I saw a reel on Facebook recently.
Four lads, probably in their early twenties, all bunched up around the camera. Singer at the front, guitarist to one side, bass player on the other.
The guitar started.
Oasis.
Not actually Oasis, obviously, but you knew exactly where it came from. That mid-90s Britpop sound. The caption said something along the lines of:
For fans of Oasis and [another band I can’t remember], check out our new single.
Sigh.
You missed the boat, lads.
That was 1995.
And I don’t mean that because the music was bad. It wasn’t. It sounded alright. I’m not even particularly an Oasis fan.
The problem is that they’re running uphill while Oasis are running down it.
And they’ve got thirty years of weight strapped to their backs.
You can’t compete with someone’s memories
Someone who fell in love with Oasis in 1995 hasn’t simply spent thirty years listening to Oasis.
They’ve lived thirty years with Oasis.
Those songs were playing in their first car. At parties. On late-night drives home. Through relationships. Break-ups. Weddings. Birthdays. Divorces. Kids. Friends they’ve lost. People they haven’t seen for twenty years.
Music is about emotional investment.
The songs we listen to become stamps along the way.
So when a new band says, “If you’re a fan of Oasis, you’ll like us,” they’re not really competing with the chord progressions or the guitars.
They’re competing with someone’s life.
Oasis got there first.
They’re running down the hill shouting CURRAHEE! while these poor fuckers are slogging their way back up carrying thirty years of somebody else’s memories.
That’s a hell of a race to enter.
And, to be fair to the band, the music industry practically forces them to do it.
What genre are you?
We’re obsessed with labels.
What genre is your music?
What subgenre?
Who are your influences?
Which three artists do you sound like?
Every platform seems to want you to explain your own music through somebody else’s.
I hate it.
I’m just me.
My influences include George Michael and The Cure. Stick that into your algorithm and see what comes out.
Influences aren’t the same as identity. They’re ingredients.
But if nobody knows who you are, “For fans of us” isn’t a particularly effective advert.
So I understand why those lads did it.
The entire discovery system is asking unknown artists to describe themselves using artists everybody already knows.
And in doing so, it encourages them to run up someone else’s hill.
I’m guilty of exactly the same thing.
George Michael fans are not waiting for me
I’m about to release my next single, Rise, and I’m planning to put my cover of Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? on the B-side.
And there’s still a tiny part of my brain capable of constructing this wonderful fantasy.
George Michael fans hear it.
They tell other George Michael fans.
Suddenly thousands of them are listening to me thinking:
Where the fuck has this guy been all these years?
I’m the missing key!
Yeah.
Probably not.
George got there a long time ago.
His fans have decades invested in him. His music has been there through their lives. I’m not going to wander in at 53, sing a song he famously recorded and somehow inherit that relationship.
I’m running uphill too.
The difference is that I’ve already been through the part of life where I needed to believe I was going to make it.
And I remember when I stopped believing.
A car park in Hucknall
I was 23 at the most. It couldn’t have been any later than 1996.
I’d tried to start a cassette duplication business.
Yes. Cassette duplication.
The business plan was mostly made up because I couldn’t think of anything better. It was one of those silly, stupid things you do when you’re young and think you’re supposed to have a plan.
Somehow I’d managed to get a bank loan with a government-backed guarantee.
The business failed.
I went into the bank to work out what the hell I was going to do about the money I owed. They explained that for the government guarantee to kick in, the loan had to default.
So the best financial option available to me was to fuck my credit rating.
And I’d still owe some of the money because the guarantee didn’t cover everything.
I walked out of the bank.
It was raining.
I got into my car in a car park around the corner in Hucknall and just sat there.
There wasn’t a song playing.
There wasn’t some cinematic soundtrack accompanying the moment.
Just me, in debt, sitting in a car in the rain.
And something changed.
I’d spent my life until then reaching towards something.
Music.
Success.
Recognition.
Freedom.
Being loved, I suppose.
I had this vision of what my life was going to become. I genuinely believed I was destined for something more. Maybe not greatness, but something.
Music was going to take me there.
And sitting in that car, for the first time, I realised the thing I’d been reaching for might actually be out of reach.
I gave up.
That’s the bit I regret.
I had more time than I thought
I think I already had my computer recording system by then.
One of the early ones.
And you know what I did with this incredible piece of technology that suddenly allowed me to record music on a computer at home?
Not very much.
It sat around for months.
Eventually, probably that same year, I sold it.
Bills needed paying.
I’d already decided the dream wasn’t going to happen, so why did I need a recording system?
Here’s the really painful bit.
I even remember thinking about putting my music on the internet.
In the mid-90s.
For fuck’s sake.
Fuck Bieber. That could have been me.
Probably not, obviously.
But that’s the point.
I don’t know.
What if I’d spent every spare hour for the next five years learning?
Practising.
Writing.
Recording.
Getting better at production.
Putting music onto this strange new World Wide Web thing while hardly anybody else was doing it.
What if I’d written another hundred songs?
What if I’d just kept going?
Maybe I’d never have been famous.
Maybe nobody would have cared.
But looking back now, I think I could have had a career in music.
It just might not have looked anything like the career I’d imagined.
At 23, I couldn’t see that.
I thought I was running out of time.
The ridiculous thing was that I had more of it than I’d ever have again.
Then everything went to shit
The next couple of years weren’t particularly kind.
My girlfriend got a job in Leeds and was away during the week. She cheated on me. Then she cheated on me with somebody else. I found out about both later that year.
We split up.
Somewhere in the middle of all that I left my supermarket job with absolutely nothing to go to, which in retrospect was a fairly fucking crazy thing to do.
For a while I tried being a taxi driver.
I got the licence. Hired the car.
One week.
One fucking week.
This was before sat nav. The work depended on the radio, knowing the area and being on good terms with the people running the jobs.
I’d thought maybe this was another way out. Maybe I could earn some decent money driving a taxi and work out what came next.
It wasn’t.
I stopped after a week, although I kept the hired car for another few days while I tried to work out what the fuck I was going to do.
Then I saw an advert.
They wanted people who could work with computers and set them up.
I could do that.
I’d been fucking around with mine for a year or two.
So I applied.
On the day of the interview, I drove the taxi back and handed over the keys.
Then I walked across Nottingham to the interview.
A couple of miles, maybe.
It’s only looking back that I realise what that walk represented.
I’d just handed back another little dream. Even the taxi had been a dream of sorts. A way to earn decent money. A possible answer to the question of what the fuck I was going to do with my life.
Now that was gone too.
I had no job. No taxi. No guarantee that the people at the other end of this walk wanted anything to do with me.
For all I knew, I’d just fucked myself.
So I walked.
There must have been around a hundred people going for eight jobs. There were several stages. Interviews. Questions. Practical tests.
Set up this printer.
Do this.
Fix that.
I fucking nailed it.
How, I have no idea.
But I did.
I walked into that interview having just given up on one more idea of what my life might be.
I walked out having accidentally found the thing I’d spend the next thirty years doing.
I just didn’t know it yet.
And without realising it, I’d found another hill.
Now I’m running downhill
I loved programming.
It didn’t take long before I realised I’d found something else I could obsess over. Something I wanted to understand. Something I wanted to get better at.
So I did.
Years passed.
I learned.
I built things.
I started businesses.
I made mistakes.
I wrote software.
I learned security.
I found customers.
Eventually, I sold my business.
That was the moment I knew I’d made it.
Not in the way the 17-year-old musician had imagined.
Not even close.
But I’d made it.
And now I’ve got thirty years behind me in software.
Which means something slightly uncomfortable.
If a 23-year-old developer decides today that they want to build what I’ve built, they’re facing exactly the same problem as that band on Facebook.
I’m running downhill.
I’ve got thirty years of mistakes, experience, customers, code, security knowledge, relationships and instinct behind me.
They can’t download that.
They can’t shortcut it.
And they shouldn’t try to become me anyway.
They need to find their own hill.
Stay in the game
It’s easy for me to say all this now.
I’m 53.
Imagine one of those lads in that Facebook video reading this.
He’s 23.
He’s working some crap job he hates. He can’t afford a house. He’s looking around at a society where many of the things my generation could reasonably expect in our twenties seem completely out of reach.
I had a mortgage at 21, for fuck’s sake.
And no, that wasn’t because I came from privilege.
I’m working class. My parents worked in factories and cleaned floors.
It was simply a different time.
So I’m not going to tell some 23-year-old musician to stop dreaming about making it.
I wouldn’t have listened either.
What I would tell him is this:
Find a way to keep doing the thing you love.
Find something within music that you’re passionate about that can help you stay there.
Not songwriting. That’s a given.
Not performing. That’s a given too.
Something else.
Maybe you’re an incredible guitarist and discover you love teaching.
Maybe it’s production.
Recording.
Live sound.
Session work.
Building instruments.
I don’t know.
I don’t know you.
But you’ll know it when you see it.
My vocal coach, Mark, was a patent lawyer.
He loved music.
Now he works from home in his studio. People walk through the door, they sing, and he teaches them to become better singers.
He’s built a life inside the thing he loves.
That’s success too.
Maybe that’s the thing I couldn’t understand when I was sitting in that car in Hucknall.
I thought there were two possibilities.
I make it.
Or I don’t.
There were thousands.
Find your own hill
So maybe I was a little unfair to those lads.
They haven’t missed the boat.
They’ve just missed that boat.
Oasis already sailed it.
And trying to recreate somebody else’s 1995 means carrying thirty years of their history up the hill with you.
Take the influence.
Take the guitars.
Take whatever made you fall in love with their music in the first place.
Then go somewhere else with it.
Find your thing.
Find your hill.
And most importantly, find a way to stay in the game.
Because at 20, or 23, five years sounds like forever.
It isn’t.
Ten years isn’t even forever.
Keep writing. Keep learning. Keep practising. Keep making things. Keep putting them out. Build your craft. Find a way to pay the bills that doesn’t require you to abandon the thing you love.
Don’t decide at 23 what isn’t going to happen at 30.
I did.
I had more time than I thought.
And thirty years later I’m making music again anyway.
I still dream.
I still occasionally imagine some ridiculous sequence of events where I release a record and suddenly everybody wonders where the hell I’ve been.
Why shouldn’t I?
Dreaming was never the mistake.
Giving up because I thought I knew how the story ended was.
Do your thing.
Enjoy your thing.
Whatever comes, whatever comes.
Be at peace with who you are and where you are, but don’t confuse that with standing still.
Keep climbing.
Because perhaps one day you’ll look behind you and realise you’ve accumulated twenty or thirty years of your own songs, your own experiences and your own memories.
Maybe someone heard one of those songs when they were 20.
Maybe it was playing when they met someone.
Maybe they drove around all summer with it turned up.
Maybe they danced to it at their wedding.
And maybe thirty years from now some young band will be telling people:
For fans of those guys…
And you’ll be the bastard running downhill.