A high risk strategy

There is something quite surreal about deciding to become a serious rock musician. This ought to apply equally to pursuing other artistic ambitions but there is something about rock music and the way it penetrates our lives with its spectacular, outrageous and eccentric flamboyance that puts it in a league of its own.

And that is one of the reasons why friends are naturally prone to regard embracing such musical ambitions as a frivolous and embarrassing manifestation of a mid-life crisis. What they do not see, though, is the extreme personal risk that is hard-wired into the essential character of performing original music you have written yourself. There is probably no better way of making yourself an invitingly soft target for ridicule than by stepping out of an apparently settled life of conventional middle age and on to a stage with an electric guitar around your neck.

The only defence is authenticity. But I did not stop to think about it at the time. I was utterly energised, carried along on the crest of the wave of the emotional backwash from my best friend’s death (see last week’s blog, ”Carpe Diem”) so that it never occurred to me for a second that I would not succeed in producing really good music that I would be proud of.

Looking back, I wonder that I did not hesitate with a wobble of confidence now and then. I had very little original material on the shelf, I had no band and I had never seriously sung to an audience before …..and certainly not my own songs. A high risk strategy, for sure.

Somehow, I just knew it would come together.

© 2020 The Madaxeman