Review of 2008

 My thanks first of all to those who contributed and helped with the site last year, notably John Pac of Parchment and former Parchment roadie Dixie Dean.

The big story of 2008 was the discovery of the lost third album. John Pac announced it with four words "it's lost no more". This site was privileged to get a listen of the missing album and John later supplied full details of authorship of the tracks. You can follow the story of the discovery here.

This opened up new by-ways, especially evidence of the strong influence that Ry Cooder had on the band's choice of material. And journeys on YouTube also led to a video of the original writer of Pack Up Your Sorrows, Richard Farina, performing the song. Sadly the video was withdrawn shortly afterwards for copyright reasons.

The other big event of the year was the reunion of the band Caedmon - the 'other' Xian acid folk band. It's members flocked onto the site to to tell their stories before setting up their own website. There was no obvious direct link to Parchment but one was soon discovered!

We continued, slowly, cataloguing the material that's gathered on this site. It can be found here.

And we continued to explore the Grapevine label, which the members of Parchment ran in the late 1970s. The discovery of the year was MCC's exquisite Thursday's Child has Far to Go - although the first Grapevine album Ride! Ride! turned out to have an interesting story. And Grapevine star Dave Price popped up to tell us where he was.

Wishlist for 2009? First of all that it will be as interesting and eventful for this site as 2008 and 2007. Secondly, that a way will be found to circulate the lost album. Thirdly, another big find - perhaps some live footage or bootleg sound of the band performing?

And as time permits I will post other archive material and continue to pursue threads that grab my attention.