Firstly, let me state that as an artist I am vehemently opposed to copyright infringement and piracy. I have found my own work on illegal download sites, and it’s not pleasant.

I don’t agree with the argument that people who steal first will then pay for it later. In this case they can’t anyway: that particular album isn’t available as a download and the CD’s are out of stock.

I also don’t agree with the idea that it’s ‘getting your stuff out there’. It’s up to me who gets to hear my music for nothing. I have no band, so don’t gig, so there is nothing to promote but the recorded work itself, and if someone shares it without my permission, they are literally taking money out of my pocket.

Whilst I agree with copyright laws, they do little, if anything, to help the ‘smaller’ artists, or indeed any artists. As any research into Spotify will show you, it’s the big record companies that end up making all the money.

When I first started making music, demos were copied onto cassette tape and posted out to record labels. This was an expensive business, and there was talk at the time of placing a levy on blank cassette tapes (i.e. price them out of the market) to stop piracy. In effect, the people who would have been most hurt by this were struggling musicians.

A few years ago, the copy protection software on CD albums would take out people’s operating systems if they attempted to play it in a computer. Fair enough if someone is intending to run off illegal copies, but what about musicians who need the music on their computer because they have to learn a song, or record a cover version? They certainly don’t need their computer to be out of action when they’re in the middle of a job.

I use Megaupload for storing and sharing music and sound files that I have created for myself and others. I do session work in my home studio and upload the files so the clients can download them. I also use Megaupload to get my own music to my record label.

The files I have up on Megaupload are confidential, pre-release material intended only for the recipient’s use. Surely the FBI must be breaking the law by accessing, deleting, or blocking these files.

As always, the innocent are punished, and the professional pirates will just find a way around it as they always do. Piracy hurts artists, but so does this heavy-handed approach of penalising legitimate users for sharing their own work.

Many people equate the term ‘artist’ with ‘rich and famous’ when in reality the majority of people working in all areas of the arts barely scrape a living. Stealing their work takes food out of their mouths, but so does destroying their work in the hope of catching a few wrongdoers. Not so much breaking a butterfly upon a wheel as setting off a nuclear bomb to kill a handful of ants.

Of course, I’m not really writing a book like this. Although I’ve been saying I will for years, if only as an antidote to what’s out there. And as a result of this half-hearted plan, I’ve read a truckload of such books, a tiny few of which had some nuggets of wisdom, most of which made me chuckle, and some of which made shake my head in despair.

The title ‘Painting With Your Feet’ has nothing to do with artists who paint with their feet because they don’t have functioning hands, but instead refers to the core attitude of many such books aimed at women. I could have called it ‘Knitting With Your Hair’, because most of these self-improvement books are designed to make women change, not for the better, and certainly not for themselves, but into some strange parody of a human being in order to gain approval and attention from men who don’t even like them, let alone might be willing to spend their lives with them.

I am all for change and self-improvement, I’ve spent much of my adult life doing it, but every change I’ve made has been for myself. Other people have, in general, been opposed to some of my changes, but I did them anyway, because I did them for me, for my approval of myself, not for anyone else’s.

There are very few self-help relationship books aimed at men, and most of the ones that exist are ‘systems’ rather than books. These ‘systems’ are usually only available as e-books, and can be downloaded from a badly designed website at a cost of many hundreds of dollars.

Dating and relationship systems for men are, in many ways, the same as the relationship books for women. Not because they try to make the man change into something that will bring him the female approval he so clearly craves, being willing to shell out so much money for the information, but because they aim to teach him how to control and change women in the same way. If the system doesn’t work on a particular woman, we are told, it is not the fault of the system, but the woman: she is, and I quote, ‘a basket case’.

Similarly, many of the products aimed at women state that if a man won’t commit to you, it’s because he’s a bastard. Maybe he is, maybe he’s just not that into you, and maybe the woman on whom the system doesn’t work isn’t that into you either. So just move on.

On the other hand, if the man/woman who isn’t that into you is leading you on and doing all the things prescribed by Systems, Rules, Games etc., to make you think they really are that into you, just for the hell of it, then they probably are a bit of a bastard, and certainly not worth jumping through hoops for.

My initial reasons for wanting to add to the Babel tower of such books, albeit as a countermeasure, were that firstly I don’t recognise these stereotypical men and women described in them, who play such manipulative games with their partners, secretly despise them, yet want to hang onto them for eternity, or dump them the moment things start going well between them; and secondly, a lot of friends (especially male friends) frequently ask me what I think their partner really wants/means when she does/says something. One even used to ring me while his girlfriend was in the toilet for a translation of something that had puzzled him. You know who you are.

I’m not setting myself up as an expert in anything. I’m just a keen observer of humans, and have spent my whole life around them. I’m a good listener, and sometimes have interesting insights. Although I have to say, I would consider myself a little more knowledgeable than a certain ‘System creator’ who advises that even after you’re married, a man should never tell a woman he loves her more than a handful of times in his entire life. And he wonders why the divorce rate is so high.

So with that in mind, I intend to set up another blog site where I will do this. There’ll hopefully be a facility where people can send in anonymous questions that I will give my take on. Notice I don’t say ‘answers’ because there probably aren’t any in life, but I fully believe that all kinds of human interaction should be undertaken as honestly as possible without resorting to manipulation or game-playing.

I want to aim this primarily at men (though certainly not to the exclusion of women), partly because there’s nothing similar out there for them, and partly because I believe that ‘nice guys’ who end up buying into any of the numerous ‘player systems’ just make everyone unhappy, themselves included.

As soon as I have site in place for this I’ll post details on Twitter and Facebook.

*Special thanks to the following Tweeters for title ideas and additions:

@cbonners1 @CherylMorgan @neuro_skeptic @ksmyth2010 @PoppyCollinson

and various others for RTing

From now on, pieces in this vein will be posted here: 
People Are From Earth

David Bowie

*

The title of this piece bears no relation to anything Gaga-esque. Although maybe it does, I wouldn’t know, not having paid much attention to her album of the same name. My jury is still out on Lady Gaga. In the 1930s, Elsa Schiaparelli designed a dress with a print to give the illusion of torn animal flesh; she also collaborated with Salvador Dali. And Edge of Glory sounds like something Steps would do. But then Pop music isn’t aimed at me, so that’s neither here nor there. Neither is this intended to be a dig at Ms Germanotta, as I said, the jury’s still out, and regardless of whether the term ‘Fame Monster’ means what I have used it to mean, it is, to my ear, a perfect description of one of the types of person mentioned herein. So I shall begin…

There is a world of difference between someone who is an artist and someone who is famous, although it is possible to be both.

Certain things, such as integrity, skill, and truth, will make me respect an artist whether or not I like their work. Conversely, I can enjoy a work without respecting its creator; so if you catch me whistling Agadoo, don’t read too much into it. Actually, if you do catch me whistling Agadoo please shoot me, or at least have me put into a medically induced coma.

Many of my friends are artists – painters, writers, actors, musicians, – all with varying degrees of success. Most of them are infinitely more talented and skilled than household names in similar spheres. One of the reasons for this is that to be famous, the primary desire must be for fame itself.

How many X-Factor contestants, for example, go on to become TV presenters? Likewise, former Hollywood ‘stars’ doing Panto. What’s wrong with making your own music for a tiny but discerning audience, or appearing in something ground-breaking in a small theatre? Oh yes, that might not grace the pages of Heat magazine.

The pursuit of fame is a very different discipline from the pursuit of artistic excellence; therefore you will see a mixture of the skilled and the not so skilled in the public eye.

The degree of self-promotion involved in chasing fame is something with which many artists are uncomfortable, but for fame monsters, it is second nature. I had a laugh with a writer friend over the holidays at the amount of shameless self-promotion we saw going on even on Christmas Day. That, my friends, is dedication.

Artists like to share their work with other artists for feedback, support, objective criticism; all of which will help hone the work so it will be the best it can be. When you know and trust someone else as an artist, you know you’re going to get the truth, even if it’s not what you want to hear.

When a fame monster asks what you think of their latest effort, they really want to know what you think about them, or more usually, they want to hear how much you like them, how brilliant they are. If you offer constructive comments about the work they’ll invariably glaze over because they think they’re so amazing anything you say is irrelevant. The fact that they’re asking you, as an artist, for your opinion is misleading; what they’re really after is an ‘in’ with your contacts. They know you do something in the same field they aspire to top, so just maybe you know Simon Cowell or Dan Brown and will put in a good word for them.

Even if you’re not approached directly by a fame monster, it’s relatively easy to spot one quite early on. The very young can be forgiven, as they may well grow out of it. As a teenager I had a brief spell of wanting to be famous until I discovered what it entails: being recognised in the street, waking to find fans sleeping in your garden or going through your bins, having to take work that’s embarrassing but high profile. The nightmare list goes on and it’s not for me.

Yes, I do occasionally naff and sometimes embarrassing session work, but that’s a technical job, like a tailor doing his best work on a suit he’d never choose to wear himself, and, most importantly, in many cases no one has to know it’s me. It won’t bring me before the eyes of the world, but it’s on my CV as something I can do but choose not to publicly, like the gentleman with the accordion.

Every fame monster has a touch of desperation that never quite goes away. Ultimately, despite their massive egos, they’re usually deeply insecure and will do anything to be ‘loved’ therefore they will probably change their name and develop a persona early on in their careers.

We all have different faces that we use for different situations, most of which occur spontaneously, such as the various social media personae. My own Twitter persona turned out to be more out-spoken and curmudgeonly than I really am, whereas my blog persona is of someone far more eloquent, opinionated, and, I like to think, wiser than you’d find if you ran into me when I’m propping up the bar at the Groucho. I know I express myself best and my thoughts are more organised when writing. This is why I prefer to have important conversations via email rather than face-to face. So please remember this before dropping a big subject on me in public and getting an inappropriate response, or more likely, no response whatsoever. Think of it like this: my thoughts are a tangled skein of rainbow-coloured 4-ply; my word processor is a new-fangled knitting machine with built-in style and taste parameters. Take your pick.

But I digress.

Yes, I have many facets to my character, or maybe many characters living in my head, but they all came of their own accord as a result of living, learning, and interacting in the real world. I could never develop a character to ‘wear’ in public, and I cringe at those who do.

A friend once said to me, ‘even with your hair extensions and plastic surgery, you’re the least fake person I know.’

I took this as both compliment and insight. True fakery comes from within. No amount of external gloss can hide honesty, and no amount of cod-earnest hand-wringing can disguise a fake.

The first stage of someone having a fake persona is when they start talking about themselves in the third person. The second is when they actually discuss the inception of said fake persona. The third is when they claim to be host to a separate entity with a different name and character who takes them over when they perform. If that’s not the ultimate in fake personae, then they’re demonically possessed and should seek the assistance of a good exorcist.

Another trait of the fame monster is the accent change. It could be ‘up’ or ‘down’ from their roots, maybe a softening or hardening of a regional accent depending where they see themselves. Those looking for commercial success will probably ‘go street’. Pop music is full of middle class bastions pretending to hail from the mean streets of Peckham.

If said fame monster succeeds in Pop but at a later stage wants to ‘reinvent’ themselves as a ‘grown up’ artist they might choose to ‘go posh’ or maybe mid-Atlantic.

Then there’s the name. I have a massive problem with gimmicky names. If you have a boring, ugly, or embarrassing name by all means change it, but let’s keep things in perspective. If you’re plain Ann Brown and fancy something more exotic how about Annabel Browne? Perfect if you intend at some point to ‘go posh’, but if you’re intending to ‘go street’, A to the Bell to the B-R-pwn will not inspire me to take your music seriously.

Your choice of name should be like your choice of tattoo: think about how it’s going to look when your showbiz career’s over and you’re collecting your winter heating allowance from a post office in Chipping Norton with an obscenity scrawled across your knuckles and the name of a teenage rapper on your pension book.

Additionally, fame monsters may also express themselves via their appearance, such as being over, or underdressed for the occasion, having an ‘out there’ haircut, or always wearing a hat in lieu of having a personality.

If in the early part of your career you catch yourself doing anything to make you appear more famous than you are – blue-tacking your poster to the side of a stationary bus so people think it’s a proper advert; Photoshopping your name in lights on a picture of a 20,000 seat arena; sneaking your homemade CD’s into a record store; making a video where people run up to you for an autograph – then stop now. Artistic excellence has flown out the window and you are legging it down the Heat Highway on your way to being photographed drunk in the gutter outside China White or wherever anyone who’s no one hangs out these days.

The reason fame monsters chase fame in the manner they do is because they know deep down they just aren’t very good at what they’re doing. All artists doubt their own talent; it’s part of what makes you strive to get better, but the fame monster knows their talent is minimal at best, but if they get really, really famous no one will be allowed to point them out as a naked emperor, and if you do it’s because you’re jealous.

The clever ones recognise their failings and surround themselves with people who are good at what they do, and so give the fame monster the illusion of having created everything themselves. These are the ones most likely to achieve success. The ones who can’t see their limitations tend to sink into a quagmire of bitterness and rage directed at those who are doing better than them.

Generally speaking the bigger the ego, the deeper the insecurity. I think this applies to all areas of life.

Artists grow, fame monsters change. They are prepared to change themselves into anything the market dictates. Each change of outfit or hairstyle is hailed as a ‘reinvention’, when all they really reinvent is the wheel with their unoriginal offerings.

It’s a wonderful thing for an artist to find their work has an audience, but ideally this should come as a result of doing what they love. Chasing fame is all very well, if that’s what’s important to someone, but be prepared to leave your morals and virtues at the door, and be even more prepared that what you did to succeed will be written all over your face.

*

*Deep and Dreamless*

Peter sat in the unlit room for almost an hour before he bothered to switch the light on. At this time of year, the darkness came so quickly it always seemed to catch him unawares. He downed the glass of whiskey – was it his third, or his fourth? – then closed the curtains and turned on the light.

There was a slow, hesitant knocking on Peter’s front door. At first he wasn’t going to answer it, but then he heard the three little voices piping:

‘O, little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie…’

Peter balanced his empty glass on the arm of the chair and padded down the hall. On the doorstep were three small boys with bright eyes and dirty faces, and smiles more genuine than any he’d seen in a long time.

Carol singers seem to get younger every year, Peter thought as he listened dutifully to the throng. The eldest of the three boys couldn’t have been more than eight years old, and the youngest barely four with a vocabulary that wasn’t the equal of the song’s requirement. At least they were tuneful and actually seemed to enjoy singing. Unlike some of his earlier callers who had belted out a few bars of ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’ and rattled their tins loudly.

The four-year-old gave Peter an almost toothless grin while his infant’s palate grappled vainly with the song’s lyrics. Peter wondered what their parents could have been thinking to let youngsters out unaccompanied on Christmas Eve. It was after 6.p.m. and as dark as midnight. The street was quite deserted; there was no telling who might be lurking in the shadows.

Peter dug into his pocket and pulled out a handful of coins.

‘Ooh, thanks Mister!’ The older boy clearly regarded the money as a small fortune.

‘You should be getting off home. It’s not safe these days.’ Peter said.

‘We got Power Rangers.’ The youngest said, waving his keyring.

‘Even so, I expect your Mum will be wondering where you’ve got to. Go on, you don’t want to miss Santa do you?’

The boys turned tail and raced for home. Peter smiled and closed the door, their song still playing in his head. Strange they should have picked that carol, the one that most reminded him of Caroline; especially the second line.

He thought of her now, in her own deep and dreamless sleep, silent as a star. Whoever said ‘Time Heals’ couldn’t have lost someone the way he had. Caroline had been dead for five years now, and it had yet to stop hurting. She would have been 35 tomorrow. Peter was a year older but already he felt like an old man, eager to embrace death as a welcome release from his suffering.

He remembered a film he’d once seen about a man who was born on December 25th, and had become a werewolf as a punishment for sharing a birthday with Jesus Christ. It was a stupid film, but Peter couldn’t help feeling that perhaps to be born on Christmas Day was unlucky. It hadn’t done Caroline many favours.

She had been born premature and blue, as her mother had never tired of telling people, a good three weeks early. Thirty years on, Caroline Noelle French, nee Roberts, had died whilst being delivered of a stillborn baby girl leaving Peter to mourn a wife whose face still haunted him and a daughter he would never know.

Strange as it may seem, Peter didn’t hate this time of year. He still hung decorations and fairy lights about the house and on the tree in the back garden. The many happy memories of past Christmases spent with Caroline took the edge off the pain, and he knew she’d have been disappointed if he’d left the house bare.

He poured himself another whiskey, his fourth – no, fifth, wasn’t it? He’d lost count – then he switched on the television, turning the volume low enough just to fill the silence. He took up the remote control and channel hopped between a circus, a carol service, news, and the film ‘White Christmas’. There was nothing he really wanted to see, but the moving images gave the illusion of having company.

Caroline would have watched ‘White Christmas’ and cried at it. She could be funny like that: weeping at sentimental films yet so brave and able to cope in the face of real tragedy.

The night she’d been taken to hospital: she’d called the ambulance herself, and hadn’t woken him until moments before it arrived. Peter remembered her shaking him gently, saying something about how she couldn’t feel the baby moving, how it was hurting badly, but that he wasn’t to worry, the ambulance was on its way. The resolution in her voice could barely disguise the quaver there.

In the ambulance, Caroline had held his hand – shouldn’t it have been the other way round? – and told him to be strong, and that things happened for a reason and it was best to accept. She must have known she wouldn’t make it.

Peter rubbed his eyes. He’d had too much to drink; he was getting maudlin. He turned the television’s volume up and caught the white-gowned choir singing ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’.

For the second time that evening, he thought of the words of that song and imagined Caroline as a sleeping town. He pictured her spine as a cobbled road; saw the soft curves of her body forming churches, houses, schools and inns; blurring the horizon as she lay beneath a sky made from her black, black hair that was prickled by myriad tiny stars.  He wished he could be now in the little town of Caroline, walking its winding streets, losing himself in its most secret places.

‘…Yet in thy dark streets shineth the everlasting light…’ The choir sang.

It was at this moment, that joker Fate decided the light bulb should blow. The fairy lights that lined the walls and edged the TV gave adequate illumination; Peter decided to leave searching for a new bulb until morning, or more correctly, he’d do what he always did and take the bulb from the bedside table lamp, which wouldn’t get replaced until well into the New Year. He walked to the far end of the room and opened the curtains. The lights on the tree seemed to blaze brighter now, in comparison with the lightless house.

Behind him, the choir continued, ‘The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight…’

Peter shuddered. He’d always found that line to have a strangely menacing undercurrent. Especially as his brightest hope and his darkest fear were one and the same: that his wife and daughter would come back.

This was the first time he had allowed himself to shape the thought. He wished, oh how he wished, that they would return to him now, but at the same time he realised that should his dead wife and child manifest before him he’d probably run screaming.

Could that happen? Could wanting something enough bring it into being?

‘Caroline,’ he whispered, his breath misting the window pane, ‘Caroline.’ His voice bounced back at him in a silent echo he only felt.

Peter poured himself another drink. His fifth? Sixth? He was past caring. And the choir sang on:

‘…How silently, how silently…’

The sound of their clear voices was almost drowned by the pounding of Peter’s heart. Beyond the jewelled tree something stirred. Wind lifted snow into a Dervish dance. Peter pressed closer to the window as the random swirling began to take shape.

In the midst of the blur there seemed to be a figure; frosted, ethereal, a Madonna of the Snows, with an ice child in her arms. Peter slammed his fist against the glass shattering it. He didn’t notice that his wrist was cut and bleeding; didn’t notice the deep red life-blood pat, pat, patting onto the soft beige carpet. He didn’t feel the sting of the gash, nor the anxious pulsing of the lacerated vein. All he was aware of was the vision unfolding before him: the wondrous gift of his black haired, honey-skinned wife remade in coldest white.

‘Caroline!’ he shouted.

The figure raised a finger to her cool lips to silence him. He pushed at the window. It gave beneath his hands allowing him to pass through it. He glanced briefly over his shoulder; the glass he had slipped through was intact except for the corner his fist had smashed.

The back garden was a carpet of snow that glittered like broken glass beneath the full pale Moon. Above the tree the beckoning figure hung in the air; one arm outstretched, the other cradling her child. Peter felt himself floating across the lawn and rising towards them.

‘We came for you.’ Caroline said, her voice an icy whisper from lips once red, now white.

‘Why not before? I’ve prayed for this for so long.’

‘It wasn’t your time. Now it is.’ she answered as they rose.

Peter looked back at the house. It was ill-lit, but through the window he could just make out his body slumped on the floor, a dark pool of mingled blood and whiskey spreading beneath his lifeless wrist.

Caroline glanced up at the Moon, which seemed to brighten in response to her, then back at the house. Peter followed her gaze to the face of his dead body, picked out by a watery beam of light. He looked quite peaceful, he thought; pale and still, sleeping death’s sleep: deep and dreamless.

*

© Suzanne Barbieri 1995/2011

Louis L’Amour

Anger is a wind which blows out the lamp of the mind.

Robert Green Ingersoll

*

I have known a lot of angry people in my life. In an earlier blog post about bullying I speculated that perhaps I attract them to me. Maybe this is because, I have been told, that I appear to be very calm. Perhaps it’s the attraction of opposites; perhaps they’re hoping some of the calm will rub off. Occasionally it has, but often my calm façade (and sometimes it is a façade) has incited other people’s anger. So perhaps it’s more birds of a feather.

The fact is that while I am calm to a degree, what I actually am is controlled. I am controlled in every emotional aspect, and express myself best in writing rather than face-to-face communication. There are some strengths in this, for example; terrified as I am of spiders, if there’s no one around to help, I can suppress the fear enough to deal with them; and while my body experiences the symptoms of stage fright – racing pulse, nausea, etc – my mind does not, rather it dissociates and gets on with the job in hand.

It is this dissociation that has sometimes served to bait angry people. Anger is a physical manifestation of the fear of loss of control. And if your reaction to this is to show no reaction, their loss of control escalates. People whose anger is not acknowledged become more angry. When someone has been extensively bullied as a child, however, often their only recourse is dissociation, and so a vicious cycle is created.

I have as much anger as the next person, but it is internalised rather than expressed openly. Because of this, I tend to intellectualise it and so can often channel it into work, particularly writing, which is very useful.

What interests me here is that anger has its own persona. My internalised anger becomes fictional characters, and I have witnessed other people’s externalised anger become a separate entity. I have a few friends who have anger problems, and on different occasions I have been present when their anger has taken hold. And it really is like watching another person take control of someone you thought you knew, like seeing a stranger wearing the skin of a friend.

To describe it in the way I am about to sounds overly dramatic, but it really is not unlike witnessing a demonic possession, albeit not quite on the scale of a Horror film depiction.

The first thing you notice is a change in the atmosphere. Everyone can tell when someone’s in a bad mood, but this is different. It’s almost as if the air around them bubbles, and there’s something either descending on them, or rising off them. There’s a point, very early on, when the person could stop it if they wanted to, but unless they’re quick, it rapidly becomes too late.

One friend I saw this happen to had a look of confused fear on her face, as though she had driven her car too close to the edge of a cliff and realised she couldn’t brake in time. I could see her struggling to stop it, but it was too late, her anger demon had run away with her and there was no turning back.

Afterwards, when it had subsided and we were sitting on her sofa with a drink, she said, ‘I’m evil. I know I’m evil.’  Of course, I brushed off her statement and reassured her, but she said it with an air of defiance. It was matter-of-fact, as if she was stating a minor character trait that she couldn’t change, such as being obsessively tidy, or a shopaholic, and I knew it wasn’t her speaking, but the last words of her anger demon before it slunk back inside her, or went off into the ether, wherever it came from. But what I remember now, is that it was the voice of a child, not a reasoning adult.

On that particular occasion, her anger demon was focussed not on me, but on another of our group, who refused to rise to the bait. But there have been times when other people’s anger demons were focussed most directly on me, which has made me think that even though, for ‘decency’s sake’ I rarely express anger, it obviously lurks inside me and sends out barely perceptible signals.

My anger demon is a true sadist. You know the famous quote:

Masochist to Sadist, ‘Hurt me, please hurt me.’

Sadist to Masochist, ‘No.’

Anger hurts only itself. Mine loves to hurt me. If that’s not by flooding my brain with negative thoughts, it’s by sending out coded messages to other anger demons saying it’s ready to come out and play, only to retreat when the playmate comes knocking at the door, and finds, instead of a sparring partner, someone whose lights are on, but is not home.

I believe it can be helpful to think of anger as a separate personality, because then it is possible to look at it objectively to see where it helps and where it harms you, and to work out how to control it.

Like a wild animal, anger demons only attack when they feel threatened. They are, at heart, children who are acting out because they feel undermined by authority. But you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, so it pays to learn how to keep the demon under control. Because if you don’t, if you give it an inch, your anger will control you; and harm you, and drive people away from you. And all that will happen before you realise what’s going on. Learn to recognise that moment when the demon begins to stir, because you don’t have to let it drag you down with it. You can stop it. As small as the window of opportunity may be, it is there, and it’s your choice whether or not you take it.

In the Abyss all things exist

Aleister Crowley

I think about death a lot.

Not least because of having lost so many friends and family members in recent years, but also because the idea of what happens after we die has always fascinated me. Is there a complete extinction of everything we are and ever were, or is it simply another stage of existence, does some part of us live on in another form: is the human body a caterpillar to the soul’s butterfly?

I have a strange memory from childhood, a false memory, it would seem. I was very young, pre-school age, perhaps even pre-nursery school, so probably aged around three or four. Though maybe that part of the memory is wrong also.

My father died a few months before I was born, and I asked my mother what had happened. He’d actually died of a heart attack, but in this memory she said, ‘He merged with the sea.’

This phrase is interesting because it was so beyond my childish understanding that I don’t think I could have made it up, and it left me with an image of my father being consumed by and dissolved in a deep, green sea, to become forever part of it.

I have no recollection of whether I later questioned my mother about this. And it sounds as much like something she would say, as something she wouldn’t. Though when I think about it logically, I can’t believe she did say something that would make no sense to a child and give no answers. Maybe she thought it though, and maybe I plucked that thought out of her head.

The sea is an interesting metaphor for the abyss that represents the great unknown of death, and the image of a person merging with the sea illustrative of the soul having left the body to return to the source, and makes such sense in a metaphysical way that it must have come from somewhere.

Aside from the crushing pain of losing someone, I have always viewed death as a comfort: an end to suffering, the eternal, dreamless sleep. Certainly the idea that there is always death has got me through some very dark times. To know that it is an option is to free you to look for other options.

A few nights ago, I dreamt I was dying. I was at the end stages of an illness, my body was weak and there was to be no way back, just a slow winding down into nothing. I felt the same fear I had only previously felt empathetically, such as when my mother was dying. This fear is not a panicked feeling, but more a sadness approaching quiet dread, the feeling that time is slipping away and nothing can be done. Everything slows down, rushing is pointless, yet there is no time to plan what kind of legacy you’ll leave, no time to right wrongs, say the unsaid. Lost time cannot be made up for. All you can do is wait. It is almost as if when you know the end is near, rather than rage against the dying of the light, you have to simply be still and wait for the night to descend, for the blackness to extinguish every last atom of the day.

The dying in this dream was a long, slow process. I had time to reflect on everything I hadn’t done, all the loose ends that would remain untied, and with the realisation that all I could do was to run all the what-ifs through my head while I waited for my life to end, while I hovered at the edge of the abyss in eternal longing for the life I once had.

I have been not so far from death a few times in my life, and at the time I was either too young or too focussed on recovery to appreciate what had been given to me. But this time, albeit only in a dream, I knowingly faced the abyss. Perhaps aided by the experience of having watched others face it. This time I can see the second chance, and can actually feel enough relief at having survived to appreciate it, to not take for granted life and good health.

Perhaps it takes a dream experience to learn the lessons we miss in ‘real life’. Perhaps being one step removed from the physical makes it easier to analyze information. Or perhaps it’s because dreams themselves come from the same abyss, the sea with which we shall all one day merge.

The invisible worm,

That flies in the night

In the howling storm:

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy:

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

‘The Sick Rose’ William Blake

There have been many descriptions of and excuses made for the rioters and looters who are currently rampaging through various areas of London and other parts of the UK. They are supposedly the disenfranchised, marginalised, poverty-stricken youth who were driven to destroy the homes and livelihoods of others because of their treatment by or lack of support from the community/Government, and therefore we should all share the blame and feel sorry for them.

I don’t buy this. This kind of behaviour is not caused by boredom, feeling unwanted or not part of society. All young people feel like that, it’s part of growing up. Neither is it caused by poverty. Are these people starving? Are they stealing food? No, they’re stealing plasma television sets and designer clothes. Are they homeless? No, but the people whose homes they burnt down are.

Poverty does not cause crime. Single parent families do not cause crime. My mother was widowed while she was pregnant with me, the result of which was that I grew up poor as part of a single parent family. And when I say poor, I don’t mean last year’s trainers poor, I mean cold poor, hungry poor, make do and mend second-hand clothes poor.

No one was rich at my primary school. Some were slightly better or worse off than others, but we were all more or less in the same boat. Some kids grew up to become decent people, some didn’t, and whether they did or not had no bearing on their family’s structure or income.

I remember one boy in particular who was in my class from the age of five to ten. He was difficult. The teachers rightly regarded him as a problem child and kept a close eye on him, but it was much more than that. I’m not sure that adults can fully appreciate just how ‘bad’ a five-year-old child can be, but we children knew.

To us, this boy was like an adult gangster. We lived in fear of him. If one of us had something he wanted, you simply handed it over. Sometimes he would kick you under the desk or push you down stairs just for the hell of it, knowing full well you’d never tell on him. He frequently used physical violence against teachers who tried to discipline him. While they probably just saw it as a baby tantrum, to us it was a demonstration of his power. He had broken the last taboo and attacked an adult.

This all sounds pretty minor, I’m sure, but when you’re a small child and one of your peers tells you they will kill you if you don’t do as they say, it really feels as if your life is in danger. Especially when you know that adults have failed to protect you thus far.

I’d like to be able to report that he turned his life around and made something of himself. He didn’t. Barely into his twenties, he got life imprisonment for his part in an armed robbery.

Maybe he was ‘let down by society’, but so were many of us, and not all of us chose to vent our rage on innocents.

When I remember him I don’t see a child, I just see a person. A cruel, nasty, empty person.  A person sick to the core, an invisible worm where the heart should be.

And that’s what I see when I look at the rioters: worms eating away at other people’s enterprise.

My town is cordoned off, windows are smashed yards from my front door and there are bloodstains on the pavement outside the church.

This behaviour is not caused by disadvantage, but by greed and a lack of empathy. Someone has something they want, so they either take it, or destroy it.

We owe them no sympathy. Save that for those whose lives they have scarred.

We’re all a book of blood: wherever we’re opened, we’re red

Clive Barker, ‘Books of Blood’

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

Leslie Poles Hartley

Encouraged and supported by some writer friends, I’ve recently got back into writing the novel I haven’t really looked at for a year or two, having been too busy with music. I’m more than halfway through, and know exactly where it’s headed, so it’s all over bar the shouting. But after a quick read through to re-acquaint myself with its unique world, I found myself in a strange position emotionally.

My life has changed considerably since I last worked on it, and while these changes have no actual bearing on the plot, it being a fictional work unrelated to my real life, there are clearly emotional elements that have had a huge, unforeseen impact.

In the past couple of years I have made many new friends and lost a few old ones, some, sadly, through death, others whose circles I have drifted out of. Some old acquaintances have become close friends, and some formerly close friends have faded into acquaintanceship.

This presents a problem when writing because of an old trick I tend to rely on. The easiest way to create believable characters, especially in the context of dialogue, is to mentally cast them. Once you can clearly hear a voice, the character’s dialogue, actions, decisions etc., become second nature. Sometimes I use actors for this, but more often than not I use the speech patterns and mannerisms of people I know. Not their real life characteristics, more I imagine them performing the role as if they were an actor.

In some cases, my changes in feeling towards a particular person make it easier to use them for this. Knowing them better, liking them more can bring extra elements to a character. Conversely, discovering unpleasant truths and feeling colder towards someone can have quite a detrimental effect on a character’s arc. Sometimes this can provide a useful, unexpected twist, but it can also take the story in the wrong direction, or clutter the plot with unnecessary issues.

This has taught me that all my work is personal, despite how hard I try to make it not so.

The easiest and, for me, most satisfying piece of work I have made is my album ‘From Indian Head To Ashland’, which features the voices of alien abductees Betty and Barney Hill, rather than my own, which, as I am primarily a singer, many people found to be an odd move for me, and a disappointing once for them.

For me, however, it was the most logical move. I was doing it ‘for them (Betty and Barney)’ and not ‘for me’ and therefore felt free to put it out there, and even actively promote it if need be where I’m not sure I could have if it had been a work that showcased me, myself alone.

I admire people who can promote themselves to just the right degree. Of course I despise shameless self-publicists as much as anyone else, but when people can present work that represents themselves honestly yet still say something about the human condition, that is something to be applauded.

And that is much harder than it looks. I’m not talking about self-indulgence, meandering romans à clef, bitter ‘divorce albums’, or anything else on a par with the erroneous belief that pictures of (or worse still, by) your children should be hanging in the National Portrait Gallery.

The best kind of self-revelatory work is a journey of self-discovery; for every known truth thrown out into the universe, another is uncovered, and whether or not the work has an audience is neither here nor there for its creator, but for its reader, viewer, listener, it is as though they are making the journey themselves. For despite surface differences we are all the same: incarnated souls trying to learn and grow as we navigate an uncharted and often hostile world.

Learning to open up and work in this way is tough. Nothing to do with possible reactions to the work, criticism and rejection are ultimately irrelevant, but tough in the opening up itself. Laying oneself bare means allowing oneself to be known by another, naked and vulnerable as if in the arms of a new lover. How does this suddenly bare flesh feel in their hands? How will they interpret what you say? What are your eyes telling them? And what will they do with all this knowledge that could be used to heal or harm you?

It’s not easy, and it’s not always pleasant, but it is cathartic, for both writer and reader. And I’m getting there. The pen is poised, sharper than any sword, ready to open a vein.

Robert Burton

*

Recently, there has been a bit of a Twitter hoo-ha about a journalist allegedly plagiarising quotes and passing them off as actual interviews. I am not particularly au fait with the ins and outs of this case and so am not in a position to comment on it.

Having been the victim, along with many of my friends and colleagues, of plagiarism on more than one occasion, I am in a position to comment on how it feels to have elements of one’s work passed off as someone else’s.

I am aware that ideas cannot be copyrighted, and that plagiarism is a nebulous term, and is not the same as copyright infringement. It falls loosely into the grey area covering fair use and parody. Where it differs is that plagiarism is always covert. With fair use, parody, or ‘inspired by’ works, the source material is always obvious and sometimes credited, albeit often with no acknowledgement of any actual infringement.

The plagiarist, like the shoplifter, has a sense of entitlement. They see something they want, and slip it inside their coat, book, music, without so much as a passing thought about who may suffer as a result. But the fact that they obtained that ‘something’ by stealth speaks volumes about their understanding of the wrongness of their actions.

My first experience of this was in my late teens, back in the day when bands had to send demo tapes to record companies rather than release their music themselves. Some time after one particular hit of several record companies, music publishers, agencies, etc. I was watching TV when a washing powder ad came on. The music in the background of the ad was oddly familiar. It was quite low in the overall sound mix, so virtually impossible to tell whether it was an actual sample, or an ideas rip-off.

The ideas rip-off, by the way, is extremely common. Many musicians I know have had it done to them, and it’s happened to me on quite a few pitches I’ve provided vocals for. What happens is this: you’re asked to pitch for a project, usually an advert; film/TV score; song for another artist. You submit something in line with the brief and then wait to hear back. And you wait, and you wait, and you wait. Sometimes, while you are waiting, this happens: quite by chance, you’ll come across the completed project. More often than not, the piece they went for bears no relation to what you submitted. It’s not better or worse, just different. But sometimes, the finished article is almost identical to what you pitched. So much so, that I recently called my colleague to ask about invoice details as I’d just seen our ad on TV. Turned out it wasn’t our ad, but it sure as hell sounded enough like us for me to think I was hearing my own vocal. And that’s never happened before.

There was no apparent reason why we lost that particular pitch and as it was a cover of a popular song, there was nothing we could do about it. In fact, there is never anything you can do about it, even if your original piece is used as ‘inspiration’ for the finished work as ideas cannot be copyrighted.

And it is this knowledge that benefits the plagiarist most.

A stupid plagiarist will infringe copyright by stealing directly, be it whole paragraphs of a book or samples from another recording, and therefore be easily caught. A clever plagiarist is far more insidious. They will take elements of your work and twist them just enough so that you know full well ‘where they got their ideas’, but not enough that you have a legal leg to stand on.

Years ago, I had a project under consideration with a major company. It went back and forth over the course of about eighteen months. I made all the suggested changes, and for a moment, it looked as if it was going to fly, then they decided not to go with it. This happens. It’s a disappointment, but ultimately it’s not a big deal.

Then something happened that most certainly was a big deal. The person I worked with on my project decided that instead of being someone who helps shape creative works, they wanted to have a crack at producing the creative works themselves.

This was all fine and dandy. I congratulated the person on their career change, as I had assumed we were friends as well as possible business associates.

Then the work came out. There were many similarities. Enough, I believe, to state that substantial elements of the work probably would not be there had it not been for the creator’s prior access to my own work.

This had a strange effect on me. Initially, I picked my way through the work, listing everything I thought had ‘taken its inspiration’ (she said charitably) from my own, with the intention of seeking legal advice. But there was just so much, it was too soul-destroying to continue to pore over it.

So I stopped working. For about two years I had no creative output whatsoever. After all, what could possible be the point, if you could work so hard and for so long on something only to have it snatched away by the very person who was supposed to be helping it see the light of day?

It was a very dark time. I felt violated, unsafe, mistrustful. My only small consolation was that the plagiarist’s execution of their work was ham-fisted, overblown, and lacking in technique and finesse, but they were getting paid for it while I starved up on my high horse.

I’m deliberately not specifying what kind of creative work I refer to here, because of the Golden Rule: Them that has the gold makes the rules.

It’s often pointless trying to pursue cases through the courts unless you’re a multi-millionaire.

It is said that to protect one’s work before sending it out for consideration is the mark of an amateur, as reputable companies wouldn’t steal ideas or rip-off unknowns. They would and they do. All the time.  Although in fairness, it’s more likely to be one unscrupulous individual taking a chance at not getting caught than company policy.

Sometimes it’s about money; usually it’s about ego. In my case, I’m pretty sure the individual involved thought they could make better use of my ideas than I could. This may have been the case commercially, but it certainly wasn’t artistically.

But then what would art matter to these people? If they had one artistic bone in their bodies they’d have their own ideas.

A man glimpses a beautiful maiden unlike any other he has seen. She may be bathing in a river, tending to wild animals, perhaps asleep in the shade of a tree. Whatever the situation, he falls instantly in love with her and vows to take her as his bride.

After much searching, the man finds her again and discovers that the maiden is not a mortal woman, but a fairy. He pursues her relentlessly, declaring his love, and eventually she allows him to ask her father for her hand in marriage.

There are many tests the man must pass before he is considered worthy of her, and when the father finally agrees to let the man marry his precious daughter, there are conditions. These conditions vary according to the many versions of the tale, but some of the more common conditions are that the man must never strike her or touch her with iron, iron being anathema to fairy folk.

The couple marry, have children and enjoy a happy life together for a good few years until one day when they decide to go out horse riding together. As the man helps his fairy bride with her horse, the bridle slips from his hand and the iron bit strikes her in the face, whereupon she vanishes back to her immortal world.

At first sight, the fairy’s vanishing seems a ridiculous overreaction to an accident, and in many ways it is, but at the heart of the story lies a lesson in personal values, or deal breakers.

We all have deal breakers, though usually they’re more fluid than the fairy bride’s, and can be tightened or relaxed according to the situation. Deal breakers are a fundamental part of one’s makeup, although sometimes you don’t know what they are until a particular situation brings them into play. They are the make or break of relationships, for good or ill.

Some people will walk away from a good relationship into a bad one, simply because the latter offers marriage and children and the former didn’t. Others will forgo love altogether for the sake of a career. You live and die by your deal breakers, and only you know if they’re worth the sacrifice. Only make sure you’re certain, as sometimes there’s no way back.

There is a codicil to the story of the Fairy Bride. As she had lived among humans and raised a family, when she returned to the Fairy world she was forbidden ever to set foot in the human world again. But her love for her husband and children was so strong that she built a raft of earth and came up out of the lake at night, as close to the shore as she was allowed, so that she might talk for a few hours with her human family, they on the shore, she on her floating island.

While this was a far from ideal solution, it illustrates that perhaps a mistake hasn’t really broken a deal, perhaps bridges can be built. And the story in itself warns against both carelessness and hasty reprisals.

We could all benefit from taking a breath and counting to ten before reacting to any situation. And whilst it is important to be true to one’s own values, it is equally important not to let ideals get in the way of your happiness and peace of mind. It’s a long road ahead, and life is too short to let stubbornness lay rocks in your path.