Actually in the long long life of Organ we’ve never actually worked out if there is a The or not.  Way way before Cultivate, and way before the art shows that happened that caused Cultivate to  be birthed, way before that there was Organ. Actually Organ was bore way back in the last century, back when we were art students, back before the internet, back before so so many things.

“I love Sean Worrall’s writings, his tireless writings in his ‘Organ Thing’ journal/blog. Here is a fine text about the exhibition at Angus-Hughes Gallery. At some point in the not too distant… one has the inkling (more than an inkling, I foresee it) his wonderfully written texts/reviews, will be an absolutely go to historical resource, and I look forward to some intelligent/clever publisher throwing him a book contract to put the best together under one cover, again one hopes, in the not too distant …” (Paul Sakoilsky, Artist, October 2018)

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HISTORY>>> Organ has taken many forms since the early hand screen-printed handmade photocopied zine days of the late 80’s (those days when zines were actually sold at gigs and art events and such, whe nthey were more than a vanity project) These days Organ comes in a stripped-down back-to-basics blog-shaped form, a selected Thing Of The Day”,  an art event, a band, a book, a zine, a painting, a new album, a thing, an Organ Thing of the day.

The Organ pages are about digging around in the underculture, the creative underground, about sharing some of the music, art and more that excites us.  Create has always been the main word with Organ, “create” was often screenprinted across the handmade covers of early paper Organs, it was oftern pasted up on walls outside venues.  Sharing links, posting up the signposts that point you in direction of exciting artists, new bands, galleries, exhibitions, events, animation, a new painting, a new video from an old band, an art show opening bext week, an art show that opened last night, a new wall painted.

We (we being Sean and Marina) started Organ because, well besides being slightly addicted to creativity and wanting to be doing things rather than just consuming things, we started Organ because the bands, the gigs that were exciting us at the time just weren’t being covered. On the whole they still aren’t really, neither are the many art events that excite us, the artists in the back street galleries, we’re seeing loads of exciting art and stimulating artists, great shows, alternative galleries and art spaces alive with things that really do deserve to be covered and on the whole aren’t being covered by anyone other than us at Organ…

These days Organ is (just) a blog, no big deal, true it gets thousands of hits from all over the world every day, and yes we’re still throwing things out there, but Organ is no big deal these days. not like it was when it got all glossy and frankly a little too big for its own good  We’re just here sharing things, exploring things, posting about things, a thing of the day. it isn’t the giant oftern thankless operation it once was, it was deliberately scaled right back to make way for the priority of paint and Cultivate and art galleries and art show.s However, we are still covering lots of things that aren’t being covered anywhere else, especailly in terms of art…

A BIT MORE OF THE HISTORY – ORGAN, kissing big ugly sharks, in one form or another  since 1986…

Since Organ’s birth back in late 1986, it has enjoyed a life as, firstly a very hand made, hand screen printed, hand painted underground zine, then as a full on glossy magazine (there was about 100 print zine editions), a very busy website.  There have been issues pasted on walls, released on cassette, one issue was hand printed on a t-shirt, there’s been a record label called ORG (I think we put out something like 200 different albums, singles, slices of vinyl and such back there, set a lot of bands off on their way).  There was a weekly TV show for a couple of years (way way before the days of YouTube, this was on your proper TV), we’ve been regularly broadcasting on London-based arts radio station Resonance FM for a number of years now. Organ existed for many many years in many formats.

Back in the late 80’s Organ was a handmade labour of love, in the 90’s it was a full on time-eating glossy production, there was hundreds of Organ gigs and events all over London, there was a busy record label, at one point we were printing 20,000 magazines a month, way too big a monster). In the early part of this century Organ evolved in to a web-based animal.  In 2011, after 25 years of grinding, we knocked almost all of it on the head (besides the radio shows), we closed down the big website and went off to catch up with some of the other things the time eating Organ monster had got in the way of – art for instance.  Organ ate up far too much of our lives for far too many years, it was brilliant, thankless, annoying, invigorating, messy, chaotic, good, bad, angry, happy – we could have compromised and got rich on the back of it but sucking up to the music industry was never our way, we did it all on our own terms, we mostly had a blast. ould I do it all again? Probably not.

November 2012 and you find Organ coming at you in a low key no thrills no messing kind of way, no big noise, no big fanfare, no plan – partly bacause when we started Cultivate we discovered that basically the arts media here in London don’t have much od a clue or at least an inclination notto bother covering the smaller art shows, the artist-led spaces, the underground events, we discovered the London art press of the 2010s was rather selective and somewhat blinkered in the same way the music press of the 1980s were.  So we needed to bring Organ back as an online blog or magazine or whatever the hell it is – back  as no thrills simple blog just for the pure enjoyment of discovering, sharing and enjoying, a stripped down Organ just for the hell of it. Just here to kiss that big ugly shark a little more, contact and switch the other… the word is still create and it is still about doing it yourself.

ORGAN – Music, art, underculture, and kissing big ugly sharks since 1986.

Organ is brought to you, by Sean, with the occasional contribution from Marina (who can mostly be found over there  on Resonance FM playing around in 5/8 with her Other Rock Show).