History: The Galaxie 500 Mailing List

During the first six months or so of A Head Full of Wishes a surprising amount of people emailed me about Galaxie 500 - I was stunned that there were people who cared as much about them as me in fact I was astounded that so many people had even heard of them - I was pretty much the only fan I knew. Suddenly to be having email conversations with fans was strange and rather beautiful.

Someone, I can’t remember who, suggested that maybe we should start a mailing list and so the Galaxie 500 Mailing List was born. Not knowing how else to do it I wrote a bunch of Arexx scripts for my Amiga and ran the mailing list using my dial-up internet connection which meant that…

• posts only got distributed when I went online
• the mailing list shut down whenever I went away
• the whole thing would die if my Amiga died (this happened only once)

Despite this, within three months there were 60+ members and by the time of the release of Penthouse there were over 400 subscribers.

After a couple of years thanks to the generosity of one of the list members the whole shebang was migrated to a commercial mailing list provider - and there it still sits - still ticking away at about 400 members and still happily talking about music new and old and pretty much anything else - with the new Luna documentary about to receive it’s premiere, Damon & Naomi still performing and recording, Britta Phillips and Dean Wareham back in the studio with Tony Visconti - there is still plenty to talk about.