The Forbidden Planet International Blog

Damn, that’s a bloody shame. Turns out the last issue of The Stool Pigeon above really is the last issue. Here’s Phil Hebblethwaite, Editor

The December/January issue of The Stool Pigeon was the final issue. A catch-22: I wanted to do much more online, but the newspaper sucked up nearly all our resources and time. It’s proved impossible to do both as well as we’d like and, to be frank, we’re knackered.

We haven’t gone bust. We will settle outstanding invoices and, subscribers, you will be reimbursed via PayPal for issues that you have paid for upfront and will now not receive. Thank you for your support.

I reserve the right to come back and do something with this site, hopefully alongside my distinguished deputy editor Alex Denney, but not unless we can find a way to fund things properly. I still love doing what we do, and perhaps what I’m trying to say is that running out 60,000 copies of a free newspaper six times a year and distributing them to 100 cities/towns across the UK has become untenable, and also increasingly less effective and exciting than publishing journalism online.

I’m proud of what we’ve achieved and it’s unquestionably been a fascinating period to cover music. YouTube launched a month after we did in 2005. Everything has changed.

Congratulations to Phil Hebblethwaite and designer Mickey Gibbons for publishing such a great music paper, and bringing to our attention some great comic artists in their comics section. I’ll miss settling down with a good music paper, even if I had little idea who they all were, it was interesting reading about them.

Sadly I never got around to a write-up of that last issue either, but just to leave you lamenting the paper some more…. here’s a little from Elwick and O’Connell…. an untold tale of Jazz legend Charlie Parker:

And I shall properly leave you with an old favourite… Krent Able‘s Dr Cave (that’s Nick Cave, whose new album is rather stunning to be honest)

You can get Krent Able’s Bg Book Of Mischief here. Sadly there’s no sign of a print version of Charlie Parker yet. But I have hope. And you can read more of them at the Sound Of Drowning website.