Where to (re)begin

I really wanted to work on some music stuff tonight but I fell into the trap of looking at Google Earth. Does anyone else do that (as in spend far too long looking at places at they used to visit alot using the time slider and getting all nostalgic…)? I hope so. I can’t be the only person to waste their life doing that (*crosses fingers and hopes*). So, now it’s 9:54 and I can’t be bothered to get into anything now… hence I’m on here and typing out stuff…

However, I really have no idea where to (re)begin this thing. Having had a spot of time (!) recently to read over what the 20-24 year old me wittered on about, I’d like to think I might sound a tad less conceited these days. That all being said, I know I’m at least 120% less fun to be with now that I’m in my mid 30s with some actual responsibilities.

I suppose I should pick up where I left off. Within one of the last entries I wrote, I said something along the lines of “oh 2008 will be much the same as 2007” (I would copy and paste but…lazy). Thing is, I was a bit wrong about all of that, as I started up a thing called Recharged Radio that July. At the time, the place I was working was boring me to death – the guy who owned the company was a successful man who…

…Now here’s a thing. I was about to start on telling The Truth about stuff but the Internet being what it is these days, I probably can’t now can I? Not unless I go back through all my previous entries and start redacting stuff. Let’s just carry on by saying…

..was a successful man who enjoyed his amassed wealth and a direct boss who was an angel descended from Heaven. Recharged Radio was a project that was born of my old Volts Show thing (independent bands etc) and moved to London. Between 2008 and 2012 it grew to a whole heap of shows and presenters, live sessions (including one from Adam Ant no less – though I can’t claim any credit for that as the wonderfully eccentric Tree and Adam Carr managed to collar him. Tree (real name! Go look her up) was in his band at the time. He was a nice fella – though quite clearly bent waaaaay out of shape by that horrible thing called Fame. Still, was very polite and just… nice, you know?). Other people who wandered through the doors included Steve Jones and Paul Cook, Richard Jobson, Douglas Hart, Crispin Glover (who I really should have asked a whole bunch of questions to but I didn’t…dammit), Tom Robinson (who popped along to our final Brighton Alt Escape show). I’m pretty sure there were others but I forget.. OH, Joe Corré (Agent Provocateur) – there’s one. Even a few of the bands we played regularly went on to bigger and better things – The Lovely Eggs (nice to see David and Holly on 6Music AND in the charts; well deserved!), Fearless Vampire Killers (who went on to amass legions of teenage fans before imploding… I’ve got their first radio interview somewhere, I bet someone would actually pay money for that haha)

I’m having to hunt through my old music libraries here to try and find other names. Every so often someone pops up on t’radio (usually 6Music)/youtube etc and  I think ‘oh, they managed to get something out into the public consciousness finally!’… 

Anton Barbeau was another one.. though he had a cult following before he ever crossed paths with us. Still, he was keen to hang around with us a bit (probably because we used to buy him beer after the shows).

Still, while it started out as an exercise in ‘let’s make people FAMOUS’, it kinda morphed into this cool little scene which we managed to carve out for ourselves – which is a damn hard thing to do in London – and for a short while, the people in the bands and us radio bods just enjoyed each other’s company, really. Even some of the Real Live Notable People liked hanging out with us; lots of gigs, lots of projects within the project, lots of events – most notably the Brighton trips – and most notably of them the one we did in 2011 where we put on 23 bands in 11 hours, Friday night after The Forum show at The Ship on New Cavendish St, staying there until kicking out time, with our own music on the CD player there and the occasional free drinks from Frank the bar manager … it was fun… for a while. Then the petty jealousies began to emerge.. and some people let things go to their head… and the arguments began… All the while we’d been doing all of this for free (it cost us money) and it had been fun… then it became not fun. So, right at the end of 2012, we (I) canned it all. Some people even wrote to say that they’d miss us. Predictably, the people who were only there for themselves vanished almost instantly but thankfully some of the good people and I haven’t lost touch (and the guys in my band now I met through RR – Andy & Minki, who until The Plague I saw most Mondays still!).

It’s funny now, in these YouTube days – where people seem to have an almost ready made audience at their disposal – to look back at all of this and it seems all so… minor. We worked hard at it. We enjoyed it and I’d like to think that more often than not, we were not too bad at what we did? I’d like to think so, anyway. As a father, I’d like to say I’ve got a couple of interesting stories to tell my kids when they’re overdue a good hard boring to tears. It was important to me, if only a very small note in the affairs of everyone else.

There was a postscript to the whole affair though – enter The Porn Baron. I’ll keep that for another entry though. It’s pretty funny (in a horrific sort of way).

Back to 2008 though – my Gran died in the November of that year. She’d been a constant in my life and because of this shiny new toy I’d started playing with, I completely ignored the fact that she was getting quite ill… I’ve never been very good with dealing with death (I prefer to run and hide somewhere), so when she did finally pass I felt extremely guilty and that guilt never left. I’m just sad I never took the time to tell her properly about it all before she went. She wouldn’t have had a clue what I was on about mostly (hell, neither do I most of the time) but she would have been happy that I was doing something I enjoyed. She was pretty selfless like that – she was a good person. She’d have been 93 this year. I wish she could have met my son Aiden… I wish… I wish… Her death has cast a very long shadow over my life.

I think it’s fairly safe to say that I’m not the same person who used to write this diary 12 years ago. Too much has happened and, while none of it truly horrendous (I’m sure there are many, many writers on here that have their own story to tell which are), I feel that the intervening years have just whittled away at what made me… me. Honestly, reading over those entries from all those years ago, it’s like reading a stranger… but I guess that’s called becoming an adult… or maybe realising that you’re just not a kid any more so you MUST be an adult because you don’t have a frickin’ clue what’s going on. Or indeed, care.

So, anyway… that’s that for tonight. I’ll type up the next chapter… next time. I don’t want to say tomorrow, as that ties me to something which I’ll probably not meet so it’ll be whenever I get around to it!

Tata