas for a collaborative record, tentatively called Friends (and Enemies) of Croydon Tourist Office. We have some completed songs for this collection already, featuring either guest musicians or guest spoken word artists, some of the sessions even going back before the Epicentre days. This collection has made us think about what it will be like when we can all be together and maybe even have more musicians around us.

So maybe you’re here, reading this, and thinking, ‘Hey! I’m a musician! Or wordy person! Or noise maker! I could fit in with this!’ Maybe you could fit in with these plans, and we never knew it. If you’ve heard any of the music on Epicentre Nights, Vol 1 or Vol 2 and thought that’s a format you could work in, maybe you should get in touch.

Maybe your someone we haven’t even met in person yet. Maybe you found us by randomly listening to music on your streaming service of choice, or maybe you found us through the Twitter event #CreativeDevon, or maybe you know Bryce, or Robert, or John, or Max. However you found us, or we found you, if you haven’t told us that you are a creative person who might be interested in taking part some day, now is your chance!

There are an astounding number of ways you can get in contact with you. You can comment on this blog itself (do people even do that? why not?), you could message us through the Contact page on this website, or you could comment on the social media post that you found this on in either Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or MySpace. And yes, MySpace still exists. And with so many people getting frustrated with the big social giants, isn’t it time to come back home?

Anyway, there will be a time where we can fill a space with instruments, people, microphones, and creativity. Don’t you want to be there when the time comes?