Ian Rilen

I didn’t know Ian personally, but enjoyed many, many SARDINE v shows, and was always mesmerised by Ian’s charm and showmanship. I didn’t get to quite as many X shows, but X-Aspirations remains one of my favourite albums of all time.

I’d lost touch with the music scene, and was late finding out about Ian’s passing. When I heard, I went hunting online for information, and found several articles with links to ianrilen.com – but the website was down, languishing as an ad-filled parked domain. Somehow, this bothered me a great deal, so I began to investigate. I did a whois search on the domain, and found out when it was due to expire. I went onto archive.org to see if anything of the old website was there, and managed to download and reconstruct much of the site. Through info on that, I was able to track down Ian’s estate executor, and indirectly, his family, and gain permission to build this new site. When the domain name came up for renewal, I managed to grab it from the domain squatters, and slowly began building the new site.

It’s been a pleasure building this site, contacting people for contributions, and hearing their recollections of Ian. I’ve cursed myself for having missed so much of his career, but feel like I’m making up for lost time by getting to know him some more through the people who knew and loved him. And it’s clear that, bad boy image or not, Ian was deeply loved by very many people.

A big thanks to everyone who has been so generous with their memories and their archives to help me put this site together, including Stephanie & Doug Falconer, Greg Sawers, Stephen Loomes, Jack Loomes, Juilee Pryor, Steve Lucas, Steve Lorkin, Alan Hislop, Andy J Crowder, Phil Hall and others I’m sure I’ve missed, who have provided me with memories, contacts, photos and videos, or just permission to pillage their Facebook galleries for materials.

I’m hoping this site will gain some momentum now that it’s live, and we’ll be able to build it into a real treasure trove of Ian’s life and music.