My Dreams of Being in a Band

"If you don't have a dream, how you gonna make a dream come true?"

- Happy Talk, South Pacific

The 1990 World Cup was when I fell in love with football - as a young boy I was captivated by the emotion and the magnitude of the achievements of Linker, Gazza, Platt and co. I called Chris Waddle a dickhead when he missed the final penalty in the semi-final against West Germany, screwed up my poster of the England team and cried. Essentially I had the experience of being a football fan condensed into a few weeks. From that summer onwards I wanted to be a footballer. Like many young boys I played football all the time and believed that this would be what I would be doing for the rest of my life.

I wasn't exactly a child prodigy when it came to the Beautiful Game - a few seasons at left-back for the 3rd Ipswich Boy's Brigade Junior team was the highlight of my footballing career. I can't remember much from the games, only that I tended to kick the ball out of play when it came near me. What I enjoyed most were not the games themselves but the act of being a footballer. I felt immense pride in pulling on my team's shirt, great enjoyment in singing songs in the minibus on the way to and from games, pleasure in banging the mud out of my football boots and satisfaction in admiring my mud-stained legs in the bath at home. Then I broke my arm and missed my final season playing for the team.

I continued to play football whenever I could but never again played for a representative side. My passion for football was as strong as ever but then I found a new love in life - music. If Italia '90 was my football awakening then the 1995 Brit Awards marked my musical epiphany. Blur cleaned up and what struck me about them was how much fun it looked like they were having - from that moment on I wanted to be in a band. The following Saturday I went out and purchased my first album - Parklife - bought on cassette from WH Smith for £10. I started off by listening to the hits but the rest of the album quickly grew on me and I was hooked. Not only had I discovered a great album but I had found what felt like a key to a whole new world - the world of the music fan. Melody Maker, NME, Steve Lamacq and indie club discos all became important influences in my life.

Like the child who dreams of being a footballer because he plays football all the time, I dreamed of being in a band because I listened to and read about music all the time. Whilst I couldn't play a musical instrument I felt that if I listened to as much different music as possible then I was bound to absorb some of it. Whilst I wanted to write songs, what I dreamed about most was actually being in a band. I watched Starshaped (early 90s film about blur) repeatedly and what I loved the most were not the live performances themselves, but the footage of the band just being a band. Singing on the tour bus, messing around at service stations, jumping into rivers together - that was I wanted to do.

My icon for who I wanted to be when I was 16 was Alex James. I studied every word of his tales of drunkenness and Soho life in the mid-90s - it was the template for how I wanted to live my life. I had 2 pictures of Alex on my bedroom wall - one was the above one of him looking like the coolest person in the world, the other was of him drinking champagne out of a bottle. It was the champagne one I liked best - highlighting how I wanted to be in a band as opposed to wanting to be a musician. I first saw blur live at V97 and my first thought was 'oh my god I can see Alex James'. Damon was great, leading the performance, but Alex was faultlessly cool throughout.

Three years later I finally made the leap into the world of the band when I started creating music with my 2 closest friends. I played keyboards because they seemed like the easiest instrument to play - all the notes are in order and you can create interesting sounds relatively easily. Like many unsuccessful bands we spent far to much time arguing about unimportant things - band names, what type of record label we'd sign to, would we write credits on our first album sleeve - than doing the important things - learning how to play our instruments better and writing more songs together. Looking back it was because I was trying to live the dream rather than make the dream a reality. The band disbanded after just over a year and while I spent the next few years dreaming that we'd re-start our musical careers, it never happened.

Last year I found the original 4-track recordings of our demos. Listening back to them I'm immensely proud of what we did create - 10 years on the songs haven't aged and if anything they sound better than I could remember. It's because of this that I regret that we never pursued it further - if we had applied ourselves better, practiced harder and more often, then something might have become of it. The Stone Roses and Blur are two of the best bands of the last 25 years and are packed full of once-in-a-generation musicians but they only achieved their success by being incredibly dedicated and practicing constantly.

In the early 2000s my brother was the drummer in a pub-rock band and his band did practice hard - to the point where they could perform most of the pub-rock classics to perfection. I was frustrated with them because they had the talent that I lacked but did not have the ambition that I had. Looking back they only had the talent because they practiced at it. Still I was proud to be associated with them and took great pride in loading and unloading his drum kit from the car before and after gigs and practice sessions. However small it was, I enjoyed the 'I'm with the band' feeling that all roadies must get - that's probably why they hang about on stage so much.

My brother's band eventually went their separate ways and he gave up drumming - something I have had a go at him about ever since. Last November he finally said that he'd take up drumming again if I learnt to play the guitar - something that I had never managed after 2 unsuccessful attempts in my teens. So I bought the best value beginner's guitar on the market and now I practice whenever I have some spare time. I can only play few chords clearly, but it's more than I could do before. Whether I get to the standard that I could actually play in a band will depend on how much time I devote to it but just playing a musical instrument again will do for now. It won't stop me dreaming though.

Why I Write

"We are what we repeatedly do, therefore excellence is not an act but a habit."

 - Aristotle. 

I started this blog in 2006 when I was halfway through a Communication Studies degree and wanted to write for the web. I took a module which was taught by a Cambridge web design company and called, appropriately, 'Writing for the Web',  and this blog was born. My last post was over 2 years ago when I was unemployed and had just lost my first paid writing job - I was unsure of my future but used my frustrations with the job interview process as a creative force for writing something that many job applicants could relate to. I was fortunate enough that my endeavours paid off and I got another writing job - just like my first, it was for a website. While I'm incredibly grateful to be get paid for something I like doing, I seem to have lost the enjoyment of writing and have lost touch with why I wanted to write in the first place.

Like many writers I write because I want to communicate what I think about the world and writing is the most effective means I have found of doing this. I would love to be a musician  - to write thought provoking songs that have an emotional impact on people. I would also quite like to be an artist and to be able to communicate without rules. But I'm not skilled enough for either. However, I can write and I haven't been doing it enough lately.

When I was an aspiring writer I dreamed of writing for NME or a Sunday broadsheet and writing the odd best selling non-fiction book about society - the brand of writing I would specialise in would be what I call social commentary. But you don't need to have a contract to be able to record, create or write anything. The web has democracised creativity. Anyone can record a song, create a piece of art or write an article and publish it to an audience of millions. That's why I was so interested in writing for the web in the first place.

The best way for a writer to improve is to read lots, write lots and share their writing with other writers. I haven't had much time for any of these lately and as a result have lost confidence in my writing ability. I have also lacked inspiration - nothing has driven me to force myself to write something, anything. But I have missed writing creatively and recognise that is something that I need to do.

I think of the writers who inspire me most and I can only marvel at the dedication they had to their craft - they all became excellent writers because they wrote all the time and were completely obsessed by it. I love the passion and sheer bloody mindedness of Charles Bukowski who never compromised his artistic integrity. I love the creativity, horror and dark humour of Irvine Welsh, who for me is the best fiction writer of the last 25 years. But for sheer writing ability, structure and effectiveness I admire George Orwell - creator of 2 masterpieces of fiction and countless excellent observations of the world he lived in - from The Road to Wigan Pier to Down and Out in Paris and London. For me, there is no better writer.

Poetry is not a form of writing I have particularly explored but Paul Sarrington (a writing friend of mine) is, in my opinion, a very good poet. I would like to end this article with one of his poems about writers:

 
I’m a writer.

Writers write,

Fighters fight,

Losers fight,

Fighters lose,

Losers win,

Winners fight,

Fighters write,

Writers fight.