The Radar Station has now been beaming out for a whole year, so it seems like a good time to cast a brief glance over what has happened here during these formative months since it first went on line on the 24th February 1998.

It is strange to remember that the site began with a different name, the unwieldy and unoriginal The Artist Formerly Known As Captain Beefheart, and a different location, equally unwieldy, occupying 3 megabytes of free web-space. One year later with its own domain name and 400 extra megabytes of information, things have changed a lot.

I first started the site as I noticed that there was nothing on the web whatsoever about Don's painting. Home Page Replica had been keeping everyone very well-informed about the Captain's music, and I wanted to do something similar with his paintings. Like everything else, things never quite go according to plan and it took about three days before the first music articles started to appear and continued appearing.

The excitement that the occasional increases in the hit counter caused me on the day that the site first went on line was fantastic. The number of visitors to the Radar Station has steadily increased from that first day to be between 280 and 450 separate users every day. I'd never imagined that there were so many Beefheart fans - clearly they were all hiding away on the Internet.

The growth in material at the site has been largely due to contributions from generous visitors wanting to get involved themselves, in the form of tapes, CDs, photocopied articles, scanned pictures, and even specially written pieces with their own views about various Beefheart issues. The single biggest contribution so far has come from Justin Sherill, web-master at Home Page Replica, who sent me an enormous box full of all kinds of Beefheart material, costing him $96 dollars to post to me. Enormous gratitude is due to both Justin and everyone else that has kept me well supplied with Beefy morsels.

Another major development was when Mike Sheckett decided to actually hand over his entire web-site (Filtered Thru Dust Speakers) which featured rare and unreleased Beefheart tunes to download. This has now become a permanent and very popular feature at the Radar Station, probably mainly responsible for the booming hit-rate, certainly responsible for many of the e-mails I get from excited Beefheart fans unable to believe their ears; exactly the same as I was when I first encountered Mike's speakers. A big thankyou to him, and to all the others that have since contributed to Filtered...

Proudest moment of all was when, while lying in bed at around 4 am reading The Wire, fighting off sleep, I suddenly noticed a familiar picture staring out from the page at me - a screen dump from the Radar Station (or Radio Station as they called it) and small feature praising the site. As The Wire is the only music magazine that I hate to miss out on reading (same for most Radar Station visitors too, I'd imagine) it couldn't have been better.

The Radar Station has also had the once over from several members of The Magic Band, two of which appeared in the site's chat room, Yellow Yap, for a special question and answer session, although on both times it was very difficult to keep up with all the questions. Many thanks to Robert Williams and Bill Harkleroad for their entertaining stories and especially for their patience.

Frustrations with the Beefheart newsgroup eventually led to the setting up of a discussion list, The Fire Party, which was generating a couple of messages a day for its first few months, but has at last blossomed. The list has recently been enjoying the first appearance of threads such as 'Why is this damn list so slow at the moment?' and 'Zappa vs Beefheart'; probably not for the last time on either counts. The list has made for some splendid entertainment over the last few months, and I'm sure will continue to do so for a very long time. If all else fails, at least we've always got Steve Froy in there for bang-on information, illuminating anecdotes and stunning blues tapes.

Financing the site has always been a problem - not only is server space expensive, but so are all the tools that I seem to need to even try to manage things properly, hence the arrival of The Radar Station's own outlet for Beefheart albums and related recordings. Operating in association with Amazon.com, this has been useful for visitors wanting to complete their collections, and particularly useful to me for helping to pay for it all. Big thanks especially to the two visitors (who would probably prefer to remain nameless in this context) who also helped out with some cash for the site when it was most needed.

So what next? There are a few plans in the pipeline - exclusive Beefheart T-shirts, more chat sessions, and an impending article about the site from Yahoo!, but I doubt that future years could possibly top the enjoyment that running this site has given me so far. It has brought me into contact with some of the most obsessive music heads that I could ever want to know, and that alone has made it thoroughly worthwhile!

Cheers for sticking with it, here's to the coming years.