I was up until 2 in the morning reading a thread called backstreet amusements circa 1984-89 at halifaxlocals.com. Trying to read, anyway, as I scrolled through pictures of people I used to see all the time but haven't for years, and then dreaming about them, because all those pics and stories fired up the part of my brain that is still 21 years old.

Backstreet Amusements was a video arcade in downtown Halifax and one of the main hangouts for the alt crowd in the 1980s. I went there quite a bit, even before I got to know Greg Clark or the local music scene. I was a jazz kid who liked punk, a little older than most of the kids there, but over time I got to know some of them through CKDU-FM.

I've reconnecting to all this because last week Lezlie Lowe from The Coast talked to me for a piece about Out of the Fog, a compilation LP that was a snapshot of the scene in 1985.

The worst thing I told Lezlie was that I have dubs of a number of band demos from that era and that it might take me a year of two to put them on my site. I had ripped them a couple of years ago directly to MP3, and would rather have better quality, but sitting on my hard drive they do no one any good. It might take a couple of weeks, but it's time they went back out into the world.