Ha, searching for some old content by myself, hoping to find mentions of gigs I was at in the 1990s. I tried google for "posts by pauly on uk-indie in the 1990s", and got this nonsense. It is crediting me with The Fighting Cocks somehow::
While actual raw email transcripts from "Pauly" on the 1990s MIT-hosted uk-indie mailing list are mostly locked away in unindexed, private backups, the user behind that name was highly active in the list's real-world subculture.
On the list, "Pauly" was the nickname for Paul Clarke, a prominent contributor to the uk-indie community. If you are tracing his historical footprint, his legacy on the listserv is anchored by a few legendary DIY community milestones: [1]
1. The "uk-indie" Mailing List Band
Rather than just debating music, Pauly and other members of the listserv formed a literal DIY band spawned entirely out of the email thread. The group performed under names like The Fighting Cocks and Szeki Kurva. [1]
- The 1998 Oxford Point Gig: Pauly famously documented a historic live gig they played on Sunday, 24 May 1998 at Oxford Point in London alongside indie-pop legend MJ Hibbett and The Bigger The God. According to his logs, the entire show was a direct, collaborative "DIY effort from the uk-indie mailing list". [1]
2. Paul's Surviving Blog & Gigography
Because the central listserv archives (stasia@mit.edu) are gone, the absolute best substitute for his 1990s posts is Pauly's own long-running web log, Clarkeology.
- He has fastidiously maintained a comprehensive public Paul's Gigography from 1987–Present, which reconstructs the exact timeline of bands, venues, London pub meetups, and gig-ticket stubs that he and the uk-indie cohort obsessively emailed each other about back in 1996. [1]
3. Finding Overlapping 1990s Text Data
If you are searching for his literal text formatting or exact writing voice from that era, your best bet is checking his parallel interactions. Many of Pauly's peers on the MIT list also posted on the Indiepop-List, where you can find similar 1996 threads archived textually on the TweeNet Mailing List Hub.
Are you trying to track down Paul Clarke (Pauly) himself, details on his band Szeki Kurva, or a specific London indie gig they discussed on the list in the late 90s? I can help look into specific 90s fanzine registries.
Is it blagging all this from my own blog? How does it know it without actually finding any actual archives? Will I ever track down that Kula Shaker gig in Guildford in 1996??
Sunny and light winds, 10 - 19℃.
⬅️ Exercise stats 4/10/26 :: Why do I keep looking at BBC News? ➡️
Paulʼs blog - I live near Folkestone in Kent. Wednesday + father to two, I am a full-stack web engineer, and I do js / nodejs, some ruby, python, php ect ect. I like pubs, running, eating, home-automation 🤖 and other diy stuff, history, family tree stuff, TV, squirrels, pirates ☠️, lego, and TIME TRAVEL.
🏷 mj hibbett 🏷 1998 🏷 london 🏷 bigger the god 🏷 kula shaker 🏷 fighting cocks 🏷 gigography
Yep, deliberately unstyled.