The Wood & Wire memorial page
For a while in the early ’90s, Wood & Wire was one of the coolest online destinations for indie music lovers.
That was then—but this is now!
STOP PRESS: As of Oct 2005 the Wood & Wire name lives on as Thomas Ashelford’s blog. Visit the new Wood & Wire!
A lot of folks keeping dropping by here at Ether looking for the old Wood & Wire site, but I’m afraid it’s long gone!
How it all started…
Wood & Wire was originally just a little project to help Ingrid and I learn how to make web pages — way back in 1993. We were playing in bands at the time (as were most of our friends), and we thought a web site about what we were all doing would be a good little exercise, particularly as there were plenty of photos and artwork we could lay our hands on.
A few weeks later our ISP rang us up to tell us that their web server was getting hammered by thousands of visitors checking out the site. I guess there weren’t too many sites like it at the time, so it attracted a bit of attention. Then it got listed on Yahoo as Cool Site of the Day, and things went completely ballistic.
I think that was just the nature of the web in those early, heady days — that if you struck the right chord things could become very popular overnight. Anyway, after having our egos stroked to that extent, we started taking Wood & Wire seriously — expanding it into a full blown online music magazine. We had little choice but to turn professional. A weekend mucking around on the computer had turned into a new career path!
…and how it all ended
We actively maintained Wood & Wire through 1994 and early 1995 — assisted by Neil Johnson. We had a dream of supporting the site through advertising and online sales. That would probably be feasible now, but it certainly wasn’t at the time. In late 1995 we started to attract other (more lucrative) web design work, and Wood & Wire fell by the wayside.
The site got lost during a web server changeover some time around 1997. I’m sure we’ve got a backup on a floppy disk in a cupboard somewhere (the fact that it used to fit on a floppy is amazing in itself!), but none of our computers have a floppy drive these days, so I guess it’s lost for the time being.
Some of the bands that were featured on Wood & Wire are still going strong and have their own web sites these days. I’ve put this page here so I could provide links to the ones I’m aware of.
Cheers,
Thomas Ashelford (AKA Thomas Tallis)