About Us

I'm a 50 year old professional webmaster, living in Gwynnevile, a sleepy little village about 50 miles (80k) south of Sydney, Australia. I have two teenage sons, Matthew & Jamie, who I see two days a week and meet up with the mysterious Madame X, daily. I've been making my living on the net for a few years and recently decided to change my modus operandi, reducing the number of sites and branding the output under my own name. 

This was prompted by a move from Google that canny webmasters interpreted as a legitimization of the web, i.e. making each website as accountable as an ordinary store in the real world. So, the idea of making outrageous claims or providing misleading information was definitely on the way out and I pre-empted that by going much further and creating this site, which contains lots of my personal likes, dislikes, views and beliefs.

In fact, this site became, in some ways, part of a trilogy.

The first is a book of short stories, The View From Bondi (see the graphic to your left) and an accompanying pop-music album of the same name, mostly written and partly sung by me.  

This site, Andrew Goulding.com, is the second part of the trilogy, an exploration of my love for pop music and to a much lesser extent, books. With the further biographical essays in Writings, there's a considerable amount of meat in the Andrew Goulding sandwich and it should fill in many of the questions that a reader/listener might have after The View From Bondi.

The third part of the trilogy is a musical that I started writing immediately after The View From Bondi was finished with John Hoenig, an acquaintance of the book "publisher". John heard my pop album and was impressed enough to ask me to write some songs with him. I was only too happy to try as I had some thoughts to express, emotions that had only emerged into form after The View From Bondi. 

I took the first four songs and knocked a rough plot into place, centering around, have you guessed it, a song-writer, Spud, who's dead!  In many ways this site and its reviews are his story, the blood and guts behind his passion for pop music. John & I worked part-time through much of 1997 and 1998, creating version 1, tentatively called Alchemy.  It was very much a team effort in that:

• though I created the characters, wrote the story, all the lyrics and half the music
• John did the other half of the music and was trying to pull in his theatrical contacts to actually put on the show. In particular, John involved the delightful Nikki Bennett who generously gave of her time to help us out 

When his production company found that it couldn't raise the finance to take the project further, Alchemy was mothballed. A multi-million dollar musical production was always a big ask, so I wasn't terribly surprised when it failed to come good but the relationship between the two of us was somehow left a little tense, a position from which it has yet to recover.

However, that coincided with me leaving full-time employment in 2001, selling my home and moving 50 miles to be close to my children, then buying, running and eventually selling a cafe, all within the space of eighteen months. 

In 2003, with some time on my hands, I spent six months, full-time, reworking Alchemy completely, dropping a number of the songs that John & I had written and introducing some more of my own, to create a much more mature, honed work.

Since 2004, I've been involved in the non-sleazy sectors of internet marketing and in late 2007, I launched andrewgoulding.info a resource site, which will hopefully eventually benefit many people. It presents information about creating websites and marketing them, in a sane, non-hysterical way, which I see as a genuine niche. If Alchemy is ever to see the light of day, it will probably be paid for by the patronage of internet marketers at that site, so wish me luck.