The Unreasonable Silence

Making Sense of the Human Condition

Why many new artists struggle to get anywhere with their music…

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On 10 October 2023

In Music

I’ve been recently reading about this concept of ‘Priming’ in relation to psychology, and how we all unconsciously respond to marketing around us. Priming is the idea that exposure to one stimulus may influence a response to a subsequent stimulus, without conscious guidance or intention. It has a particular relevance for any artist trying to get interest in their music because we are all ‘primed’ to take the most interest when our favourite artist releases anything new.

Imagine two artists presenting the exact same album, literally the same songs, same singer, same band, same audio. One is released by a high profile artist that we know, the second is released by a completely unknown artist. Each is given the exact same marketing budget, is promoted on the same platforms, with the same advertising copy. It will be no surprise that the high profile artist will enjoy much greater interest, and will generally receive more engagement. Less surprising is that they will also receive much more negative criticism… The reason for this is that the audience has been primed with an expectation of how that music should sound. The reality may not meet their expectations. There are other priming influences; People will respond generally when they know other people will respond, a rolling snowball of engagement fuelled by feedback from others… The signal to purchase will be much stronger because people are primed to respond to similar buying signals when others do the same. There is a reason that people buy more band merchandise at gigs, this is priming in action.

The unknown artist will present their same album to an empty room. Much like an exhibition stand at a sales conference, the lack of interest, will fail to create any more interest. With no existing priming information, there is no reason even to walk over and investigate, no reason to click the link and hear the music. When you understand that people need to be primed to act, the way the marketing world works starts make sense, why large organisations spend millions putting logos in weird places with seemingly no context about the product they are selling. They are seeding primes… At the mere mention of the artist name, will have a view of what we think about them. This dictates all our future responses to anything they have to sell or promote.

When the product comes, we will all respond..or not..

Ignoring the fuel gauge – How your life will improve when you stop counting the days.

By

On 25 September 2023

In Self Improvement

Confucius said “We have two lives and the second one starts when we realise we only have one”.

There comes a turning point in your outlook I think, when you have this realisation that the days in front of you are less than the days behind. Then I found there is another turning point sometime after that when you realise it’s not a good idea to count the days like that. I spent some time with my Dad recently who is in his late 70s and in rude health. I realised he was thoroughly enjoying his life and that enjoyment wasn’t coming from staring at the fuel of gauge of life and thinking I’ve got less than a quarter of a tank left, best make the most of it.

He’d made a new fuel gauge, one that is calibrated over the remaining quarter. Either that or he’d dismissed any notion of there being a gauge at all, which is even better.

So I think this notion of living your best days because there aren’t many left isn’t helpful. It’s better just to live, and I mean live in the active sense not a passive, ‘I’m just existing’, one. I can refine that further by saying I’m much more intolerant now of wasting time. If I spend my energy on something it’s got to pass a few tests.

1- Does it fulfil me?

2- Does it help fulfil someone else?

3- Does it sustain my resources to do 1 or 2?

I’ve also realised that success and achievement are highly overrated. Really bad things happen to successful people that only live for achievement. When they get to whatever goal they’ve set themselves, their lives suddenly become very empty, and dangerous things start to fill the void.. That’s what The Man Left In Space was all about.

Better to be fulfilled on the journey…which is why I’ve started writing music again.

A Musician’s guide to self worth.

By

On 2 April 2023

In Music, Random Thoughts

I was asked recently about self worth as a musician and how to maintain it. I’m probably the worst person to ask as in many cases I’ve utterly failed to find it on many occasions. But like losing your car keys for hours and then suddenly finding them, I can at least offer some insight into what I’ve done to restore the equilibrium. I think the present landscape presents a fairly bleak outlook for any musician, but that’s not to say it’s hopeless. The problem is we are approaching the end of a unique and golden time in the history of the music industry, the era of the recording artist. It’s nearly done, over, and many of us are struggling to see the transition into something else.

A key tenet of maintaining any sort of self worth is to feel valued in what you do. So how do you remain valued when the world largely is increasingly indifferent to your art…. Music is now free right? I’ll aways remember an old work colleague saying to me once, when I told him that I was leaving the corporate world and was going to spent more time on my music career, he asked me to ‘send a copy of the album because I never pay for music…’ There was no joke or laugh at the end of his sentence, he was deadly serious and had no reason to suspect I would refuse such a generous offer of his interest in my labours. This was a nice guy who I’d worked with for many years who had just told me straight that he thought what I would be doing was utterly worthless to him in financial terms even though he was a music fan. If I’d offered to clear his gutters or change a tap washer for him he’d have got his wallet out and paid much more than the cost of a CD with no issue.

And there you have it. Self worth for musicians in one nugget. If the world doesn’t value you, you have no option but to do that for yourself.

Self-worth is one of the most elusive currencies in the music industry though. We are judged by how many streams we make, how many records we sell, how many people we played to… how many awards we have won.. In commercial terms, it’s a numbers game. When we do find a tiny fleck of success, it’s often fragile and fleeting. Even if you are successful, the world will judge the success of your next output by the metric of the previous one.

We are judged, scrutinised..We’re often bombarded with messages online that tell us we’re not good enough. We’re told that we need to sound like this artist, or that we need to play this genre, or that we need to do this to be successful. Then we are wrapped up in the game. We’re constantly comparing ourselves to other musicians and measuring our worth against external standards that have nothing to do with our own unique musical voice. He plays better than me, she’s got a better voice than me. He’s more confident on stage than me…We can also be defeated by our own expectations.

Seeking self-worth can be the foundation of a fulfilling musical journey. It’s the belief that we are valuable and deserving of respect, appreciation, and recognition simply because we have the courage to share our music with the world. It’s the understanding that our worth as musicians is not determined by external measures of success, such as the number of likes on our social media pages, the amount of money we make, or the size of our fanbase. Our worth is determined by our passion for music, our dedication to our craft, and our ability to connect with others through our art.

I’ve been doing this a while now, 9 Cosmograf albums and 10,000 hours of work. I still have the same enthusiasm to make and share music but the urgency of seeing my work in print and press has diminished somewhat…

In the early days I’d be seeking that external validation from reviews and comments, but now it’s more about what the music means to me. I’m also now slowing down on the output. An album release nearly every year was too demanding and to be honest I’ve no desire at all to repeat myself just to keep people happy.

Self worth means for me deciding that I want to do other things too, fulfilling personal projects and maybe things that will actually pay the bills. I’m also enjoying producing other bands, and musicians. Helping them out on their own musical journey is incredibly rewarding.

Some of us may decide that being a full time musician just isn’t realistic anymore and there’s no shame in that, none at all. Things have changed out of our control and you have to adapt. Being realistic and realising that you need to do other things to make money is definitely one of the best things you can do to protect your self worth.

Music will always be there for me, but I’ve consciously chosen to separate the art of making music from the expectation of being paid a living wage from it. There are easier ways to do that…and I’m working hard on those too. Touring isn’t featuring in this plan I’m afraid. There will be a few shows for sure, but I have no appetite for walking that perilous financial tightrope.

In some ways I’ve achieved the best solution. I am free to express myself as an artist without the pressure of making that output pay. This might mean I may move in unexpected creative directions as a result. I hope you’ll carry on listening…

Trigger’s Broom

By

On 10 March 2023

In Music, Random Thoughts

And the paradox of prog fans that won’t accept change…

Those of you based in the UK may have a fond memory for a certain UK sitcom called ‘Only Fools and Horses’. One of the main characters was a hapless and rather gormless road sweeper affectionately known as ‘Trigger’, on account of his searingly trigger fast wit and *intelligence (*British sarcasm). Trigger once proclaimed to Del and Rodney in a famous sketch in the show, that he had used the same broom for 20 years….even though it has had 17 new heads and 14 new handles.. Apparently this is also called The Ship of Theseus Paradox. Plutarch asked whether a wooden ship which has had every single piece of wood replaced was still the same ship.

The paradox is alive and well in the world of prog too. I’m sure we all know a band or two of a certain name where the substantial part, or just all of the original members are no longer present. I’m not mentioning names here, online wars have been started in the name of such conjecture and my flameproof suit is at the cleaners.

As many of you know, I love the expressive world of irony, metaphor and allegory, and I do find it hilarious that a group of people of advanced years, not untainted by the ageing process, seem to be the least tolerant when it comes to new music from ‘Trigger’s Broom’ bands.

Like perennial teenagers stuck in Boomer bodies, their minds are stuck somewhere in 1973 when the giants of prog were in their caped and Mellotron adorned prime. Their bodies tell quite the different story of course and some are much larger, greyer, follically challenged and generally world weary (I include myself in this). So then wonder why they have such unreasonable expectations that a band can form in their teenage years and remain in a state of perpetual youth and brio for some 50 years, without disagreement in creative direction, or suing each other… without illness, death or a myriad of other life circumstances that dictate a change in the band lineup. As anybody who has actually been in a rock band will tell you, keeping any band together for more than 6 months is more than a minor miracle.

Prog fans are difficult to please it seems.

A post script to this is that according to research, our bodies replace many of their nearly 30 trillion cells regularly. About 330 billion of those cells are replaced every day. So by next week we could be almost entirely different beings than today. The bit that stops us morphing into multi-headed dopplegangers is that our DNA stays the same from the day of a cell’s birth until it dies. It also changes over time too, but much more slowly.

So we are all Trigger’s Broom… and as long as the music still sounds like your favourite band, I think it’s OK if they now don’t quite look like you remember.

Why You Should Support New Bands and not Pay £200 for a Concert Ticket.

By

On 1 February 2023

In Music

There was an interesting disturbance in the music world recently when Peter Gabriel announced his long awaited concert tour. Amongst the excitement and furious activity to obtain tickets, was inevitably the consternation about the prices..

I have to admit I was in that camp. With the average ticket price somewhere around the £200 mark, I just wonder what has happened in the music industry where this is an acceptable price for a gig, even one as illustrious as the return of Mr Gabriel to the stage for the first time in nearly a decade.

A friend on Facebook recalled that they saw Peter at Birmingham Arena in 1983, for the princely sum of £7. Accounting for inflation over 40 years, the equivalent price in today’s money would be £21… So how did we get from there to £200?. Is it just the built up demand to see this legendary artist? or are there other forces at work?

To examine that, I think we need to look at where the record industry is now. Technology, in particular the concept of streaming, has bent the traditional model of physical record sales so badly that an artist at Peter Gabriel’s level now is almost giving music away as a loss leader to promote ticket and merch sales. Peter is long past having a number one hit album and even further from becoming a streaming sensation with a single track, but he is at least blessed with an older demographic that have followed him since the early days of Genesis, and many have bought all the records along the way. But that model died when Spotify levelled the music industry as we know it and made the largest all you can hear buffet of music for the princely sum of FREE….

Imagine travelling back to 1980 and saying to your mate in the record store. “You know, one day someone will invent this thing called the internet, and then someone will put all the worlds music on it, and you’ll be able to listen to any song you want for nothing…” I think the response would be something like “Get out of here and stay off the drugs!”. But this is exactly what has happened.

Back in the day, artists sold millions of records and then toured the hell out of the album. These days you get to consume the record for nothing, with the hope that you’ll pay through the nose to see the artist on tour and buy a barrowload of merch whilst you are there.

For artists at the other end of the spectrum like me, we are to some extent trying to navigate our way through a sea of fog without a clear idea of where land is. In the modern progressive rock genre, we are at least blessed with a very high percentage of fans that still value the physical record. Somehow, we also still have record shops in 2022, and a new appetite for vinyl that the pressing plants are really struggling to satisfy. I’ve been waiting over 8 months now for my own latest album to be pressed.

But a world tour at anything like £200 a ticket is the pension benefit for the rock dinosaurs of another era. There’s nothing here for even moderately successful musicians in a marginalised and uncool genre of music. But I guess this is common whatever music is being played on the stage.

The most successful contemporary exponent of prog currently is the reformed Steven Wilson led, Porcupine Tree, selling out sizeable venues across UK, Europe and the US. The ticket prices are also much more reasonable £65. Still not cheap though.

As I said on Facebook it also boggles my mind that a lot of people in that Peter Gabriel audience have thought nothing about paying £200 for a ticket, but would baulk at the prospect of spending £10 on a record from a new band. This for me is where the danger lies…

The sad thing here is that there will never be another Peter Gabriel, Genesis, Yes, Floyd or King Crimson. And the reason for that is the fans of those bands won’t give them up… and they will always be willing to throw huge piles of cash at everything their record labels offer for sale. Yet another Floyd remaster packaged in in a fir lined case with a vellum parchment booklet? “Sir, take my money!” No one should have to give up their heroes of course, but equally people need to be aware that unless you support the small guys, there will never be anyone to fill their shoes. Maybe they don’t want anyone filling their shoes?…I still hear people saying good music died in the late 70s…The more informed of us know that there are incredible bands in modern prog that are making music the equal of anything produced then, and in all the same traditions.

But now the industry has unrecognisably changed, we are all struggling to come to terms with what success now looks like. One of my artist friends joked that he never foresaw that his band would actually effectively become a clothing brand, as the only money he made was from selling merch, mostly T shirts at gigs.

A successful artist now in the prog world sells a few thousand CDs per release and can probably get around 100 people in a room for a gig at £20 per ticket. It can take at least 10 years of endless work to get to that level too. I’ve always struggled with this protracted slog of effort with the reward of virtually no financial return and you might have noticed I regularly bleat on about it. In my previous life in the water industry it was possible to navigate an entire career and triple your salary over the same period, and I didn’t even work as hard as I do now. But then again, if I was back in 1973 too, I wouldn’t have been signed and none of my music would ever have been heard.

When you work through these modest numbers, it’s not difficult to understand why ‘successful’, critically acclaimed, and in some cases award winning artists are taking second jobs and struggling to pay their energy bills.

It’s a shit business….



Why calling people toxic is toxic.

By

On 20 January 2023

In Self Improvement

I’m really aware of this recent phenomena in Psychotherapy circles of calling people or relationships ‘toxic’. I see it all the time now on mental health blogs and I personally don’t think it’s helpful.

If you go around labelling everyone who offends you as ‘toxic’ you are in danger of actually making a very bold statement about yourself, in particular your intolerance for anyone that doesn’t share your views. I think it reinforces the notion that certain people are the cause of your problems and if you avoid them, your problem will go away. The truth is that virtually anyone can present a very challenging set of circumstances to you if you are experiencing a mental health crisis or simply going through a difficult period in your life.

The solution maybe is not to avoid everyone that you consider represents a threat to you but maybe to examine why you feel that way about that person, and why maybe others don’t. You might not like their behaviour or agree with what they’re doing, and you also don’t need to put up with it, but at least you can see it more objectively as someone’s own response to anxious behaviour, trauma, neglect or any other unresolved issue, rather than some notion that their behaviour is aimed at harming you.

I presented this idea on my Facebook page recently and had some interesting replies, some agreeing with me and a number of people who were really defending the use of the word.

It could of course be semantics over the words used but I just think the labelling doesn’t resolve the issue. For me when faced with this kind of situation, I need to confront the reasons why the behaviour was unacceptable, why the boundaries were crossed, and where to set them in the future, in order to be sure my actions were appropriate. Without that I’m just reinforcing the belief that everyone I meet is toxic if I don’t like the way they behave. I can’t see how that’s healthy.

A few people were concerned I was advocating a policy of ‘turning the other cheek’. That’s absolutely not the case and in many cases I was thinking absolutely the opposite. If someone wants to do harm to you, then show them clearly where those boundaries are in no uncertain terms. But the real battle comes afterwards when you have to deal with the fallout, post trauma… The therapy for that is a bit more complicated than simply labelling that person, or behaviour ‘toxic’, sweeping it under the carpet and moving on. There lies the danger of it being used as a fix all sticking plaster.

Experiencing trauma should not be a life sentence for living the rest of your life, and a good therapist should be able to help to reframe those events without the labels.

The view we take of these events is crucial to our mental health going forward.

I am Analogue man

I am Analogue Man – Why the Future is not like it’s shown on TV.

By

On 6 January 2023

In Uncategorised

Despite enjoying many of the attractions of modern technology, in many ways I am ‘analogue man’, and here to remind you of what we have all lost in the unstoppable procession into the future…But maybe we haven’t lost much at all?

If you are old enough to remember the BBC series Tomorrow’s World that was very popular in the 70s and 80s, they delighted in showcasing the ‘Home of the Future’ giving us all a tantalising taste of how we’d all be using laser disc players, video phones and have robots doing the housework. Well elements of all those things came true, but maybe not quite as literally as they were depicted by Judith Hann and Michael Rodd all those years ago. The thing they didn’t factor into their futuristic predictions is that people don’t conveniently follow technology curves, throwing out everything that’s old and replacing it with new. They didn’t factor in that people kind of like old and new stuff and mix it all together.

Now we have smart phones capable of video calls, and there’s no need for laser discs, video recorders and minidisc players…. But get this! We ‘stream’ our music from data servers whilst still buying something called ‘vinyl records’, remember them?

You see, a lot of us still have this profound underlying need to connect to bygone eras. It’s not just nostalgia for Boomers or Generation X’ers either… Generation Z’ers are buying LPs for the first time and discovering The Beatles and The Stones. And they are finding out all about this historic music from their smartphones watching something called TicTak and FaceTube. This is the beauty of marrying old with new.

In the real world of Tomorrow, the wonderful thing is, you get to pick and choose. Our Homes of the Future are typically an eclectic mix of 4K TVs, smartphones with more processing power than Houston Mission Control in the 1960s, and carpet and furniture designed in the late 19th century. The Kubrick 2001 ‘esqe vision of bright red plastic furniture and white walls was cool for a while, but we got tired of Spaceman fashion and craved a return to the more sartorial elegance of an Edwardian country house. Just as long as there are enough USB charging points and a decent internet connection.

How many of us still read good old fashioned books but purchase them from Amazon on an iPad or Phone? Technology hasn’t yet killed off the book, and I don’t think it will kill off the CD either, which is another weird anomaly that is set to survive the streaming revolution.

My other job is repairing, and servicing vintage watches and to some extent I also make music ‘of a bygone era’, where again, I mix, quite literally, the old and new. I’m now the proud owner of a 2020 spec Apple Silicon M1 powered computer running the latest version of Logic which I can seamlessly interface with my handmade valve powered microphone pre amp designed by Universal Audio in the late 1960s.

Rolex steadfastly still make the most desirable and iconic watches in the world and, they are also the most environmentally sustainable too. They require no power, no nasty lithium mined batteries, take minimal energy to manufacture, last 100 years + and are worth more in 10 years than when you bought them. They are also less accurate and useful than a £30 Smartwatch. Which is why the two happily co-exist at the same point in history.

The thing is, the past is full of imperfection, crackles, hiss, noise, smell, heat, weight, inaccuracy, inconvenience, danger, and the digital world promises to solve all these problems. But we forget that we become fond of things that aren’t perfect. The imperfections that the analogue world creates, are the very imperfections us humans grow to love.

The crackle and warmth of vinyl, the distorting characteristics of an overdriven valve amplifier, the sound of the Mellotron trying to imitate a choir or strings. Then there’s the orange glow of filament bulbs, the smell of a leather interior, the sound of a V8 engine under load…You get the idea..

Some of these things disappear but they come back in digital form. Then people wonder how good the emulation is and get excited about rediscovering the original analogue design. Before you know it we are all paying ridiculous sums of money for stuff that was thrown out in the rubbish 50 years ago.

In the music production world we have plugins that emulate classic analogue circuitry. LED lights now mimic the look of filament bulbs and once we are over this initial phase of electric vehicles with the aesthetic appeal of household domestic appliances, my prediction is that a new era of EVs will arrive that resemble the classic lines of yesteryear. I have no doubt that EV sports cars will also come with a choice of organic engine noises played in the cockpit to hide the really awful ones like brakes squealing and tyres rumbling.

A good friend said to me once, that one day the digital world will be better at being analogue than analogue is….He may be right.

But on that subject of old things becoming desirable again. Here’s a fascinating question.. What are we are throwing away now that will become priceless to collectors in the 2070s?… Answers in the comments please…

A Man with a Fork in a World of Soup – Feeling Like You Don’t Fit

By

On 31 December 2022

In Uncategorised

Facebook has this feature called ‘Memories’. When you click on it, the app shows you everything you posted on this same day, going back a number of years. On News Years Eve in 2019 I posted about how my mental health had declined in the previous year and jokingly said that my mind Failed Under Continuous Testing (FUCT). I had identified that I was spending too much time trying to fix the unfixable. I had somehow smashed the pottery into a thousand pieces and was berating myself for not being able to put all the pieces back together. This is such a common theme for me. I am completely unable to let things go, to sweep the pieces into the bin and start again.

I admire those people who can do this, intently, the ones that can accept with good grace the deal that life has dealt them and start again. For me, the agony is continuously replaying the trauma on a loop. I still want to replay the same sorry scenario over and over, like some demented software engineer who’s trying to find the exact line of code where it all went wrong.

For me, 2022 has been all about fear and loss… I lost an old school friend to cancer back in August and it deeply affected me. We barely spoke in recent years but we were connected by the whole life forming experience of being great mates at school and subsequently bandmates with hopes and dreams of rock stardom. Rob was an extraordinary character; he couldn’t see any barriers in the world, just opportunities. He suffered appalling circumstance on many occasions, but just got back up undaunted. It seems such a cruel irony that life turned around and finally pulled the rug from under him at just 52, when he was so well equipped to deal with its numerous downs.

I was and still am the opposite.. I can see hurdles from miles away, perceived hazards, pitfalls, possible things that can go wrong, and people with dishonest intentions. Some would say that this is a fantastic life skill, and it’s certainly saved me from disaster on a number of occasions, but also it can be all so overwhelming, putting plans in place to achieve anything of worth is often too anxiety-inducing to contemplate.

I very recently discovered I may be suffering from something called ‘Hypervigilance’ which is the mind being in an elevated state of constantly assessing potential threats around you. It can have all kinds of unwanted consequences, but does have at least a flipside in that it unleashes a wonderful creativity for writing concept albums.

I wrote this song called ‘If Things Don’t Change’, and it’s very clear things are very much going to have to change in 2023, and for a lot of people.

Increasingly in 2022 I found myself incredibly angry about politics, and I have subjected friends and family to more than a few rants. But I think we are heading for disaster… Just on one level, my energy bill for December was £400. Just one month.. I can’t afford this, and I don’t know many people who can, where will this all end?

I am thankful for a few things. The very few genuine friends I still have. The adage about finding out who your true friends are has never been more resonant. Also family and the opportunity to keep trying, even if every year it feels like an ever increasing incline. I think of Rob and also former bandmate David Longdon who will never get that chance… As I wrote in the song..”As long as I can feel the sun, I’m willing to try..”

Cosmograf reached its most critically acclaimed heights yet, this year with the new album, even though the sales remain frustratingly low. It’s the latter point and the growing cost of living which is causing me the most anguish I think… The constant mismatch of putting your heart and soul into work that for the most part is not valued except by those very loyal dedicated fans that continue to support me. I joked to my parents in law at Christmas, that I could have built another company by now and retired, but like so many of my fellow muso friends struggling at the moment, I sold my soul to rock and roll.

To be honest, I don’t know how much more time I can dedicate to music, when it pays so poorly…and I think 2023 will see me put more effort into building other income streams, including my watch repair business.

Forgive my lack of positivity for the new year, but at the moment I feel like that great quote from Noel Gallagher describing his brother, Liam:

“He’s a man with a fork in a world of soup”.



Sharks

Swimming with Sharks – Why Bad Things Should Happen To You

By

On 2 November 2022

In Music, Self Improvement

Lies, Damn lies and Statistics
I’m sure you remember that old statistic about the likelihood of getting bitten by a shark. I just googled it again and apparently it’s 1 in 3.75million. Being the overthinking being that I am, I wonder how on earth they calculated that, and how absurd the notion is that the risk of being eaten by Jaws is the same if you lived in a suburban house in Reading, or if you were an Australian surfer on Bondi beach.

Of course the risk isn’t the same at all. Our own brains are as equally useless as averaged statistics in assessing the objective level of danger that you are in. The mind is unable to calculate the true risk of what lies before us and it actually takes an experience based approach to whether something is harmful to us or whether we are more unfortunate than other people in whatever event occurs.

Do you Feel Lucky?
One person’s assessment of whether a situation is risky or dangerous can be entirely different to someone else’s. Similarly it’s also impossible to objectively determine if someone has been lucky or unlucky. It’s just something we say… If our Australian surfer spends every day in the water in the known habitat and feeding grounds of a Great White, there is a good chance he’s eventually going to have a rather unwanted encounter. If he does, we might opine that he was ‘unlucky’ to get bitten, but given all the circumstances, it was bound to happen. We might also say he was ‘lucky’ to survive, which is surely the daftest statement ever if we are saying there was a 1 in 3.75million chance of being bitten in the first place. Our tiny brains aren’t very clever at objective assessment. We just say what we see, or say what we think we know from our own experience, or the experience of others that we are aware of.

Rock Stars Die Young
When I was a teenager I spent more than a few hours wondering why so many big rock stars that I dreamed of becoming, seemed to die before their time, often in some sort of hideous misadventure. Drugs, alcohol, helicopter, plane and car crashes, and various other unusual deaths seemed to be very common and certainly well above the statistical averages.

What was the reason for this? Are the music and creative industries really so inherently dangerous? We all know the 27 Club thing, right? It’s fuel for conspiracy theorists but also fun to try and take a more scientific approach, using things like reasoning and probability to analyse what’s going on.

I guess if we look at the activities that surround the art of making music in a bit more detail we start to get a more realistic picture. Logistics pay a big part, and back in the 70s and 80s, getting a rock star from A to B involved a great deal of fast moving and dangerous transportation in an era where we hadn’t even legislated on the safety benefits of the seatbelt, let alone the airbag.

Drugs and alcohol have always gone hand in hand with the music industry and in many cases were salves to the crushing boredom of life on the road or a way of coping with the pressures of fame, or an intangible artistic struggle.

I don’t think luck has much to do with any of this at all but yet the brain persists to draw its own erroneous conclusions. In my own life I regularly curse my own ‘luck’ and question ‘why me?’ on a whole variety of daily issues. The one parcel of CDs that our label sends without insurance will always get lost in the post and I then wonder why I’m almost on first name terms with the Royal Mail help team on Twitter. It’s because, just like those 70s rock stars, I’m ‘Swimming With Sharks’. I send a lot of post, therefore probability dictates that I will lose some stuff at some point.

Virtual Sharks
This all sounds very trivial until you realise that our mental health is really inextricably linked to the view we take of ourselves and that of the world around us. If we go through life thinking that we are cursed, or unlucky or that good things will never happen to us then the probability that life will get worse will increase for sure.

I wrote a song on my album Mind Over Depth, literally called ‘Sharks’. As with so many of my concepts, I’d taken a story and made it into an analogy or allegory for some other deeper meaning. The story in this was case was the fate of the crew USS Indianapolis that delivered components for the atomic bomb that levelled Hiroshima in August 1945. The ship was holed by a Japanese submarine and all the surviving crew went into the shark infested waters of the Pacific, leading to the largest shark attack in history. In my song, the sharks represented the negative thoughts that attack us every day, and the thrashing movements of the stricken sailors, our futile attempts to defeat them. And furthermore, the very thrashing about and shouting in resistance, made things worse attracting even more ‘sharks’.

We are all ‘Swimming with Sharks’ to some extent but more positively I think we can possibly reverse this mindset. If we consider we are ‘Dancing with Angels’, we might consider that ‘being lucky’ is surrounding ourselves in an environment where our productivity yields the most fertile results. Some would dismiss this as ‘being in the right place at the right time’, yet another fortune based idiom.

But how can we use this insight? Well, when something bad happens to me now, I try this trick:
Instead of saying “Why is this happening to me?”, I say to myself. “Why SHOULDN’T this happen to me?” This simple act of reversing the perspective defeats my brain into taking a more realistic view of the situation. I think a lot of really resilient people that I know do this automatically without even thinking about it. They accept that there is no immunity against life dealing them a bad hand, but they equally know the storm will pass, and they laugh in the face of the wind…

Where It All Went Wrong – Tabloid Reading Boomers

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On 8 September 2022

In Uncategorised

Those that follow me on Facebook and Twitter may have noticed I’ve become rather animated about politics these days. When I started my adventures as Cosmograf, I formed a firm opinion that it was best if musicians simply stayed out of political issues. I watched as some of my contemporaries clearly put their mark in the sand and pinned their party political allegiances to the mast, and I thought they were making a terrible mistake, dividing and alienating a potential audience when, it was all too difficult to get any attention at all for your music.

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