There's 'Metal' and there's 'Metal' and the 'Metal' scene is fucked: Part 2

Part Two: The Bands

It seems that the last post in this blog got 600% more readers in a day than anything else I have written since July. Some agreed with what I said and some didn't and some people really got their knickers in a twist about it.
I guess that is exactly what I hoped for by writing these pieces. At the very least to voice my opinion and provoke thought and discussion in others.

Todays piece is slightly different and is focusing on "the bands" and the fans relationship with them. Despite the metal scene seeming stronger than ever it is still a bit fucked.

We, as music fans are now luckier than ever to have the widest possible choice of music and bands available to us twenty four hours a day and at the click of a button.
It's a whole new world compared to what some of us grew up with and far from having to hunt out new and interesting bands in many ways we are now bombarded with new bands to try to get into or to give a fair listen but its getting harder and harder to see the forest for the trees.

When I was first getting into music of my own (as opposed to having music thrust upon me by my father, Dire Straits mostly) I felt like I had entered a new and exciting place and the currency in this foreign land was the cassette.
The cassette was probably one of the greatest inventions of all time for moulding the musical tastes of two generations and opening the gateways to a sonic landscape that would be imprinted on most of your memories till you die or lose your marbles.

I am not proud to say that I shoplifted cassettes on a few occasions when I was at high school and ran the risk of this becoming an all to regular occurrence as my appetite for new music grew bigger and bigger.
By the time the school bell rang for lunch I already had my Grandad's coat on, a huge sheepskin that nearly drowned me in its size and was as essential to me as a tuxedo was to James Bond when it came to my mission.
I had the lunch hour to get out of school and get to town then back before the second bell. So at a brisk pace I would head straight for John Menzies (and then when that shut down it was Woolworths) hoping not to bump into any of my friend's parents on the way.
This coat was my accomplice and its sleeves a secret weapon. I don't know when it was I realised you could fit a ten pack of TDK D-90's up each sleeve but when I did I was a changed boy.

The 90 minute cassette was the key to everything you see. You could give them to your mates still in the wrapper and they came back with this amazing and fresh new music on it. The song titles crudely scribbled on the back card (or exquisitely written and illustrated in the case of one of my ex girlfriends) and the bands logo scrawled in biro and a little smudged on the spine.

At school we couldn't afford to go out and buy every new metal release that came out so we worked as a team. "I bought Legion by Deicide last week so you lot hand over your cassettes and I'll copy them tonight. Countdown To Extinction is out in a month. Whose turn is it to by the CD?".
It was piracy, it was the beginning of file sharing and maybe we all had a hand in what was to come. We were starting to kill the industry slowly before, in ten years it would fall apart completely with the downloading trend.

We were only buying a few albums a month between us, maybe three. On a good month as many as five or six but they were the only releases we even knew about that existed and even then they would have to be special orders at the Braintree Our Price store because they didn't really stock much metal.

We couldn't hear the bands either. We read RAW and KERRANG and saw the bands, read their opinions etc. We had no idea what they sounded like. You had to pay real close attention to what tee shirts they were wearing in the photos and make educated guesses as to the sound of the band and really hope you were right. The Our Price returns policy was less than friendly to spotty long haired kids.
"Well this guy who looks like the singer is wearing an Overkill shirt and the band are on the same label as Sodom. Do we buy it?".

Is it better now? Is it better that we have instant access to a band, their back catalogue and their life story? The problem is we now have the instant option to make up our minds wether we like it or not.
After all it was just a click of a button, you haven't invested anything in this band yet. You haven't had to put the time and thought into what they were probably like and you haven't had to buy the record just because it was on ROADRACER records and you liked other bands on that label so lets hope this was a good one. You just click, listen to thirty seconds and think "Nah!" and then that band are gone from your life. Its one hell of a tough audition for a band that can't plead their case.

This takes me back to the cassette. Pretty much all of my favourite albums ever written where of a certain length. You would get an album per side of a D-90 and maybe a couple of extra tracks of something else at the end just to fill the space.
To me this seemed perfect and what helped make it that way was the fact that cassettes were actually rubbish in a good way.

As soon as I bought CD's the one thing that came with them was perhaps leading towards the bands downfall. It was the ability to skip tracks. You would maybe skip to the tracks you liked, miss out the ones that didn't get going very quickly and then go back to that one you really liked the first time.
When I got given a copy of Kin by Xentrix I have to say I didn't really like it on first listen but it was a cassette, that meant it was an absolute pain in the arse to skip tracks rewinding and fast forwarding and missing the beginning of the one you wanted to hear. What this lead to for me was that every album I got I would listen to from start to finish. It had a chance to impress me and would normally be heard again in forty five minutes after I had listened to whatever was on side two (in this case I think it was Sacred Reich).
In actuality a lot of the albums I thought were incredible on the first listen probably fell by the wayside pretty quickly and the ones that were slow burners, growing on you I probably still listen to today.
All of this seems to be about the same thing to me. Investing your time in a band. It made you loyal, you were more of a fan when you listened to the whole albums because you put the hours in too.

I think bands were guilty of making it harder to really get into some of their music too.
With the death of the cassette and vinyl formats the bands were free from the time constraints of those mediums. At this point bands started making longer albums to fill the seventy minutes they had at their disposal. Maybe in many cases this stopped bands from trimming the fat and lead to albums having more "filler" tracks just to pad out the length.
There are few albums of one hour plus in my collection I can actually listen too all the way through. It's not to say they are bad albums but even if I love the band I struggle. I love mashed potatoe but after the three hundredth spoonful of the same flavour I am pretty sick of it.

So what is the answer for the future of the metal scene and music in general? Who knows?
The internet has played a massive part in destroying it and now it has to play a part in rebuilding it into something bigger and better.
We do have to face the fact that there are a lot of bad bands out there. I'm not judging, when I was young I was in some pretty bad bands and some of you may think the bands I am in now are terrible.
The problem is with that amount of choice it is harder to find the good ones amongst the pile and we have to get back to investing that same time and effort in hunting them out as we did before.
Possibly the real key to investing your time in bands is to step away from the computer and start really showing your support for the somewhat floundering unsigned scene (there are more bands and gigs than ever but in many towns attendance is at an all time low). Your new favourite band may be playing in your local pub and you will never know.
Maybe the album format is dead and it would be better to release singles or EPs more regularly, giving people something they can listen too right through and that showcases only your absolute best work and not your best four songs and ten that you had to put on to fill time.

I don't know. I am a musician and I am facing these questions everyday and wondering where we go from here. We will work it out but its easier to work it out together than alone.

Tonight before you shut down your computer (or leave it on overnight downloading the latest episodes of Dexter or The Walking Dead) why not go to a facebook page of a random band you have never heard before and listen to three songs in there entirety. Make up your mind then. Who knows they could be shit but they just might be the best thing you have heard this year.

There's 'Metal' and there's 'Metal' and the 'Metal' scene is fucked: Part 1

Part One: The Fans

I like to think of myself as an open minded person most of the time and I love music. All types of music. Music is great.
I listen to most genres of music and my tastes are varied although I have never really got the dance music and rave scene (but if you want to take speed and go to what is basically a disco then be my guest).

One of the genres I probably owe the most to is metal. Heavy metal, thrash metal, death metal, black metal, you name it. I listen to many bands in each category and pretty much worship a few. It is the music I spend most of my time around these days and I am lucky enough to make a living from it now by combining playing in bands with producing bands from this genre in my recording studio.

On the whole it looks like the metal scene is as popular as it has ever been, maybe it is even bigger now than it was in its glory days of the eighties and nineties. After all, we used to have Donnington Monsters Of Rock each year which was amazing. One day, one stage, eight or so bands and it was cool.
Now we have Download, Sonisphere, Hammerfest, Bloodstock, Hard Rock Hell, Hevy and loads more grass roots, home grown smaller events.

All of the festivals mentioned above are run over a weekend providing multiple stages and probably around one hundred bands at each. The crowds for some of these are huge. Much bigger than Donnington ever was.

Surely this means that metal now is huge, it's massive, there are millions of metal fans out there right? Well you know what? I am not so sure.

You see, there is 'metal' and there is 'metal'. And they are completely different and more importantly the fans of the two are like different fucking species.

I am not just looking back on my teenage years with rose tinted spectacles and dreaming of the days before Metallica turned shit, Sepultura didn't cite fucking Korn as an influence (Roots Bloody Roots can fuck off) and we could all rely on Tommy Vance and Krusher to raise our spirits when the rain started and we were waiting for a band that was running late. Metal was different then in a much more important way than we could have imagined.

The problem is that on the whole (and some people will spit their snakebite and black out all over their screen as they read this) metal is for chavs.
There, I said it. And its true. You know it and don't want to admit it but you know I am right. Its for chavs.

These are not your ordinary chavs but none the less they are exactly the same. They have gotten rid of the burberry (but probably still have it at home somewhere just in case it becomes popular again) and have asked their Mum to keep hold of their gold chain and sovereign ring for safe keeping.

Metal has become so fashionable and popular that the kids at Download this year who were going crazy for "Children Of Boredom" or "Mullet For Duncan Bannatyne" were listening to "Dizzee Rascal" and "The Streets" a few months ago and in essence what is wrong with that. A change of heart, a new taste in music isn't a bad thing is it?

Maybe in this case it is. Because the thing that sets them apart from the other metal or alternative fans is that deep down they are still chavs and they carry that attitude with them.

The same guys that were down Liquid necking Bacardi Breezers and trying to finger drunk girls are now at metal festivals. But something deep down hasn't changed in them because they are at Download but they are still drinking WKD Blue, starting fights and trying it on with any girl within a hundred yard radius and when she says no she is a cunt, lezza and slag.

You can change the jeans for the skinniest ones you can find and get some shitty neck tattoos delicately framed by the Toni and Guy hair cut you are sporting but your attitude and intolerance is like a shining beacon casting a soft Burberry patterned glow that shines off your lip ring and through your flesh tunnels.

Nowhere is this difference more apparent than in the pit. I used to go crazy in the mosh pit but would probably keel over after ten minutes these days and I used to come home battered, bruised and aching but it was all good clean fun. We all used to push and shove and get a few bruised ribs every now and again but one thing we all had in common is we were there for a good time. A mosh pit was just that, not an excuse to fight. Some shows were tougher than others and you felt a little intimidated on a rare occasion but you mostly felt pretty safe.

Remember that big meat head guy in the Slayer shirt who just kept pushing you and pushing you? We were all in that situation once or twice. Well what happened when he actually pushed you a bit too hard and there was a gap behind you in the crowd and you hit the deck with a bump? That's right, he looked horrified, bent down, picked you up, said sorry, dusted you off, smiled.............. and then pushed you again.

In the last few years since the chavs have taken over the metal scene I have seen numerous mosh pits that I wouldn't go in (and I am not a small guy) because of the gang of Oli Sykes clones that are taking it in turns to land a few snidey punches on an unsuspecting fan and then standing back and laughing. These tough guys not only punch and kick people when their back is turned but also see young girls as fair game for a smack in the back of the head. And what happens when someone gets knocked down? They get left, trampled and kicked.

Ok, this is a generalisation and not everyone who listens to Bring Me The Horizon is a complete wanker and would kick a seventeen year old girls teeth in. But some of them would.

It's no surprise that the metal (and goth) scene has often attracted people who were outsiders and had more problems than the middle east. It was because those people felt safest within a crowd of metallers and because they knew that they wouldn't be judged for whatever issues they had going on.
The kids who got bullied at school by the really popular kids often became metal heads or goths. I have met a lot of people with physical and mental disabilities who really felt safe to be themselves for the first time in their lives when they started going to metal shows and became a part of that scene.

In America the same thing happened but much earlier than it did here. The Yanks don't really have chavs as such but in the mid nineties the "jocks" and "meat heads" found their own fight club at shows for bands like Coal Chamber and Drowning Pool. The same guys that were out in Iraq singing "Let the bodies hit the floor" while shooting the face of a civilian would go back home and kick the shit out of the skinny long haired kid in the Megadeth tee while downing a few brewskis with their buds. This still exists but now they have their own meat head buddies on stage in the form of Five Finger Death Punch.

So the chavs have taken over Donnington, Monsters Of Rock is long gone and Dio can't save us now. Mainstream metal has become the home of the very people who don't understand what the metal community is all about.

Metal WAS a community, we used to all look out for each other, we took care of our own, if someone fell in the pit they got picked up and the lyrics to Denim and Leather really meant something.
It was an attitude and a way of life. It was a philosophy and an outlet for frustration and for some, most importantly it was a refuge from the shitty things they had to deal with every day.
We are now as much of a minority as we ever where. Regardless of the fact that one hundred thousand people attend Download, whats left of the real metal community now congregates every year in Derby at Bloodstock where we are safe from being judged by people for not having the "right" tattoos or skinny enough jeans and we don't worry about getting bottles of piss hurled at our heads.
We wont be laughed at in the crowd by a group of floppy fringed guys with swallow tattoos on their necks or hearts on their arms because we are fat, disabled, nerdy or just plain don't look like we fit in and don't straighten our hair.

The metal scene is fucked........... long live metal!!!

I am a fraud because I cant gurn

I am a fraud, I call myself a guitarist and a musician but I am now not sure I am at all.
I mean, I can play guitar. I can write songs and play other peoples songs. I mostly play the riffs but I have been known to crack out a solo or two in my time but I am not a "real" guitarist.

I have come to this conclusion because of one thing these other guys do that I don't. Its all about the gurn.

You see, I love playing. Music is my life for the most part and I get untold pleasure from doing it but am I missing something? Why don't I have the guitar face? You know that face that loads of guitarists get when they go into the solo, they are playing in a typical toilet venue in Essex and yet you can tell by their face they are on a cliff top with the wind flicking the last few hairs of their comb over romantically in the breeze while a majestic eagle soars overhead. They gurn like they have never gurned before and the faces they pull make them look like that bit in Inner Space when Martin Short's character has his face change back from being the Cowboy (search Inner Space face change online and I am sure that someone out there will have put it on youtube, everything else in the world is there).

Am I playing wrong? Because I'm just not feeling it like that. I love playing and I feel the guitar parts coming from what may be my soul (or at least from the Mexican food I had for lunch) but it doesn't make me pull those faces.
I need to know if I am missing something? Will I one day unlock the key to playing guitar in such a way that suddenly it makes me look like I am on the verge of an orgasm with stinging nettles in my pants? Will I reach this spiritual plateau where I "become the music, man" and play on a cloud of dreams and ecstasy? Or am I just not into the theatre of it all?

I pull faces when I play too. I do the concentrating face because I am staring out the fretboard making sure I hit the right notes and I also do the wah face (less nowadays as I have learnt to control it) where you uncontrollably mouth the wah wah sound, but thats about it. Sometimes I manage a pained half gurn like the real guitar gods but thats mostly just sweat getting in my eyes and stinging like a bitch.

So whats going on with these other guitarists? Do they have any control over their own features?
If this is some out of control contortion of their facial muscles then it really must be an affliction for these poor guys. It looks painful to me, what if it really is.
If it is out of their control and it happens whenever they start to shred then it must look pretty weird when they are just sat on the sofa in their boxers practicing guitar at home to an audience of one cat thats busy licking itself.
Maybe the face only does it in front of an audience. It has an automatic switch to "LIVE MODE" and suddenly all hell breaks loose.

If it isnt out of the players control then I need to know this. Who is it for? Is this face for them? Does it make them feel better as a guitarist? Does it even make them play better? Putting all that effort into pulling stupid faces would put me off my game big time. Maybe these guys are just that pro that its all part of it.
Maybe the face is for the audience. They look up at the guitar god and think "Wow! That guy looks so fucking pretentious he must be great" maybe if we took away the distraction of the faces we would listen to the player and think "Actually he isn't that great". Who knows.

I guess all I know is that I don't do it when I play guitar but I know a shit load of guitarists that do and some of them just look fucking ridiculous. Am I a fraud for not feeling overwhelmed by the power of the shred or do I just not want to look like a pretentious tool who thinks he is playing Wembley when he is next to the cigarette machine at the Kings Head Public House.

Im off to play guitar while staring at my feet and not moving a lot like the big fake I am.

Really? Again?

I am not sure how many more times I can see the sun come up. Its one of those things that when it happens once its beautiful, when it happens day in day out its strange. It becomes like living in an alien world.

Its not like I am sleeping all day like I used to. Being nocturnal became a pattern just like any other but I was still getting a few hours sleep. Now its different, now I am trying to survive on two, maybe three hours a day for the second week running.
I know its not healthy, I know my brain is shutting down. That is why I keep bumping into things and dropping guitars.

I just can not turn my brain off at night. I get to a point where I am so tired my eyes sting and that any second I will be asleep. I close my eyes, the pain stops, the brain whirrs back into action like I have flicked on the reserve tank or I am saving all that extra energy by disengaging the vision controls.

Its hard to explain the things that fly through my head for hours till it gets light and I have to head back into the studio. Its a constant fifty-fifty ratio of nonsense and the profound.

I am starting to really re think a lot of things in my life, and it is definitely getting closer to the time to cut people loose and change it up, if only selfishly for my own sanity.
Its amazing where my mind takes me on these long nights. Am I seeing things clearer or am I distorting the world I live in and making bad decisions based on this fuzzy half waking reality?

I am pretty sure some of it is clear as day in the dead of the night. I am getting more and more used to being let down by people, and it is always the people you love the most.
Maybe thats because they are the people you forgive most often and then it just becomes habit for them.
It is time to stop accepting it now, I cant do it anymore. I don't have the strength to deal with the knock backs and heartbreak that comes with it.

Sometimes you need to let the ones you love the most just go, yeah you have lost that person in your life and you may feel some emptiness but its gotta hurt less than feeling like you are always the least important factor in their life right?
I dont know, its light outside. What do I know about anything?

I do know that it is time to push forward two hundred percent with everything in my life right now. I am not getting any younger and who knows how long I will live. I can run full tilt and at top speed for the next few years and try everything I have in me. If it fails at least I tried, I REALLY TRIED.
I have let too many things coast by, hoping that the effort I put in is enough or sometimes I get this sudden burst of enthusiasm, throw everything I have at it and then wait for others to show they care too. It doesn't come, I work alone. So then I throw it all up in the air and think "fuck this" until the next spurt. This time I'll give it a go, this time they will all get behind it? Still nothing, back to square one.

Well now its a change of tactics, battle lines drawn. One hundred percent from my end mean at least twenty percent from the other end. If not, then someone gets left behind, I can move forward without all the passengers on this train and I will pick someone up at the next station.

Thats what the supposed clarity of an insomniac gets you, a manifesto with fuzzy edges. A plan with holes in you cant see but somehow are managing to step over in a dream state.

The other side of whats keeping me awake at night is a list of the top five bands I want to jam with. Tonight it was The Rentals, Armored Saint, Grandaddy, Sonic Youth and The Bad Seeds.
See, I told you half of it was nonsense.

Time to try again, the eyes are stinging, I will close them now and hit the stage with Nick Cave.

Being grown up isn't half as fun as growing up

I have no idea what I expected life to be like when I got to this age. I don't remember thinking about it very much. In fact for most of my teenage years I swore blind that I wouldn't get to this age.
I always assumed I'd be dead by thirty. A lot of this was teenage angst I guess, I played in a rock and roll band and all my heroes had died before they got to this age. I would be remembered more fondly and like a real "rock star" if I died at twenty seven right?

For a start you have to have a legacy to leave behind to join that club. Think about what Jim Morrison, Hendrix and Joplin had already achieved by that age not to mention Kurt Cobain, Pigpen (Grateful Dead) and Dave Alexander (The Stooges).

They had delivered something incredible unto the world, something that would live on forever and would touch millions of people worldwide (after reading this why not go and listen to FUN HOUSE and it will still blow your mind).

I really hadn't (and still haven't particularly) achieved anything at all by twenty seven years old. I hadn't left my mark at all and probably never will.
I have made a handful of records that a very VERY small group of people say they like and think the songs are pretty good. It has hardly set the world alight.

So what do you do then? Neil Young said its better to burn out than fade away. Do I swallow a handful of pills when I have made a record that people really love and end it there? Does that cement your place in history? Or does it just make you a selfish dick head like so many people that leave so much devastation in their wake. Most probably the latter.

Its weird because growing up is hard, no one ever talks about it really. None of my "friends" have ever said "You know hitting thirty something was really difficult for me" maybe thats because it wasn't and they all dealt with it fine or maybe it is because they just do not want to talk about it but the truth is, for me at least, I don't really like it.

It is a strange feeling, I hope I am not laying myself too bare to the world but this "blog" is a small piece of therapy to me and therefore truthful. If you think it makes me seem "uncool" or "sad" then believe me being cool is something I have never achieved in my life. I have faked it for short spurts to try to fit in but  I am not a cool person.

For me, being thirty is like being a teenager but instead of scrawling your thoughts on the back of an exercise book and listening to music in your darkened bedroom locking your parents out you just keep it to yourself. But you still have exactly the same worries and feelings. Loneliness is one of the biggest and wondering where it all changed. When I was sixteen I was literally surrounded by friends, day in day out. We would always travel around in big groups, smoking and drinking down the pavillion or going to gigs and getting wrecked.
Now everyone has their own lives, their families, their jobs etc. and thats that.

What happened? Does everyone at my age sit around at home watching DVD box sets on their own and trawling facebook?

I know I made this situation myself in many ways because of one choice I made that I feel has been something hanging over me for years now.
I used to have a drinking problem and a problem with other substances, it's no big deal now but at the time it was on its way to becoming a real problem in my life.
It was cool for a few years, always being out, partying hard, surrounded by loads of people all out to have a good time too. The weekends get longer and longer and the days become one and everything is a wonderful psychedelic blur of girls, drink and noise.

Then one day you decide you need to stop. You have to. Its not critical yet but in a couple of years if you carried on it would be a hundred times harder to get off the ride.
I actually stopped and then "relapsed" as they like to call it on more than one occasion but on the occasions I gave it all up I remember the specific turning points for me. The times that something got so out of hand you worry you wouldn't survive the next one.

Sadly, when you really need your friends around you most while you are getting sober that is also the time the invitations stop coming and the phone stops ringing. I guess no one wants to be around the sober guy and now you don't drink (or the other) then you probably are not fun to be around any more.
The phone just stops ringing, thats it.

I recently started drinking again, but this time I have it under control. I will go out and have one beer and then switch to Coca Cola or maybe a couple of ciders but I still have to make a very conscious decision that I will not have anymore and sometimes its still hard to make the decision (but it is getting easier) but the days of feeling comfortable going out clubbing till three am are gone for me and the phone still doesn't ring.

When you sit and think about how many true friends you really have I know for sure that I can count them now on both my hands.
I have lots and lots of acquaintances, loads of people that I will see at a show or festival and can chat to, have a beer with and talk to but real true friends are in short supply.

So where does that leave you? Well this entry in my blog doesn't have an ending or conclusion like others may do. It is just a spout for thoughts and thats all it is.

Im off to finish Season 8 of Cheers and then maybe crack on with Season 9. Goodnight x

Career Oppurtunities

What age did you really know who you wanted to be? What you wanted to do? Where you wanted to be in this world?

In many ways I am not sure I even know now. I'm thirty (thirty one this year) and I am finally settling into adulthood albeit kicking and screaming.
I have a career now. Thats a strange thought to me. Its not just one more job in an endless succession of shitty jobs that I know I will be getting out of as soon as something better comes along. Its A CAREER.

I am a few years into my career as a musician and record producer/studio manager. And for the first time I can say I work in music professionally. Not in the evenings or at weekends. I'm not still working in a call centre or mailroom trying to fund being in a band. I am now full time.

This obviously is a dream come true and I do count myself lucky every single day that I don't have a job I hate.
I wish it was more secure. There are no guarantees of where the next pay check is coming from but thats fine, scary but fine.
Also being self employed comes with its other downsides such as no holiday pay. I take time off and it costs me lots of money. But hey I could be back selling stuff to people on the phone for minimum wage.

Now I am a full time musician (sort of) then thats it right? Thats what I want to do till the day I die. Like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards I am a musician for life? I am not so sure.

I imagine music will ALWAYS be a massive part of my life and I love the perks of the job but am I now mature enough to have decided this is how I will end my days or do I still want something else?

When you are sixteen or seventeen years old and you are on your way to college you make a decision based on what you "want to be" as to the courses you enrol in. I wonder what the real percentage is of people who now work in the same field they studied for. Fifty percent? Thirty? I would probably guess its around ten percent or am I just a pessimist?

That is because you have no idea what you want when you are a kid. I am thirty and I think I may be slowly on the way to working it out.

I finally have a plan. It's a retirement plan and I am starting to like it. You can tell the sixteen year old me I have a retirement plan and watch him laugh in your face but I am really into it.

I think I will be playing music for the next fifteen to eighteen years and working my arse off at it too but then I have to stop. For a start no one is going to want to see my sad old face on stage at fifty years old singing about the same girl I split up with at college thirty years ago and secondly I am not sure that is the life for me anyway.

Don't get me wrong, there are some exceptional musicians I love still performing at a ripe old age and many more I wish had lived long enough to see it, but that is not me. Maybe they are just more relevant, Neil Young and Tom Waits both certainly have much more to say than me (and infinitely more talent) and I would loved to have seen Frank Zappa writing and performing music forever. But they aren't the usual people I see in the rock clubs and back stage at festivals.

I dont ever want to be the sad old bastard at fifty something years old getting drunk out of their mind, falling over and landing face first in the V.I.P. bar and asking the "young" bands if they know where they can "score some sniff". Its really tragic and they are the only people who don't realise how sad it is.

You have never seen a facial expression quite like the one on an eighteen year old girl being chatted up by a fifty something ex-rockstar.
This weird mixture of disgust, pity and struggling so so hard to be polite because "he was really famous once" is one of the most bizarrely contorted images in my mind. And as the young girl eventually squirms her way out of the grip of the old lecherous bastard you see the glazed eyes of a deluded old fool thinking "she'll be back".

So I am going to put myself out to pasture before I reach the point where it looks pathetic or embarrassing and this week I started on my path way to retirement. I have it all worked out and for the first time I am seeing my later years as a place I am looking forward to visiting some day.
I wont yet tell you how this journey is starting for me, I am sure that I will go into it in more detail as these writings progress but there is a plan.

At the end of it all each and every one of you are welcome to sit with me on my stretch of beach and have a nice cool drink and watch the sun go down over the ocean as I get old and grey. I hope some of you choose to join me some day and those of you who don't............. she hasn't gone to the loo and she definitely isn't coming back, no matter how many laminates are hanging around your neck.

I lived a double life once.

Well this is it, the first time I have written a "blog", and in fact the first time I have done any real writing aside from lyrics in so many years I cannot even remember what the last thing was. A love letter? A short story? Possibly one page of a script that I had a great idea for but didn't have the motivation to finish.

I guess as this is the first entry I will tell those of you who don't know me and have stumbled across these ramblings by accident a bit about who I am.

I am a thirty year old musician and producer. At thirty I am probably too old, definitely too fat and certainly not fashionable enough to ever become a household name playing the music I write but I'll carry on just the same if you don't mind. If you like the songs then good, if not? You can't win them all I suppose.

My main passion and the thing that means most to me in the world is music, namely the band I play in TAKOMA STAR. We have been playing some kind of punk rock since 2006 and I hope we wont be stopping any time soon.

I have always felt I lead a double life and in many ways I have ever since I was a kid not just because I used to talk shit more than I talked sense (a character trait that does make you as big an asshole as you imagine it might) but I always felt I had to be two people.

When me and my kid brother were young our parents got divorced, it was no great shakes. It didn't scar me or screw me up. In fact I never really understood why people got so broken up about their parents getting broken up.
It did leave me in this strange limbo between two lives though. I was raised mostly in Braintree, a small shit hole of a town in Essex, England. It was a crappy place then and is still a crappy place now even if it was referred to as the punk rock capital of the world once (I think that was just because local legends The Prodigy spiked their hair and added guitar to their mixes) we were piss poor and still are.

Where we lived with our Mum we were the only kids we knew who only had a black and white television (and this is the nineties I'm talking about) we had no carpets and no beds at one point, just mattresses and we had plastic patio furniture in our lounge. This didn't last for long but we weren't living in a palace.
I think I loved it in a way, you could have a party and fuck the house up because there was really nothing to fuck up except some charity shop velvet curtains I have never been forgiven for ruining.

Living like that albeit briefly felt like it validated the fact that I loved punk rock and thrash metal, you felt shit about it and you knew you where different from the other kids.
This never ever got me down, my brother had a different experience to me. Feeling ashamed and embarrassed he never invited friends over and was probably pretty lonely for a lot of his youth. But that's his story and if he wants to share that with you then he can do that himself.

For me it was the opposite. I loved being able to have a gang of friends over and really hang out without a care in the world, smoking weed and listening to or playing music.

So how come I was a middle class kid at the same time? I would be whisked away every weekend to our Dads nice (not huge or posh, just nice) house in a chilled village and we would spend the summer sailing or fishing, we had horses, we always had a new car and life there was pretty good.

It felt weird to flit between the two but it got me used to living as two people in one brain.

Jump to ten years later after many years gigging in many bands I reconnected with some friends from a cool heavy metal band from South America called CRIMINAL.
At the time our paths crossed again they were looking for a bassist. I am a guitarist myself but play other instruments too.
Initially I offered to stand in for any shows they had coming up till they found someone else or whatever they wanted. Five years later I am still in the band and recording my second album of their twenty year career.

Since joining CRIMINAL I have played in countries I never even thought I would visit, to tens of thousands of metal fans and shared the bill with my childhood heroes at various shows around the world.

When I was sat on that mattress in my childhood room staring up at the hundreds of posters and press clippings that covered every inch of my walls and ceiling I never dreamed that some of these people I would one day call my friends others I would be lucky enough to just have met them and had a picture taken while I grinned from ear to ear and the big two, Megadeth and Metallica, I would have played shows with as part of the support band.

This all lead to another double life. Its a very weird feeling playing a show in front of ten thousand people or even fifty thousand plus and feeling on top of the world knowing that within two days you will be back in the same cold factory in the morning doing a repetitive job and freezing your balls off for fuck all money.

I am not and will never complain, I love the fact that I just get to do it. I do it for free when I have to because I love the experience and I wouldn't change it for the world but it still feels strange.

It is also strange knowing that the kids in the front row of a massive show who are jumping up and down and screaming the lyrics at you think you only live one life.
"But you are playing with Metallica in front of 50,000 people. You must have loads of money. You must be a musician full time. You must have a nice car and a nice house right?"

Well kids, it just doesn't work that way now but the dream is still nice.

Thankfully I have almost whittled down my multiple personalities to just one. I am now leading ONE life. Maybe for the first time since I was a small child.

I now DO work in music full time and I love it.  I own my own studio (I mean, I will be paying off the debt for years to come but it is a start) and we do have a nice house (mortgaged for twenty five years but who cares).

I get up every day now and aside from the crippling debt I am doing something I enjoy and I cant ask for more than that.

I am living the dream one cat nap at a time.

Thanks for reading this if you made it this far, I will keep this updated sporadically as a diary/therapy session as and when I have something to say.

Take care

Danny B
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