Burn baby BURN! The melt down.

After years in the shadows I'm slowly creeping intoithe light. My new years' resolution is to have a Christmas number one. It’s only February so there’s loads of time. 

This childhood dream was re-realized in a charity shop during an encounter with a casio keyboard. It had so many beats it could bring you and all your dreams back to life. I bought it instantly, and last week I secretly performed for the first time in years. Me, a guitar I couldn't play and a weird baby sang this original cult classic-  WITCH BABY and Bar Wotever at The Vauxhall Tavern were very nice to let me do so.  I've no doubt I'll be headlining the alternative Pride 2019 

 This was more remarkable because last year, due to monumental sadness, I had completely lost the ability to sing at all: 
Ever since I was a peculiar little girl, I’ve written peculiar songs. ‘Nigel The Super Cow’ was my first great song, Test Tube Baby came next- These were not a success on the local youth club scene and I nearly got in a fight because cool kids didn’t understand or appreciate things that were different. They didn’t understand that singing about super cows was in fact probably the coolest thing you can do.

My dreams of having a Christmas number one hit were ignited even earlier when I won a school competition for best Christmas song. It was played in assembly and I hid in the toilets every lunch break for a week. I was the new kid, incredibly shy and bullied ferociously in my last school, I was trying desperately to not let it happen in this one and hiding seemed like the best chance of survival. Nothing bad happened and I got a letter saying my amazing song had been entered into the regional final-  I was to perform it live to all the other schools in the area! This was HUGE for a 12yr old.  

The regional finals were full of talent from the county, but pretty soon I realized none of them were singing Christmas songs. Worse than that, my last school bully was there in her cool band ... And here I was, shaking with nerves, about to sing my special Christmas song about Jesus, in July. 

Needless to say, I fooked it quite spectacularly. 

Despite these knocks, singing in secret has always brought me joy, but last year, due to monumental sadness, I completely lost the ability to sing. I couldn’t pitch, couldn’t hold a tune, couldn’t even hum along to something without sounding off. I thought I was losing my most basic neural functions and I was very scared and very very sad.

Back in October, I took myself off to the wilderness to find some sort of peace. With nothing to do but make very dangerous fires in a pine forest, I spent a month burning pain, pain, and pine needles.  I reluctantly picked up a guitar and spent all the other time twiddling my thumbs, before the month was out I’d written my first song in years. I decided that I would be a singer after all.
                                                                                    ----
So the last you heard, in the throes of madness, I was selling all my material possessions and running away to Portugal to become a wild woman. Removing myself from my friends, family and support network at a time when I probably needed them most to live with randoms on a hill in the middle of the Portuguese wilderness, was a strange choice, but I wanted to be around people who didn’t know me or my struggles.

I was doing a ‘Workaway placement’ and my temporary new life revolved around building some dudes dream house and clearing his extensive forest garden alongside 6 other recruits, nomads and escapists.
 
Initial impressions were he really didn’t care about his new house guest.  It didn’t take long for things to change and I started to get the impression that I scared him a little….  Ha. 
With my intergalactic intelligence and practical skills, I was put on fire duty and banished to the hill every day for a month. With just one extinguisher and no supervision, I built huge ridiculous fires everywhere. VERY DANGEROUS. Gosh, wow, yeah so dangerous. Turns out I have a raw talent for building fires. Fires so powerful, they kept burning under the sodden forest floor. They started calling me the Fire Queen, saying I just had to look at some wood and it would spontaneously burst into flames. These fires represented my burning soul. I would feed the fire my pain; pain, pine, and eucalyptus, mostly. I spent so much time by the fire I wrote a song. Pretty much the only thing I did there.  It started off very sad, then it got angry, and now it’s just about hot women. Much more marketable. 

Communal living with no internet or technology meant entertaining ourselves in new ways. We did incredible things with cardboard boxes and to my surprise, I was popular with my peers. People were queuing up to play with me and my box of dreams! There were a lot of musical instruments too, but no one there could play them. I was disappointed. Reluctantly, I picked up a guitar and cringed. I hate the annoying person on the guitar at a party…but here I was making the first steps to become one.

 



I started to feel like it was a waste of time busting my balls for someone else's dream. Work-Away felt more like Slave-away. With no escape, no internet and no thanks, I was just a well-behaved minion doing the masters bidding. I was beating myself up for not ‘being creative’ in the way I imagined, the musical I’d set my heart on writing wasn’t coming out and my hands were hurting in the arthritic way that shouldn’t happen to a healthy 32 yr old. I made up for this sleeping, crying and playing the guitar. There was such little thanks for setting the hill on fire, I decided it was time to bust a move and headed to Lisbon for a great time drinking expensive cocktails for a week.  

  
I came back to the UK in the same position I left in; living in lounges and frustrated by lack of anything good.  I honestly believed my trip to Portugal was pointless. 
But I was wrong. It took a while for it to sink in deeply but what I needed to do was find my voice. This mental resuscitation came in the form of that retro Casio keyboard with so many beats you could bring yourself back to life. It reminded me of my very first dreams of being a singer, of having a christmas number one. My dad left me the tiniest bit of money, which is ironic because he never had any- And after buying this strange keyboard, I remebered I could play the guitar, and before long, I had a shit one from gumtree. My dreams were feeling achievable.



  I really feel that my luckiest break must be on the horizon. I thought I needed dead animals, loads of space, hundreds of thousands of pounds, people to do everything ect ect….. but I don’t. All I need is myself... this keyboard, this guitar from gumtrree and an electric guitar that was donated to the cause. I'm back In London now with a home and a phone and a bone so if you have creative oppertunites or want a christmas number one too then get in touch. My gates are always open. 

I am still a multi-faceted creative powerhouse and nothing can change or stop that. Only me. 
#Christmasnumber1





  

-->

-->

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Plug Me In, Turn Me On

Debut Contemporary: CON ARTIST: Crimes Against Artists Humanity

Like A Lamb to the Slaughter. Easter special.