Today I received an e-mail from Guigo Barros, a man from Brazil who despite the distance and the infrequent contact we have, I consider a friend for life. He is the one who asked me, around 8 years ago, to join the admin team at ProgArchives.com. We served on that team together four over four years – a time I won’t easily forget. The admins we worked with were all great people, as were the site collaborators. A lot of these people are still around there – Prog is a sticky business….

In Guigo’s e-mail was the above photo of (from right to left) Guigo himself, Martin Horst (a German site collab) and myself. We met one evening in Februari 2008 – in Paris, where Martin lived, and where Guigo was visiting, on vacation with his wonderful wife Ana.

We talked about music – obscure bands, well known bands, Zeuhl, symphonic, jazz rock… I was taking notes that led in the end to me picking up the unsigned bands section of ProgArchives later, and this site, Angelo’s Rock Orphanage last year. Always on the lookout for new, unknown gems…

One more memory from that trip is how I wrote my review for Van Der Graaf Generator’s album Trisector. The afternoon before meeting these wonderful people, I just sat down in a small park near the Sacre Coeur, put my headphones on and wrote that review, in the early February sun.

Guigo and Martin were just two of the good friends and musical contacts I made along the way, I’ll be posting more of these short ‘encounter stories’ here over time.