Who is Alchemist?!

This site is owned and run by Alchemist, a long-time Sheffield resident based in Walkley. Although I'm by no means an idealist, I currently run the site as a one-person not-for-profit venture, doing just about everything myself. Of course, if someone offered me a vast fortune to include an advert or two, I might well include it, but even then I'd want to be sure it didn't get in the way of anything important. I've been using computer networks (like the Internet, but originally much smaller) since 1979, and know only too well how incredibly annoying it can be, having to wade through page after page of irrelevant junk.

The SheffieldMusic.Com website started life early in 2000, when I found myself unemployed and at a very loose end. I'd been off sick for a year dying of boredom, and I'd decided to liven things up by teaching myself about HTML and web programming. The friendly folk at Hillsborough Job Centre encouraged me to go on a training course, learning how to be a one-man company, and I decided to have a go at being a sole-trader web designer. The first website I created from scratch was (and still is) my own site, NoiseFactory.co.uk, named after a band I used to be in (we never even performed anywhere, but the practices were enormous fun). I've always had great plans for NoiseFactory, but somehow I've never had enough time to get it into shape ... sigh, sigh, sigh. I now own around 35 different URLs, and maintain several other sites as well.

Although I enjoy being a sole trader, and was even making a reasonable income at the time, I switched to full-time employment towards the end of 2000, when a dream job became available - I spent two years as a researcher. Towards the end of that contract, I got myself a short-term job teaching Commercial Web Design at the "The Institute for Lifelong Learning" (TILL, part of Sheffield Uni) on West Street. If you left school without the right qualifications, and have been thinking of catching up at evening classes, I can definitely recommend TILL. I really enjoyed teaching for them, and my students (all of them just like you) were always friendly and dedicated. So if anyone ever tells you it's too late to learn, don't you believe them!

Since then, I've got myself another dream job - but I'm not telling you about that one! Meanwhile, it's been taking me longer and longer to reply to email when people (and bands) try contacting me here at SheffieldMusic.Com, and I haven't been able to go to any gigs for the last several aeons. I'm not ignoring you - honest! It's just that I'm having to run the site in my spare time, and there's less and less of it available.

On the musical side of things, I'm what you might call an old fuddy-duddy. I grew up in the 60s and 70s, when everyone was into early Genesis and Pink Floyd. I was 15 - absolutely the best possible age - when punk and the Sex Pistols stole the scene, although my favourite artist at the time was probably Patti Smith. I've been a synthesizer nut for as long as I can remember, and bought my first keyboards something like 20 years ago (I'd previously bought a piano in 1976 for £12, and used it to teach myself how to play. The piano disintegrated in about 1982). I'm still not very good, though! Never one to stand still, I decided at the start of 2004 that it was time I learned to play the guitar, but only managed to stick with it for a few mnths before work got in the way again. My guitar teacher was Keith Hinchliffe, and I have to say he's an amazing guitar teacher. Even though I'm in my 40s, and most people reckon I'm far too old to learn anything as complex as playing the guitar, he managed to get me playing stuff I thought impossible after just 3 months!

More recent stuff: I, erm..., did a few quick practices with what remains of Fred Yukka - but alas, 'twas not to be (sigh, sigh, sigh). I'm currently (July 2006) working with a mate to generate a whole load of new songs.