Once upon a time I learned some simple HTML and opened a Geocities site. This soon turned into a website that me and my friends would add content to, the kind of stuff all late teen, early 20 somethings do.
While i was enjoying making Flash and HTML websites, many of my friends were in bands or did photography. So once a few friends started playing gigs, reviews and photo galleries from the gigs and the roadtrips to match began to appear on the site. By the start of 2004, our silly little website under went a total overhaul.
I do miss that early 2000s aesthetic
We started off with mostly HTML driven sites though 2004 and 2005, but slowly started pivoting to PHP driven (this is where i learned). Around this time we grew, what began as me and steph going to see a few gigs turned into a team effort. Gaz joined us writing reviews, while myself, Andy, Uche and Smat all took turns getting into gigs for free, i mean taking photos. As the webiste grew, we expanded and started putting on gigs and eventually we planned to launch the first issue of the Saggy-Pants Magazine.
I picked up a really old, crappy A3 photocopier, it was a long walk home carrying it but we had it. We then set about creating it. Having never done it before, it was…erm… rough. The plan was to make A4 pages, glue 2 to a sheet of A3 and the copy them. We made a jig to staple them, brought toner, papers and was ready, all went well, we sat around running those first copies and then…well…..nothing, it just died. Would not print or feed………so we had to cancel it. (You can still read this however in the archive)
So after begging, borrowing and stealing we finally manged to pick up an A3 office laser printer. The carts were cheap and it had a large paper capacity, so we was back in business and thanks to some sponsors (and a lot of our own money) we finally managed to launch the magazine.
Along the way we made some amazing friends, i met my wife who was a part of the community. During this time writer like Kristi joined us, who at the those first gigs had to come with her mum due to being under 18 but so soon became a regular between the pages and still to this day works within the cities entertainment sector.
We produced a podcast, this was back when it was more of a pre recorded radio show, compared to whatever the current version actually is . Sadly only 1 episode of this still exists LISTEN HERE
As time went on Steph and Gaz eventually took over the Maze one of the cities many venues and it became harder to carry on. So sadly it all came to end, but along the way I met and worked with some amazing people. Not only did i meet my wife, Steph and Gaz got married and many of the rest of the team moved on into related jobs.
I was working at Gauntleys when i started Saggy-Pants, i quit and tried to be a webdev….then 2008, so i went back to Gauntleys, left opened my own tobacconist, closed it became a web dev….. not sure what happens next…….
So whats the point to this?? Well for one it makes me happy to look back at the silly idea me and a friend had that turned into something that took use on a ride, one i am still loving to this day. The people i met along the way, many are still my friends, ive ended working with members of bands like Illuminatus, Patchwork Grace, its great. But above all, i found a hard drive, the kind of hard drive i have kicking around with dir structures like
Looking at the filetimes, this drive is from around early 2007 and covers the entire Saggy-Pants arch from version 5 (2003) all the way to Saggy-Pants 10.5 which was the last. Sadly from 2006 onwards we had mostly moved from HTML to purely PHP driven and while i did have a copy of the database from very close to the end, the uploads DIR was gone.
So armed with Claude Code i setup about scraping 2 HTML versions and a malformed SQL dump trying to extract as much as we could. This was not easy as the HTML sites ranged from nested tables with FONT tags, to single god tables with divs and CSS, so its not exactly perfect but it was managed. In the end i was able to extract over 300 articles/reviews/interviews, 4000 images (sadly much is gone), 300 demos, 10 videos and 1 episode of the podcast. This has all been compiled into the Saggy Pants archive, which you can access here.
please note i do not own the rights to any of the music on this site. Most of these tracks were given to use to host on the site, sell as part of compilations. I will be honest i have added some additional tracks that i have from these bands. If anyone would like me to take any of these tracks down, please reach out to me and i will do so. I wish i could contact all those, but sadly those media@bandname.co.uk emails no longer work and those who had sam3423@ntlworld.com and the like also bounce.
If you would like to add any material you have from this time, be that images, music or videos please let me know. If there is interest, i would be happy to move this to its own site and spread the net out a little more to a wider time frame or location.
One last thing, other aspects of the community
Its great to see the guys and gals at Left Lion still going strong, LL always felt like the example of how to do it properly…..but that would have taken more effort than a £35 photocopier you saw in an office window walking home from work.
When i started going through the files, i found the videos by BabyDeltic, unlike most of my other attempts, i did actually manage to track Dan down and its wonderful to hear things like It was a very small seed that I planted in a very naive attempt to grow something bigger but over the years something very strange happened - It actually worked! Ive now been shooting music videos professionally for almost 20 years!
One last person who i think deserves a mention, Steve Fisher, that man was everywhere and i doubt there are any bands who didnt have photos with his iconic big watermark. I did a search and its great to see that he has his entire archive up on his website also, so if you want another glance of the Nottingham Music scene of the years, you really should head on over. We might have have a little running joke at battle of the bands rating his shirts, but that man has a pillar of the scene for many many years.