The Song Bar was created in February 2016 by Peter Kimpton, aka The Landlord, as an online thematically-based music venue for a global group of readers and writers to create playlists and share music with knowledgeable and convivial conversation. It began in part as a continuation of his previous role as editor and chief writer of the now defunct Guardian Readers Recommend playlist blog, where, as well as sometimes creating playlists alongside other guest writers, he began to create weekly introductory pieces on each theme as a column/feature hybrid.
Song Bar, as well as a swath of new music coverage and other features, has now covered more than 400 different themes from interactive playlists of guest volunteer writers. The Marconium catalogues all songs chosen as it previously did for the RR feature.
The first topic was Songs about Moving On. The blog’s introductory post was published on Feb. 11, 2016 and the first volunteer guru, treefrogdemon, wrote the first Song Bar column which was published on Feb. 16, 2016.
The rest, as they say, is history with a huge variety of topics covered and dozens of guest writers and many regular readers and contributors using various pseudonyms. Under the guise of the Song Bar Landlord, Peter has also continued to write and develop his weekly topic introduction and has even taken to being guest playlister guru on occasion.
The Origins of the Song Bar: How the Song Bar community was set adrift and inspired a revival