James Bell Central

Newsletter 101

This is the 101st edition of my newsletter, and I’m changing everything. I’m changing where it lives. I’m changing how it looks. I’m changing my whole approach to putting my music, and my thoughts, out in the world. And, by golly, it’s actually fun again.

Okay, to be fair, at the moment it looks pretty much the same as it always did, but it now lives on my website rather than on the Mailchimp email newsletter platform.

I’ll explain the reasons for the move in a bit, but it’s part of a shift in focus for me that I’m really excited by.

I’ve rediscovered why personal websites are amazing, and generally undervalued and underappreciated. After years of lock-in on social media platforms, I’m really struck by how much you can do with them.

Now, I have left this website to collect dust and mildew for a number of years, and despite my frantic updating in the last few days, I’m sure lots of it is still broken – sorry! But I feel like I actually have a vision for how it should work in future.

In fact, this month I’ve got a bit carried away and maybe done a bit too much on this in too short space of time, so I feel like it might be even more chaotic than usual, but here’s what we have:

A whole new separate section for the dark political stuff, so it’s a lot easier to avoid for anyone who isn’t feeling it. And also, some light relief I made last year.

In terms of recommendations, it’s mainly folk or folk-adjacent music – some new, some old. But there’s also a couple of oddball recommendation choices in there too.

And there’s also a lot about how to do creative projects online. Within a hostile and increasingly toxic walled-garden internet.

Basically, I think we make our own little spaces of refuge.

And this is mine.

Featured

MICROSONGS

One fun by-product of overhauling this website is I’ve been trawling through all the stuff I’ve made over the years. This batch of microsongs is actually probably the most recent.

Some of them are literally just a few seconds long, but each one cuts right to the very quick of the human condition.

Be prepared to go on a pyscho-philosophical journey.

Bring snacks.

Featured

THE QUIET PART LOUD

Something I’ve written about before is that there is this tension being an artist in, or even just adjacent to, authoritarianism. Either you make your art about what the regime is doing, in which case they kind of win, or you ignore it, in which case you are tacitly treating it as normal, in which case you are tacitly endorsing it, in which case they win.

I feel like it’s difficult to have something to say, however small your audience, if you’re not addressing the rampaging elephant in the room. But it can’t be the only thing you have to say. As we say now: joy is resistance.

So I want to pull all my thoughts on the current state of world politics into a regular, but separate, article which readers can dip into if they’re interested, but which they can just avoid if they want to.

This is the Quiet Part Loud.

Recommended

PANTO HORSE SONG

Sometimes, it can just be as simple as clicking on a video by a musician you’ve never heard of because the title suggests it’s about a pantomime horse.

A sweet and (deliberately) silly song. Highly recommended.

Recommended

MAVIN GAYE’S CLUELESS ASS

This might be the first time that I’ve recommended a meme.

But I saw this screenshot on Bluesky, and it keeps making me smile. (No disrespect to one of the greats of Motown.)

It’s odd to suggest that a Spotify playlist could have perfect comic timing, but it does.

Recommended

CLAUDE CODE

I appear to be recommending an AI tool from one of the big AI companies.

But there has been so much talk about Claude Code that I feel like it’s worth identifying the cultural influence it’s having.

Software developers are saying that this has already changed the way they make a code forever.

Although, it’s probably worth adding a cautious caveat that I’ve also heard: making code is now incredibly cheap, but making software is still expensive. Edge cases, server maintenance, bandwidth costs, etc.

But still, it seems pretty incredible.

Recommended

THE MUSIC WE LOST

I mentioned that I’m trying to parcel off all the more distressing stuff into a separate article.

This is, in its way, a pretty distressing video, detailing the Irish famine of the 1840s and how it has affected Irish music, culture and life ever since.

It was recommended on the local folk Discord server, and if you are a folk nerd, I highly recommend checking it out.

Recommended

KYNTRA

Another recommendation from the Bad Tradition Discord server. This time of a folk duo – one of whom I was in The Reverenzas with a million years ago.

I haven’t seen young Henry Webster in a long time, as he lives in that London now. Although, rumour has it he’s been to local sessions and I’ve just missed him.

But he was a great fiddle player then and he’s a great fiddle player now. The guitar playing is pretty great too.

Recommended

BJÖRK SINGS THE ANCHOR SONG (IN ICELANDIC)

I still believe that Björk doesn’t get the recognition she deserves, as being perhaps Europe’s singular musical genius of the 1990s.

Despite her playful genre-hopping, I still associate her with the electronic, synthetic, modernistic.

But in this video, she just rides up to a local Icelandic church on her bicycle and plays the last song on her first debut album, singing in Icelandic.

It’s a whole different side to her, and it feels to me like a ray of sun on a heavily overcast day.

Here are the lyrics:

I live by the ocean / And during the night / I dive into it / Down to the bottom / Underneath all currents / And drop my anchor / This is where I’m staying / This is my home

A couple of years ago I was so happy that I had finally found the ideal creative channel for making music the way I wanted to make it: YouTube. I would record music, and make music videos, and then document the process of making them and comment on any interesting tangents along the way. The videos were way too long and unfocused, but I don’t regret making them like that. It gave me the room to experiment, and find a new format that I could refine over time.

Then… yeah. Trump. Again.

His return sent panic through the jobs market, making it suddenly much more difficult to get the boring safe jobs in University admin that I’ve been relying on for the last couple of decades. But it also gave us Vichy Tech, and the realisation that these unimaginably wealthy and powerful platforms like YouTube would soon be weaponised against us.

Now, I just shared the video below in the Quiet Part Loud, but I’m sharing it again here to expand on a different point.

It seemed clear that the internet of the big social platforms, which had become an increasingly toxic place anyway, was about to become actively hostile. Real life community was likely to become increasingly important, but so were smaller, more private online communities. Places where connections and relationships weren’t filtered through political gatekeepers.

Figuring out how this might work was a challenge for my music projects. But it was maybe a bigger problem for my day job.

Because I had been getting exasperated with working in university admin – perhaps unsurprising after 20 years, on and off. And I started to explore the idea of freelancing: specifically, using my day job background in communications and marketing to help Oxford researchers promote their research and their careers.

So I’ve spent the last few months doing just that: talking to researchers about how to communicate in 2026. From my many years working at Oxford I’d developed some pretty firm ideas about what works and what doesn’t. Ideas that tend to differ quite considerably from what the University tends to consider as best practice (and what I tend to consider is at least 10 years out of date).

As I’ve been pitching my theories, however, about the dangers of dependence on platforms that might be politically weaponised, and about the challenges of posting online regularly when you have hardly any time, and about the challenges of staying in touch with your followers when Zuckerberg wants you to pay for that privilege… I started to realise that I was also talking to myself.

I started to see the parallels between university researchers and purveyors of super-niche historical music.

Maybe the monthly email newsletter, which I had really just kept going for fun all these years (10 years this March, incidentally!), was actually the one thing to focus on. Or rather, maybe it was the combination of an email – which goes out to your audience rather than waiting for them to come to you – and a personal website, where you put whatever kind of content you want.

I suppose I was considering this for a while, but wasn’t really sure whether to commit to it.

And then one day I was idly thinking about what it was I wanted from making music. I knew – I’d always known – how to build a career as a musician: you move to London, play a lot of gigs, pay attention to the audience and adjust your material until they love it. Then you get a manager and it all builds from there. I knew that, but I didn’t want to do it. That’s the same way to build and grow a YouTube channel, incidentally, but again I didn’t want to do it.

Why not? Because for me the whole point of these projects was to realise the music in my head, not tailor it for an audience.

Then I realised: these last few years I’ve been trying to be a semi-professional musician or a YouTuber, but I’ve been doing it wrong because what I want is to be neither of those things. I want to be an artist – that’s the technical term for someone who isn’t interested in ‘market fit’.

And here’s the thing about being an artist: the whole point is to avoid formulas and quick workflows, and to come up with something totally new and original. That takes time. That takes a ton of time. And it will basically never leave time for marketing, or promotion.

You just can’t do both.

But the one thing that artists can do, so long as they’re happy with a small audience, is just make the best art they can, and put it out in the world whenever and however they can, and hope that word of mouth spreads. If it doesn’t, the art probably isn’t good enough yet.

That was the thing that clicked for me, and made me realise that platforms like YouTube and Bandcamp might be where I host my stuff, but I really need to focus on the email/website combo rather than appeasing an algorithm.

Oh, and I actually need to make some art!

I mean… that’s the other big problem. I don’t think I’ve made anything I would consider art in many years. I haven’t had time, because I’ve been foolishly been trying to get the marketing funnel set up first. Maybe that’s why the writer’s block as lasted so long – I just hadn’t been giving myself the opportunity to practice?

Anyway, I feel like I know what I’m doing now.

But I have a lot of catching up to do.

I moved the email newsletter to the website so that I wouldn’t be dependent on any online platform.

But I also did it because it lets me do this: