Chances are

Artists who approach us like to assure us of their committment by saying things like: “If given a chance I’d give up the day job. I’ll do anything to make it. If given a chance.”

The moment I told my parents that I was going to London to pursue a career in music must have been horrifying for them.  My dad used to insist I would have made a great lawyer. Why? “Because you can lie your way out of any trouble you’re in.” Thanks…. ;-) 

The decision certainly changed things for the worse in every financial and material sense you could think of. Man, we were so poor we had to steal toilet paper from pubs to have any. We didn’t starve, but we ate very very little. We had no money to spend on recreational items like a can of the cheapest lager.

Ever the upwardly mobile young thing, I decided to improve my lot by getting a gig playing songs in an Italian restaurant. There was this most glorious looking Italian waitress there. Emmanuelle. The name says it all, really. I digress… eventually I got fired for playing the wrong kind of music. I did Nirvana and Oasis covers - the popular stuff of the era. The proprietor wanted romantic Italian songs. The only one I could think of was Shaddup-a-yourface. Didn’t go down well. He sat me down at the end of a busy night, bought me a glass of the best red wine they had and said: “This would be easy if you were bad, but you’re very good. I hate to let you go, but I hope you understand. We’re both men trying to make a living”. It was a touching moment with a Goodfellas-esque script. His meatballs had kept me alive for some time.

All these seasons later, I’ve earned my stripes to speak about what’s involved in creating a livelihood out of music. Some say it’s all about belief. I say, believing in it is one thing, but how ’bout working for it? Ever considered that as an option?

In one of my favourite books by Kurt Vonnegut, the Chinese put a man on the moon through the power of concentrating their minds on it. A cool thought, for sure, but it’s fiction. The guys who actually went to the moon used fuel powered rockets.

All I can say to you, in a band, reading this and thinking that “I’ll do anything to make it, if given a chance” is that the only person who will give you a chance to put music first in your life is you. When you say “I’ll do anything to make it”, you must mean it quite literally, at the expense of everything else.

You just have to decide what’s important to you.

This entry was posted on 14/11/2008 at 11:37 pm and is filed under News At Zen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.