I’m so glad you’re here!

Friends, I’m thrilled to welcome you to something we at the good ship TeamGP have been dreaming up for a long time. 

The internet has changed a whole lot since I first started recording and touring nearly two decades ago. When I first started uploading home recordings to my Myspace page back in 2006, the web felt like an uncharted wilderness where the old hierarchies of the music industry didn’t apply. For someone like me – gay, political, sweary, all the things record labels weren’t going be lining up to platform in the early 2000s – it represented a new, more democratic route to finding an audience. I could reach listeners directly without any gatekeepers in the way. I was lucky to be able to build an audience of folks I found playing just about every gig in every lineup that would have me over the 2010s, and through social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, I was able to gather those people into one place where I could keep in touch. I used to be able to use social media to spread the word about my shows, but also to share jokes and thoughts and musings in a way that felt like a genuine connection to the folks whose support keep me in the job.

But here in the 2020s, things have changed. We all are incredibly and uncomfortably aware that social media is no longer that garden of Eden it once felt like for independent creators like me. The mass exodus of Twitter users a couple of years ago made me realise that these resources are not ours, and they can be changed, manipulated or taken away from us at any time. 

It is also getting harder and harder for any of my posts to get seen by the fans who have deliberately signed up to receive them without me paying these companies to “boost” my content. I don’t want to be giving money to companies that I frankly believe are acting against the interests of humanity in order to not be essentially censored from my own fanbase. 

I am luckier than most artists here, too – I have an engaged audience who are practically supportive and will seek out my posts that Facebook or Instagram buries, and they will organically amplify them on their own feeds. And that helps a lot, and I’m so deeply grateful. But I wonder how we ended up here. Where I have ended up as some kind of marketing executive doing the work for evil tech platforms whose politics I abhor – and even worse, convincing my brilliant fanbase to do it too.

The Internet started out as a tool to help me share music. That’s what I want it to be again. I want to write and make songs and shows that I can share with people who will hopefully get an emotional nourishment from those things. I want to spend my time doing that. 

And so, we are launching a new site. One that isn’t owned by anyone else, where I can share songs, and videos, and writings and – whatever I want, really – and it can’t be suppressed or manipulated by anyone else. 

We hope that this website will be all the things in digital form that my gigs hopefully are: a safe place, a place of community, a place of shared solidarity and a fertile ground from which ideas, friendships, new songs and new memories can grow.

So please join up as a member – it’s completely free, I won’t use your data ever for anything else, and I think that together we might be able to make this tiny little corner of the internet feel like it used to – like something that’s ours.