I returned to the 13th Floor Club on Saturday night, which is almost always a joy. It might be because it's a niche night, playing only sixties mod, garage and psychedelia, but it appears on the surface to be one of those rare evenings which manages to attract a constant, hardcore audience without once being heavily invaded by scenesters or people determined to force their vain identity on the place. Facebook photo snappers are present there, but for most people the evening seems to be an excuse to have a good time rather than to be seen to be seen in the right clothes.

I find that most of the best club nights in London peak early in their lives - you have to be aware of them just after the first couple of nights when they're beginning to attract a crowd, but before the point where the more obnoxious media whores get wind of them and colonise them. Believe it or not, I know club promoters who (privately) think exactly the same thing, and get painfully nostalgic for the days When They Wasn't Famous. Or didn't have their brilliant idea ruined, at least - fame is probably overstating the case more than a little bit.

Highlights of the evening included:

* Guest DJ David Quantick getting deperate for the toilets and leaving his DJ booth to rush through to the front of the cubicle queues with a nervous and embarrassed wave of thanks. I wouldn't like to speculate about what his problem was, but I hope he's OK now.

* Icelandic mod band Thor's Hammer actually getting a spin on the decks this time around - not with "My Life" but another more obscure EP track "Big Beat Country Dance". Always welcome.

* Can's "Mother Sky". This was spun the last time I visited the club in January and felt like cheating then, being neither psychedelia or garage in the strictest sense of the word, but being blasted through a proper PA system the track always sounds wonderful. Home listening never quite seems to capture the pulsing, repetitive urgency of it, but there are precious few places you can visit where it will work its way on to a DJ's playlist.

Obscure track of the evening on this occasion was Alan Avon and Toyshop's "A Night To Remember". I'm not a fan of it, actually, and nobody danced to it, but I'm always entertained by the curveballs some DJs like to throw into their sets.

Beyond the fact that the evening was much more crowded this time than last, little seemed to have changed beyond the presence of rather more mods on this occasion. This can be bad news in that mods do tend to have a nasty habit of judging a person by their evening wear, but almost all seemed to enter into the spirit of the occasion and were perfectly friendly. I'm also starting to see people I recognise from previous visits in the club now, which is rare for me. Perhaps it's because the 13th Floor Club officially has the friendliest toilet queue in London - although you tend to be stood in it forever, waiting for one of two cubicles to become available, so I suppose chat is preferable to awkward silences.

I only hope this night can continue without being hijacked by a self-conscious set or ruined at any point soon. It does what it does extremely well, and I don't think it needs any additional help.

I've been talking about doing this for ages, and I think the time is nigh... well, a couple of weeks away, anyway (let me get Easter and a few other extra-curricular responsibilities out of the way first).

In a nutshell, I think time is long overdue to put an end to this Livejournal. I do aim to continue blogging, but for various reasons too dull to go into here would like to keep the poetry blog active online over at the Myspace site, and start up a specialist music blog running elsewhere. I could of course just as easily do the latter here on LJ, but there are a wide variety of reasons why I might find that uncomfortable, and for quite another thing, I really don't think that LJ is quite the blogging site that it once was when I joined in 2004. It's not even owned or marketed by the same people. Time was you had all sorts of brilliant, tremendously active writers on this site and a lot of interaction, whereas there are days at the moment where it just feels like operating within a void (and not just on this blog either - my whole friends list suffers from similar underactivity).

Additionally, I don't feel especially comfortable scribbling away about everyday matters on here*. There have been a few instances in the last year or so where I've almost said the wrong thing and come a cropper, and so I've been a bit more ruthless at editing those sorts of entries than I used to be. The problem is, it's now reached a point where I feel as if I'm skirting around the interesting details so much that the whole thing is almost entirely missing the point, and actually isn't much fun for me on a personal level. I'm not one of life's natural gossips, and whilst a blog might have made sense when I was living in Australia when I had a lot to observe and could very quickly run away (or at least get a flight home) in the event of upsetting the natives, it's a bit harder to be so truthful in London where people do seem to take offence very easily. It doesn't matter that this blog is actually hardly read by anybody - it only needs to be read by the wrong person at the wrong time for me to find my nasal passages precariously close to the proverbial ton of shit. And we all know what that smells like, eh readers?

The big question is, where should the new blog go? Blogger and Blogspot seem to be the most popular two choices, and there's a lot of content on both that's worthy of a good read, but what essentially is the difference? What tools do they offer? Is there anything that's a pain in the arse about them? And what are their communities like (Blogspot seems the most active to my eyes, but is it easy to "link into" other people's journals as you can on lj?)

Anyhow, I await everyone's advice. If I don't get any, I'll probably pester rhodri. And rest assured I've been out buying odds and sods from records stores and doing some vinyl rips of stuff that will end up on the new music blog, and it will be a damn sight (or perhaps a damn site, ho ho) better than this scrapbook-styled effort in terms of content.

(*Yes, I've heard of locked entries. No, I don't like them much).