It Bites’ album Map of the Past arrived recently. On the cover was stuck a list of tour dates. And this reminded me of something that drives me nuts. (Well, all right, slightly annoys me). Every second band, venue or promoter webpage I go to (and even some festival pages) lists some exciting upcoming gig, but the date never mentions the year! This, of course, wouldn’t matter if bands and venues and promoters and festivals never folded, or if, when they did fold, they put a note on their web page to this effect. But of course bands, venues, promoters and festivals fold all the time, or they just run out steam, and they let their web pages just stay there, for years and years, with that exciting gig from 3 years ago still up there on the front page. And it’s up to you to work out whether this gig really is upcoming, or some ancient relic of history, by consulting a calendar to see if the date matches up with the day of the week. But then some of these web pages don’t even mention a day of the week! It’s just ‘Gig on June 18 at The Flying Monkey’, a date a suspiciously long way off. So you have to look up The Flying Monkey’s webpage to see if that gig is on this year. But The Flying Monkey’s webpage does the same thing! No years, and sometimes no day of the week. So then you have to do some more detective work. Not hard detective work, sure, but a time-waster when it happens over and over. So thank you, defunct band that couldn’t be bothered to update their web page when the bass player went to Dubai and they never found anyone else.

So if you’re a current band who really do have an exciting gig coming up at The Flying Monkey in June of this year, please put “2013” in the date (and the day of the week, to save me having to look that up as well). Because if you don’t, I might just decide that you’re probably no more, and that this gig is a ‘map of the past’. (And if your main page is a MySpace page, then I’m unlikly to even visit, because I know there’s a 90% probability that I will find on it the words “Last Login: 23/8/2009”.)

So what was on the It Bites sticker? A list of tour dates with no year and no days of the week listed! I’m going to presume that these are 2012 dates, because that’s when the album was released. But what a shame if they were 2013 dates, and nobody realized?