Plain Or Pan is, and has always been, powered by WordPress. It’s a technically easy to use blogging platform – once logged into my account, I can write something on any internet-capable device I have to hand and upload it to the world as fast as I need it to be there. Not that there are millions, thousands, or even single digits worth of people putting their lives on hold until my next hamfisted attempt at stringing paragraphs together makes its way through the ether to them – I mean, I’m no Sally’s Baking Addiction (8 million hits a month) or Green Living Now (similarly popular, equally as monetised) – but for the odd one or two music obsessives who feel their day is incomplete until another McAllister-penned article on The Smiths or Radiohead or whoever is with them, they can be safe in the knowledge that from germination to completion, my words fairly whizz their way there.
I’ve become obsessed recently with the map feature that’s found within the ‘Stats’ section of my admin dashboard. It’s always interesting to look and see where the traffic to the blog comes from. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of it comes from the UK – over a quarter of a million discrete addresses, as it happens, with the United States not far behind. Tyrolean hats off to the Germans though, currently providing the third-greatest number of hits to Plain Or Pan. Wunderbar, as someone once sang. To be fair, their ability to read English will be far better than my ability to write in German (Google Translate notwithstanding), but my Teutonic friends seem to like the cut of my jib even more than those readers in Australia, New Zealand and Canada – and I thought ex-pats were supposed to be homesick. Read on and reminisce. Sydney and Perth! Auckland and Wellington! Toronto and Vancouver! Get yr collective fingers out, will you? Here are your memory triggers, you tartan-blooded immigrants.
Last week, I was delighted to find I had visitors from such far-flung places as Peru, Bangladesh and the Faroe Islands alighting on Plain Or Pan. Had they stumbled onto these pages after Googling ‘Bowie, Berlin, Heroes’? Or ‘Edinburgh Festival, Scotland, The Fall, Mark E Smith’? Or had they arrived here only to be disappointed after discovering that ‘Teenage Fanclub’ was in fact a gently rockin’ melodic guitar band from the west of Scotland and not something else entirely? (I wonder if Norman and co ever regretted the name they’ve saddled themselves with?)
Playing around with the features of the map stats, I was able to take a snapshot of all the traffic that’s been to Plain Or Pan since it began in January 2007. Amazingly, I reckon there are only half a dozen countries on planet Earth where people haven’t visited from. If you have friends in the Central African Republic or its near neighbour Chad, if you happen to know any music-obsessed nomads out in the Western Sahara or the rainforests of Gabon, if you are pen pal to a villager in the foothills of the Himalayas in land-locked Bhutan or up there in the frozen wilderness of the Arctic Circle, then please spread the word. Let’s get the full set. Currently, there are 195 countries in the world and 189 of them are home to someone who has visited Plain Or Pan at least once.
It’s incredible!
C’est incroyable!
Bu inanilmazdir!
Es ist unglaublich!
Es increible!
Tai bukesiyile!
Es s glybn!
Eto neveroyatno!
Det ar otroligt!
Plain Or Pan? Plain Or Pan-Global, to be more accurate.
I’d guess – and no science exists that will back me up or discredit me, so let me go with this – that there are less countries in the world where people have knowingly heard an Oasis album, or a Dolly Parton track, or even a Taylor Swift record, than there are countries which are home to someone who’s read the words on these pages. What do the islanders of Palau know about the Gallaghers? Do the female citizens of Burkina Faso soundtrack wild hen parties to the pumping sounds of 9 To 5? Do the inhabitants of Djibouti shake their er, booty, to Shake It Off? Who knows?!? All I do know, and the proof is there above, is that Plain Or Pan is a truly international thing. It’s a swell map indeed.
Ah, Swell Maps.
Swell Maps – Read About Seymour
I’ve always had a thing for Read About Seymour, their fairly pogoing short ‘n sharp DIY punk track from 1977. Tight, taut ‘n choppy electrified zipwire guitar (it’d be called ‘angular’ these days), a clattering yet fantastically rhythmic drum pattern that you can practically sing; hissing hi hats and dubble-ubble tub-thumped toms, a repeating vocal shouted through clenched teeth, a freeform bus crash ‘n broken glass of an ending…it’s over and out in less than a minute and a half yet somehow manages to invent the more raggedy end of Blur’s discography in the process. Don’t try and tell me Damon and Graham have never obsessed over this single in their time! Highly influential, highly enjoyable and still causing ripples all these years later, it’s just like Plain Or Pan really. Ask those turned-on and tuned-in Tajikistanis if y’don’t believe me.
Plain Or Pan 