I was on my way to a solo show in Sheffield and I was nervous. No exasperated tweets about wailing infants on buses, no smug commentary about the shuffling mania of fellow passengers, no intermittent dozing, no music in the headphones, no novel on my lap. I watched the scenery go by and wondered what on earth I was doing.

Nervousness is not typically in my repertoire. I haven’t been nervous before a show for at least five years. Before going onstage I am usually just quiet (maybe because I’m saving my energy for all the imminent jumping about). This time, however, I was dreading it. In fact I’d even lost sleep over it the night before.

So why this sudden change?

I’d just got rid of what many people called “my trademark” - well, to be exact, I’d mercilessly shaved it off. Suddenly I was overcome with doubts about my abilities as a performer. And, as every performer knows, doubting yourself can be like the first nudge in a line of dominoes.

For readers who have stumbled upon this article from links unknown, a quick introduction: More than the songs I write or the shows I play, I am mostly known for having a very big beard. The songs and shows take a lot of work, the beard took a lot of no work. Skewed logic at its finest.

Those that already know me may not, however, know this:

In 2009, while we were recording “Mother” (the song - and later video - that helped hoist my little Manchester folk/swing band to a more international level of obscurity) I suffered from a severe slump in morale, the kind where you sit staring into the middle distance for days not talking to anyone. I finally got dragged out of it by my friend Dan (Bedlam Six bass player - one of the best and most dependable people on the planet) and we got on with mixing the new record. I wrote the song “Deep Enough” a week later, it’s about how one can never really prepare for when ugly thoughts/doubts/emotions pounce out of the shadows and start gnawing away at us. Like most of my songs it is filtered through a theatrical persona where tongue is wedged violently in cheek (my songs tend to have a kernel of reality at their core despite being somewhat cartoony by the time they reach the public).

As soon as I wrote “Deep Enough” I had an idea for the video - a forlorn looking man staring into a mirror shaving off a big beard. This is not a particularly new idea - Scorsese has done it (twice), so has Wes Anderson, even Demi Moore did it in GI Jane (well, not a beard but the effect was the same) - but a potent visual nonetheless. So after completing the shoot for the “Mother” promo I let my moustache grow out into a full beard and bided my time until we recorded a full band arrangement of the song.

What I hadn’t factored into my plans was the reaction to this change in my physical identity. Human beings need to connect with each other (as E. M. Forster famously said: “Only Connect”) and this yearning eats away at us if we do not indulge it from time to time. Yet the British build so many walls up around their character that we tend to live our entire lives in miserable little bubbles of social etiquette. Despite being manic onstage, off it I’m as socially frigid as the next man, to the point where if someone sparks up a conversation with me in a bus stop I assume they are mentally subnormal. Having a big beard, however, is the same as wearing a sign on your forehead with the words “I am the exception… I am not an entity that exists in the world of fashion or sex… I am timeless… I am not a threat… I am OTHER.” To be a bearded man is to be public property. To walk down the street with footlong hair on your chin is to wordlessly invite a deluge of questions and unwelcome petting. One time I was in a bar with a friend who had just broken up with his long-term partner when someone from the next table interrupted him in mid sentence and said to me “Could you settle a bet for us? I think it took two years to grow that but my wife thinks it took four.” They hadn’t even noticed that my friend had tears in his eyes.

But as a singer-songwriter the beard is my certificate of merit. It is my curriculum vitae. It is proof that I’m not a part-timer or have-a-go chancer. There is no way I have a “proper” job. No serious employer would consider me, I look like a nineteenth century gold prospector (or a “fisherman’s ghost on acid” as Kirsty Almeida once described me). I’m unemployable and have a considerable gap in my CV to prove it. No, if I’ve invested that long into such a growth, funded only by the songs I write and the shows I play then I must be worth taking seriously. And that’s the hardest thing for an emerging artist to achieve - being taken seriously.

And now the beard is gone. All I have left is my songs and the excellent musicianship of my colleagues. And I worry it is not enough because people keep bandying around this stupid word “trademark” as if anyone really gives a damn about my shaving habits.

We may like to think image is secondary to content but it only takes one glance at the adverts on a typical high street to realize image is everything in our society. Music may be an aural experience but, like perfume, it’s marketed in a mostly visual way. Sinatra wouldn’t have got as far he did if he wore jeans and a t-shirt (and as Danny Ocean he wouldn’t have been admitted into half those casinos let alone get a chance to rob them). Can you imagine Jools Holland gushing over Seasick Steve if the man was wearing a shell-suit instead of dungarees? Image may not be everything but perception certainly is.

Furthermore, in Britain at least, we don’t always go into an unknown situation with an open mind. If we are watching an unfamiliar musician strut about on stage there is a certain unprovoked malign quality that says “So this guy thinks he’s going to entertain me does he? Well we’ll see about that!” As a performer I fear the “Who does he think he is?” sentiment almost as much as I’m ashamed to admit harboring it myself. I work in one of the only sectors of our society where people not only expect everyone to pay attention to what they do but also applaud it when they’ve finished. We have seen generations of snarling young men parading up and down in front of the music-loving public, demanding its devotion as well as its money. I share stages not only with the latest crop of hopefuls but also with that formidable legacy. But bounding up to a microphone with a large shaggy beard and barking like a dog is a lot easier than sidling up to it in a pair of tight trousers and saying “desire me”. Unlike my rock peers I am not perceived as a sexual proposition, I am not cool, I am in no way a competition or threat to anything or anyone. I am a clown and it is a role I am very happy with (if you want to know something of my life philosophy I refer you to Donald O’Connor’s words of wisdom in Singin’ In The Rain). Is losing my beard the folk equivalent of losing my red nose…?

And then my thought process about identity and perception was interrupted as we pulled into the Sheffield bus depot. I retrieved my guitar from the belly of the coach and trudged up the hill towards the venue, my chin and neck a lot colder than the last time I made the journey.

Yes, that whole middle section was a dream sequence. Any independent musician will tell you that occasionally one can’t help getting swept up in a way of thinking that makes no sense at all. In our weakest moments we get distracted by all those old industry fairy tales and forget why we started writing and performing in the first place. Then we attend music conferences and networking events and online seminars and (heaven forbid) other people’s concerts only to end up in some stupid conversation with a self-styled marketing expert telling us what it is they think we are. And they go on and on about your brand. Brand? Give me strength! The joy of being an independent musician is that you get to decide what you are, not some clueless executive. You get to be that thing for as long as you like and you also get to change your mind whenever you feel like it and if there are people in your audience that go elsewhere as a result that’s fine because they are just as free as you are to do what ever they like. You are the architect of your success and it doesn’t have to resemble anyone else’s. I take my cue from audiences, from collaborators and from myself, not from people second-guessing an imaginary version of the music market. Who is the music market anyway? I am. Well, I’m a bit of it. I may be socially awkward if a stranger approaches me on a bus but at one of my own concerts I am available to anyone who wants to talk to me, in fact that’s the best part of being a performer - one is physically present and thus able to endlessly expand one’s web of association.

I played that show in Sheffield with my bald head and my bald chin and it went fine. Of course it went fine. Because people who take an active interest in the arts aren’t fickle and they aren’t stupid. Artist and audience are two elements of the same piece of theatre, both writing it as we go along.

And occasionally we shave bits off the narrative.

Latest promo video from The Bedlam Six. The song is “Deep Enough” and is the closing track of the Memoir Noir EP. I’ll be writing more about this earth-shattering film in an article about identity and public perception soon…

Levon Helm died yesterday afternoon.

I don’t go in much for citing creative influences (I think it’s all a bit more complicated than saying “so-and-so did that which made me do this”) but Helm was definitely one of the big ones for me, not only in his work ethic and attitude towards collaboration but also, more simply, in the way I (try to) sing. I don’t mind admitting that when I struggle with a new song I sometimes use one of his numbers to fill the temporary gap (the latter section of The Bedlam Six’s “You Can’t Run From My Love” was actually The Band’s “Rag Mama Rag” for a few days before I settled on the vocal line that eventually made it onto the record!).

I generally tend to resist the urge to pass comment about old musicians passing away, to be among the first in that gruesome dash to claim for oneself (and one’s blog) a piece of the public mourning. So often it is someone most people had forgotten even existed in the first place, so specific to “their era” were these celebrities. Every day facebook and twitter fills up with faux hysteria and old youtube clips of these so-called beloved artists, people beside themselves with that peculiar brand of online emotion reserved for social media (“OMG… gutted that the guy who played the original Milky Bar Kid has died, sooo sad”).

But Levon Helm is different. At least he is to me. His performances on classic songs like “The Weight” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” at the height of his fame is, I think (perhaps controversially), the least of his achievements. But I’m not going to write a biography here (I imagine plenty of those will be popping up over the coming days), I think it’s enough to say that he was a hardworking musician all his life who collaborated with some of the greatest practitioners in the rock, folk and country genres.

The distinctive thing about him is that unlike so many of his contemporaries he was putting out great records right up until the end, indeed he just won another grammy award earlier this year. For me 2007’s Dirt Farmer is an absolute masterpiece and one of my favourite albums. I actually listen to it more than I listen to The Band’s eponymous brown album. Can you think of another musician who came to fame in the 1960s who goes on to release their best stuff fifty years after their so-called peak? I can’t. Levon Helm makes me feel so optimistic, that maybe we don’t have to endlessly trade off the stuff we played in our twenties, that we can keep improving, keep surprising people, keep the doubters at bay.

It is for this reason I think people’s sadness at Helm’s death is completely genuine, not just a spurt of nostalgia like the one that followed Davy Jones’ passing earlier this year. I think his cancer deprived us of some really great future albums. He was mid-tour when it happened, he obviously wasn’t keen on slowing down.

I met Levon and his daughter Amy very briefly in 2005. It was New Year’s Eve and I was living in Philadelphia at the time. I’d taken a perilous bus ride up to Woodstock with my partner to attend one of the Midnight Ramble Sessions in Helm’s barn. The roads were icy and a blizzard was raging. At one point the car in front swerved and clipped the side of us before spinning off the road into a ditch but we pressed on into the night, everyone has somewhere to be on New Year’s Eve and our driver was no exception. After changing coaches in a tiny town called Paradise we were deposited in a rather nondescript bus stop in a deserted Woodstock. The place feels like a toytown and, at this hour, a ghost toytown. We headed to the nearest bar to ask directions and ended up chatting to a rosy cheeked man with a huge grey beard and prodigious belly who pointed us in the right direction (I later found out this guy was in the 1970s band The Dharma Bums - I even found pictures of him with Garth Hudson and the Dalai Lama - Woodstock is a weird place!).

From there we hitched a lift to Levon’s place up in the woods, the heart of upstate NY bear country. We were a bit late and the music had already started. It was his first concert after a long battle with an early bout of throat cancer. This was the first time he’d sung in public for five years and he sounded great, that distinctive voice a little thinner now but the passion and grit still there. Among the group of musicians he’d assembled for that intimate session was the last surviving member of Duke Ellington’s orchestra. It was a night I shall never forget as long as I live.

Farewell Levon Helm, one of the true greats.

In the days when I used the phrase “making it” without quotation marks I never stopped to consider what it was I actually wanted.

Everyone, no matter how abstractly, wants to be successful (be it professionally or personally) and for many there is a clearly signposted route involving earnings, influence, tax brackets, job titles, rank etc. But what is it to be a successful artist, where so much depends on undefined notions of truth, integrity and other poetic back-patting?

I originally wanted to be an actor but was put off after a few years by the way one’s fortunes are so dependent on factors outside of one’s control. An out of work actor is a waiter. An out of work musician is, whether alone in a bedsit or busking on a street corner, still a musician - still able to physically pick up an instrument regardless of whether anyone is listening - and that is a comforting thing when times are lean.

Success (as a life goal) is a world away from just being able to work in one’s chosen field though. Or is it?

Here is a sentence I have heard from a lot of musicians: “I just want to make a living from what I do.” As a sentiment it seems pretty reasonable but I find the people who say it aren’t typically those that have embarked on a considered path into professional musicianship (of the anonymous MU card-carrying kind), nor are they generally people with any clear strategy of making connections and researching possibilities. They are mostly artists with more ambition than imagination, their sights set on some degree of public recognition, wherein they themselves are the art, not just the songs they write/perform. So suddenly our attention is drawn to the absent words in that sentence: “I just want to make a living from what I enjoy” and the longer version “…I don’t expect to get rich” and then the even longer version “…and I’m not bothered about all the flunkies and drugs and sex and acclaim.”

For there is, whether we like it or not, an invisible context surrounding the work of every singer-songwriter and genre band. We’ve grown up with the iconography of Dylan and Hendrix, the hysteria of Beatles audiences, the self-indulgence of stadium rock and, like the horrors of Pandora’s Box, we’ve never been able to pack all those expectations away again. There is an incredibly glamorous elephant in the room making things just that little bit more difficult for those trying to make a real go of it in the entertainment business.

After all, forgetting the accoutrements of celebrity, who doesn’t want to be able to pay the bills by doing the thing they love? The majority of jobs are soul-destroying and meaningless, the pay being a poor substitute for the self-worth sacrificed. Who doesn’t want to do two well-attended tours a year and on their off days flop out of bed, pen an ode to unrequited love and send it off to whoever puts music into the credits of the Twilight films then stick the spoils into the pension fund? The “I just want to make a living” line is cringe-inducing in its naïveté, especially when viewed beside what most of the world does to make ends meet.

For we now live in a society where one can no longer realistically rely on a job for life in most professions. Like any other craftsman, a songwriter/musician must consider what makes them relevant today whilst simultaneously training a calculating eye on future options. If one’s philosophy centres on the concept of “making it” then keep in mind the fact that all things made are at some point unmade. After years of playing the pub circuit I finally reached that hallowed ground of being a full-time performer (which does wonders for self-esteem) but I took the clown’s shortcut and my act is dependent on a lot of jumping about - the sad truth being that I am already beginning to struggle physically. That’s the reason for the extra-curricular activities such as this blog, the odd bit of lecturing, panel appearances and reviewing albums for magazines under a pseudonym (well, we must all have our secrets!). I may be self-employed but I am far from self-sufficient, what I do is entirely at the mercy of public demand. Keeping one’s options open is essential.

For Success is a tricky concept, one that seems a little too final for my taste. But it is not a static thing and it is not a destination. So how to position oneself in relation to it?  It is, I believe, vital to have a personal, private and tailor-made definition of the term, not one borrowed off history or the fluctuations of public expectancy. Success should not be boring and yet look around and you’ll find that most people’s definition of it is just that. Ooh, what an expensive car he has, gosh I’m impressed.

But perhaps success is always boring. There are a few set and tested routes that lead to it and an infinite array of colourful and contrasting paths to failure.  Could it be better to fail with aplomb than succeed with a yawn? That’s what I repeat to myself as I slowly rock back and forth, cradling my aborted CV, staring at the unpaid water bill before click, out go the lights…

For a glorious few weeks each year my life is pretty much exactly the way I imagined a career in music to be when I took my first naive steps towards self-employment in the creative industries (at a time when I wouldn’t have dreamed of using a term like “creative industries”).

Most of the year is full of stats, networking, marketing and a host of other euphemisms that basically mean staring at a computer screen trying to convince strangers you’re in some way relevant.

But this article comes from the road, written in the back of a van speeding towards Freiburg. I am on a European tour with my band The Bedlam Six, everyone is in good spirits, the sun is shining outside, we’re ahead of schedule, have a crate of beer left over from last night’s rider and our bellies are full of hotel buffet. This is when all the questionable decisions I’ve made since leaving behind the relatively secure academic prospects afforded to me by the University of Pennsylvania finally make sense. This is when I have no regrets. This is when I don’t feel like a fraud.

Because the UK circuit does its best to make amateurs of us all. Success is treated like some sort of lottery (only far more expensive), the assumption being that progress cannot be made without the intervention of some expert, some aficionado, a fat man with a cigar and a big car. Fiction. And dull derivative fiction at that. We are made to feel like witless chancers, snuffling through the detritus for a golden ticket. All pretending, all scared, all making snide little comments about the other scared and swaggering hopefuls, all communicating in second hand phrases borrowed from a different era. It’s maddening and tragic and makes me want to move.

And that is why everyone I know loves playing in places like Germany. It’s not because musicians are paid decent amounts and treated like professionals (that happens in the UK too once you get to a certain level), it’s simply that the system itself has been looked after, does not exist at the mercy of fame or fad, it is in good health.

It took a long time but my band gets treated very well in the UK now, our tour this far has been wonderful, organised by enthusiastic promoters, playing to great crowds in some really gorgeous venues. But to make it this far we had to struggle with every single jaded booker’s assumption that all we want to do is get drunk and pretend to be rock stars for an evening. Why does Britain hold this default assumption that everything is over, that all we can hope for is an evening’s posturing, a hodge podge of nostalgia and attitude, like the musical equivalent of a crumbling seaside resort?

A decade of haunting the UK performance circuit has finally got me something approaching a sustainable career. But one tour in Europe had me instantly slotted right into an infrastructure that appears to be designed and maintained to keep the live circuit in perpetual motion regardless of whatever flavour of teen angst is in fashion at the time.

Success in the UK feels like a fluke - like one day I’ll be found out, tarred and feathered and run out of town. On this side of the channel I feel like an honest man.

If you are interested in our daily tour diary (at the mercy of venue/hotel internet accessibility) then head over to the Bedlam Blog where I am posting regular updates of our progress. 

There is an oft-wielded statistic that cites YouTube as the world’s leading website for music consumption - not Spotify or SoundCloud or LastFM or any of those sonically-tailored contenders, but a video platform seemingly designed to make tiny celebrities of slow lorises holding cocktail umbrellas.

And no, I don’t think it is absurd, or even ironic. It makes perfect sense. Some people may disagree but I believe music is always an accompaniment to the non-aural. The idea of music as a standalone commodity - a solitary song spinning a story to itself - is only as old as the recording industry (younger than my grandfather). One may strive to interact with sound as directly as possible, through noise-reducing headphones in darkened rooms, but one is never truly alone with music, there is an unavoidable and ever-circling entourage of dependent thoughts, borrowed interpretations, social pressures, production histories and general context. Indeed, context is essential to music, as I suppose it is, on some level, to all art.

And that is why I love music videos. All sorts of music videos. I like the ones with huge production values and needless pyrotechnics, I like the low budget ones, I like the high-concept ones, the one-take wonders, the subtle ones, the silly ones. I probably shouldn’t though. After all, they are the vulgar corporeal, the too too solid flesh. To say that videos improve music is to say science improves magic, really it can only cheapen the illusion. But somehow it works for me, maybe because my background is in theatre and an interest in unashamed artifice, I will give my attention to all shapes and flavours of music video. The only sort I deem worthless are the unimaginative.

For how many times have you seen a band standing in an expensively lit white room facing into the camera and miming for four minutes? Why does this happen? Who is this stuff for?

I understand how these yawn-fests became the norm. The early days of popular music coincided with the early days of television and the prototype modern teenager. Those three things combined to create static performances on awkward plinths recorded through gigantic and barely movable camera equipment in front of studio audiences doing their best to swoon from a seated position.

Ed Sullivan did the best with what was available to him and it resulted in some timeless performances. But why limit yourself to that format now when the camera on many mobile phones is capable of better quality footage than Citizen Kane?

One of my first posts on this blog was about bad band photography and I suspect bad music videos are reaped from the same diseased crop. It strikes me that far too many bands are spending more time trying to look like a success than putting their energy into becoming one, as if they can trick us into following their “hotly tipped” careers rather than making music that will entice us on its own merits.

Three decades after MTV first aired (with the wonderfully apt though artistically abject “Video Killed The Radio Star”) the default rock band music video still seems to be “dubiously attractive twenty-somethings playing guitars miserably and/or angrily.”

I just don’t understand.

Whenever I write a song there is a bunch of accompanying images in my head. None of which involve dubiously attractive twenty-somethings. Granted not all songs have an obvious narrative but they must contain some sort of emotional content, a nod towards something relatively universal in the human condition - if they didn’t no one would be interested, simple as that. Writing a song when your head is full of visions of yourself snarling into a retro microphone is like writing a novel while thinking solely of the printing process - that’s the delivery, not the content.

It’s not the mediocrity that depresses me. Mediocrity haunts everything (it is how one steels oneself against it that is important). I don’t care about established pop and rock acts churning out these little films, it’s the emerging acts aping them that are the real worry. We should no longer be seeing bands inexplicably playing electric guitars on beaches or in quarries, their power cables and silent amplifiers nestling among the pebbles. For again I say: Who Is This For? Next time one of these videos from some new Oasis-wannabe pops up on your facebook feed have a look at the comments and you’ll generally see one that says “looks really professional mate.” And that’s it, looks professional. But when are we all going to stop pretending? That video is not for the band’s audience, it is for some mythical version of the recording industry.

A music video can be many things: a piece of art in its own right, an entertaining accompaniment to the song and an effective marketing tool. It is also, however, a window on the featured artist (and an often uncompromising one at that). If all a band has on display is its naked ambition, as meager as it is anachronistic, then I’ll opt for the slow loris every time.

New video from my band The Bedlam Six. It’s a rare pretty number about love and priorities and having a sense of context (represented by a man’s relationship with his dog).

There are a lot of phrases you learn to dread when you’re the guy at the inbox end of a record label’s email address. Some of the PR spin is hilarious and there is a lot of repetition (I’ve learned that pretty much every rock band these days has “searing guitars” for example - in fact the word “searing” has ceased to hold any meaning for me now) but there are two phrases I hear and read so much that they have begun to induce a Herbert Lom-style eye twitch.

“THIS ARTIST IS READY FOR THE NEXT BIG STEP”

Really? As far as I’m concerned it’s just an infinite flight of incredibly small ones. If the path you have chosen has steps as big as that then, frankly, I think you’re probably on the wrong side of the mountain. And people who start scaling mountains without first looking at a map and deciding on which side is the most suitable for climbing generally aren’t the ones that get to name the mountain after themselves.

[Oh, it’s going to be one of those metaphor-stretching articles is it?  I’ll try to keep them on a short leash]

“THIS BAND HAS PAID THEIR DUES”

Since when do you stop paying dues? Dues are not the entry fee, they are the cost of continued membership. I hear this phrase all the time and, believe me, I know how it feels to be going round in circles but this just smacks of lazy thinking. Indeed, if there’s one thing I’ve learned since I decided to go full time at this, it’s that it doesn’t ever get easier, you just get better at doing it.

I don’t want to come across as unreasonable (I’ve written loads of press releases and I often read them back and think “oh god I sound like one of them”), I know a lot of these words are just conversational shorthand, a sort of aperitif before getting to the meat of the pitch. The fact that such sentiments have become so familiar, however, and so seemingly instinctive, makes me wonder whether they might not be at the core of the problem.

It is almost as if these people are expecting some sort of Headmaster figure to look at their end of term report and say: “right then, let’s see… band-name that responds well to google search… tick… ample social media interaction… tick… press photo taken in a disused quarry… tick… decent youtube stats… tick… free download in exchange for email address… tick…” before getting his official green stamp out of the top drawer and giving this artist the go ahead to MAKE IT IN THE MUSIC INDUSTRY.

I wish so-called creative people would stop thinking they’re waiting in line. That’s what X-Factor contestants do. There’s no outside and inside, no steps up and down, just get on with doing your best to create something that makes sense on some shared emotional level and then build from there. Too many people are waiting for someone to give them permission. Who exactly? If you have the technology to send a spammy email about searing guitars I’ll wager you have the technology to make a record and release it globally without anyone else’s help. And as for the marketing side, well it can be as simple as this: if you’re a musician you have a truly enviable capacity to make friends - music is the most universal and inclusive art-form there is (unless you’re one of those morons who thinks it’s all a big popularity contest).

I know it’s comforting to believe there is someone out there that can make life fit some sort of enviable narrative template. And it’s particularly handy to have that phantom figure on hand to blame when you don’t end up with a bathroom full of Grammys (but then you would have to ask yourself the question “was that really what it was all about?”).

Celebrity is a religion with its own set of martyrs and devils. Its miracles, however, are no less farfetched than those of any other confused dogma.

At times such as these, art can be a welcome heresy. I just wish these artists would stop thinking about “making it” and get on with creating it.

I started 2012 on a low. I start every year like that. In the days between Christmas and New Year I get impatient, bothered by a sense of thwarted intention, eager to get on with things. Come January though, when the days are still short and the air is chill I lose my optimism and see the year stretching out like some miserable and gigantic sea-monster floundering on the shore, a great groaning problem that I must either haul back into the ocean or hack into manageable chunks.

It’s also my birthday in January, an event that brings with it an ever swelling set of existential baggage (the above image of a court jester reminds me of a line sung by Feste the Fool in Twelfth Night: “Youth’s a stuff will not endure”).

So I decided to shake myself up a bit. Not by doing anything dangerous, just something that would place me out of my comfort zone. I organized a special birthday show in which I would play alone, seated and without the safety net of my usual gimmicks.

So far, so unremarkable.

It is worth noting that when I play with the Bedlam Six I tend to pepper my performance with a theatrical brand of contained mayhem. I leap off the stage, lasso bandmates with my guitar lead, kick my legs in the air, roll around on the floor and sometimes injure myself in the process (I once popped my shoulder out when clambering down from the dress circle of a venue and had to pop it back in during the trombone solo). I must stress that these antics are not contrived or rehearsed (it always feels natural and never a chore) but such a performance style does serve two distinct purposes: The first is that it is entertaining (and now that bands can no longer reasonably expect a steady income from album sales it is important to make the live show as appealing as possible); the second is that it distracts the audience from noticing that my abilities as a guitarist and singer are woefully abject.

But for every rock song I write for public consumption I’ll write two folk songs for private use. I never play them live. The lucky ones get sung by people with beautiful voices but most of them just sit in a mental drawer and gather dust.

The thing is though, just as many popstars want to be film actors and many comedians want to be novelists there is a part of me that longs to be taken seriously as a composer. Although the worry is that once you start getting taken seriously, it’s difficult to return to being taken comically.

So I decided that on my birthday I would dip my toe into those serious waters for a moment and see what manner of creature might be stirred from the depths.

I was very nervous. Generally I don’t get nervous about performing. Being on a stage can be very relaxing, it’s not often one finds oneself in a situation where one is entirely in control of events - a good gig is like that. I’ve sung in front of thousands of people, plunged from high festival stages into crowds of strangers and even dragged the odd drunk heckler around with my teeth. But sitting on a stool and singing slow songs in a minor key to fifty quiet people in the room above the Black Lion pub in Salford? That’s hard.

Well it went really well anyway. An indulgent audience and exceptional co-performers helped of course. But oh so wonderful to be afforded a new perspective on one’s abilities, it being so easy to become stuck in the same tested routines and expectations. The experience has not made me want to become a “serious” performer though - I think the world currently needs comedy more than ever - but it did reinvigorate a confidence in myself that I can now admit had started to falter.

There is no moral to this story, I just wanted to kick this oft-neglected blog into 2012 with something confessional that wouldn’t take much in the way of considered writing. That night was one of the best shows (and best birthdays) I have ever had, all because it made me rethink my definition of artistic success and, indeed, the notion I have of my own place in the world of live music.

It was also good to feel nervous again. One should never get too sure of things - losing your nervousness can be as bad as losing your nerve.

Usual mixture of cynicism and hyperbole will resume soon…

themilkbarldn asked: My Mrs has said that using a pseudonym, and using another name other than the one bestowed upon you by your makers, is hiding the real "Me" away. I tried to tell her that I'm not ashamed of my original name, and referred to examples in music, David Bowie, Elton John, Joe fuckin Strummer et al. I think it's a form of re-invention almost like a shedding of one chapter of your musical life into another, and a way of letting go on stage, that Derelict Leon never could y'know?

I also think it’s funny that the name given to you when you’re a few days old should be so much more sacred than the one you give yourself as an adult. I didn’t get a real sense of who I was until I was in my mid twenties, after I’d done a bunch of stuff, made some mistakes and thought really hard about what I wanted out of life. Folk put too much stock in the naming of things - people, genres, ideas etc - I say: just get on with it!