This site is being developed by me, Barry Phipps, one of the four members of the Coctails.
For some time now I have been working on an archive of my own life and work—photographs, music, recordings, writing, objects, documents, and all the other things that have accumulated around forty years of making things.
I had intentionally left the Coctails somewhat to the side.
The band was such a collaborative part of my life that I wasn't quite sure how it belonged inside an archive that was otherwise mostly about my own work. But after thirty years, it has become increasingly obvious that I can't really reconstruct my own history without reconstructing some of this history too.
So this is where I am starting.
My hope is that thecoctails.com eventually becomes an official Coctails archive, endorsed and moderated by the band, and built from the things all four of us have saved and remembered.
For now, I am using it more simply as a place to gather my part of the story.
As I go through my own archive, I realize I have more than I remembered, not only for The Coctails, but for my other band Mudhead, and all of this stuff that happened with Mark, John, and Archer before The Coctails.
Mark Greenberg has lots of stuff too. John and Archer have things. For now, I’ll try to make sense of what I have before asking the guys to help fill in the blanks.
Because the site is both provisional and personal, it is currently password protected, allowing me to invite people in to look around as I see fit, with the hope that it can one day become public as a collective, moderated archive created by the band. If you are invited, please keep the password to yourself… at least for now.