Inspiration & Influences
These iconic writers have offered me monumental inspiration throughout the years and have greatly impacted and influenced the development of my own personal writing style, whose colossal rolling mountains of ingenious poetic prose I have ventured as far as the eye can see, exploring the landscape of their novels with an astonishing sense of wonder, learning to appreciate the excellently crafted paragraphs of elevated language with a particularly keen eye for the descriptive passages.
Be it the dense, syrupy-textured prose of Thomas Wolfe’s ‘Look Homeward, Angel’ – so drenched in poeticism, it emits a palpable aura of divinity or holiness, especially in the sections of his novel which are concerned with nature, in which he depicts the world with such emotion, vibrancy and detail it often feels like his pencil was guided by a thousand magical hawk’s eyes soaring through his imagination.
Be it the magnus opus and sole novel of Oscar Wilde: ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ – a story of now legendary-status which is somehow simultaneously archetypal and unique, concerned with both the fundamental, universal elements of the human condition and the nuanced minutiae of his character’s personalities; his writing style both immensely intelligent and witty, but also extraordinarily beautiful and exquisite, thus making it intellectually and aesthetically appealing, a feat which has rarely been achieved quite so splendidly in a debut novel.
Be it the haunting Gothic tales of Edgar Allen Poe – whose poetry and prose is so eloquently crafted and constructed using so vast and varied an array of elevated language, that to read his writing is to feel my mind usurped by a superior force and the source of my vision swapped from my eyes to his, often using his thrilling powers of articulation to portray the wretchedness of life, the misery, the heartache, the evil; however, doing so with such skill as to create literary works of tremendous beauty, despite the horror of their subject matter.
Be it Marcel Proust’s classic ‘In Search of Lost Time’, the saga upon which his immortal legacy of genius rests – an incredible writer who delicately spins his past into a phenomenal yarn, with the grace of an Impressionist painter, creating a dreamlike series of novels which seem to heighten my senses as I read them, alluring me deeper into their world; Proust creating such vivid, visceral, laser-sharp scenes of imagery, thence managing to fill those scenes with amazingly interactive characters, whose every nuanced thought and emotion he seemingly effortlessly articulates with thrilling clarity and depth.
Be it Kenneth Grahame’s spectacularly majestic novel ‘The Wind in the Willows’ – a work of literature so utterly mesmerising and breath-taking I often find myself subconsciously drawn back to it, time and time again, containing poetic prose which manages to capture, in all its glory, a wondrous fantasy world of surreal imagery and strange talking creatures; its astoundingly artistic and creative use of language never ceasing to hypnotise me, bewitching my senses, like a revolving gyroscope or a huge glistening hourglass, a work of truly spellbinding and peculiar beauty, its serene fairy tale atmosphere being something that has significantly inspired and influenced me.
The infamous Beat Generation writers were, for me, the first mature literary artists whose work I fell in love with – when first I read ‘On the Road’ by Jack Kerouac at the tender age of sixteen – acting as a portal through which I passed into the literary world of adult authors.
Their blended juxtaposition of autobiography and fiction somehow creates a mysterious world for the narratives to unravel within, like paintings pertaining to the genre of Magical Realism, in which one can never be sure if what they’re reading or seeing is fact or fiction, reality or fantasy. In this manner, they’ve successfully created a modern myth – the legend of the original Beats – which is most aptly characterised in Kerouac’s novels, an extended saga-like series which recalls various periods of his life, undoubtedly using poetic license to embellish the narrative, though it remains unclear to this day precisely which aspects of the narrative are exaggerated, or even purely imaginary, and which are starkly true and without inflation of any kind.
Inspired by Kerouac’s prolific use of the technique, Ginsberg used a stream-of-consciousness style of writing to create his masterpiece ‘Howl’: an epic poem, the creation of which was sparked by his William Blake esque visions, that flows as naturally as the breath or a river, using organic rhythms of speech unique to Ginsberg as a writer, creating an enthralling – even hypnotising – piece of poetic literature dredged up from the strange depths of his unique psyche.
Finally, William Burrough’s harrowing novels Junky and Queer introduced me to themes of illegal and legal substance abuse and alcohol and drug addiction as well as homosexuality and insanity as literary themes; his prose exploring the dark aspects of modern life which most of his contemporary writers lacked real-life experience of or the bravery to write about and publish, in what was – at the time – a rather hostile social environment for creatives like Burroughs and the original Beats, one of censorship and rampant discrimination.
Despite the harsh cultural landscape within which they found themselves, all three of them created magnificent works of literature and have thus justly ascended to become pillars, nay icons, of Twentieth Century Western Literature.
As well as vast meandering hills of poetic prose, with long winding sentences and elaborate flowing rhythms, I have also been influenced by sparse and halting prose, written in a journalistic style, using stark language to clearly and concisely present a story, without the flare and decoration of in-depth descriptive passages using elevated English.
For me, the greatest writer of this style is undoubtedly Earnest Hemingway, whose novels I have found to be a deep source of inspiration, like a cavernous well into which one can drop a bucket and sit idly for hours as it careens impossibly far down into the earth and somehow keep going; myself finding the minimalism of his literary style highly impressive, using, as he does, a limited vocabulary, he forces himself to be creative and competent with a smaller set of words, his tools, thus putting the onus not on the quality of his tools – i.e. the complexity of his language – but on the excellence of his craftsmanship. And it is with great virtuosity and sensitivity that he crafts his narratives and develops his characters, defining the story with the clarity of a master journalist, as, in fact, he was, yet also incorporating highly creative writing to construct a realistic world in which the story can be set.
Jean Genet was a countercultural literary figure, with no formal education in writing, whose cult-status novel ‘The Thief’s Journal’ also coheres with this style of Literature, it being a great inspiration to me as a writer; Genet managing to poetically recount the harrowing tale of his voyage through Europe as an impoverished nomad, his writing so unapologetically confessional that it influenced me to use traumatic and psychologically intense experiences from my own life as source material for my creative expressions.
It was also Hunter S Thompson’s novel ‘The Rum Diary’ which filled me with great passion and ecstasy at the idea of pursuing this particular creative path; Thompson using such a frank writing style, cutting to the core of each scene, each character; every single word seeming to be essential – like a tiny cog, the size of a coin, in a clock tower which, if removed, would catalyse the collapse of the entire mechanical structure, or like a lean, sinewy body with zero fat – his prose style is so sharp and fundamental, it influenced me to be conscious of every word I use and not write anything that isn’t absolutely vital, in some manner or another, to the piece.
Finally the poems of Charles Bukowski have inspired me in this regard, his poetry so unadorned it almost feels brutal, so naked it almost feels uncomfortable, so barren and bare it almost feels cruel; depicting the world so bluntly, thus putting no aesthetic layers between the disturbing subject matter of the poems and the reader, thus, inspiring me to be bold and not shy away from revealing the true nature of the sinister, the insidious, the vile, the dark subjects which usually must be coated in a dense layer of beautiful language in order to be palatable.
These musical artists have never ceased to offer me the gift of inspiration, through their majestic creative expressions; even influencing the development of my own unique musical style, for these artist’s songs are not mere sequences of notes, they are a window into their minds. Each musician has formulated an original ‘sound’, thus urging me to follow in their colossal footsteps and attempt to do the same, by looking deep within my subconscious for the source of creativity.
Elliott Smith, in his short life, wrote and recorded many hauntingly beautiful tracks for acoustic guitar using unconventional harmonies, compelling me to abandon commonplace triad-based chords and instead write my own unique and original chords; his instrumentation and breathy vocals – almost like soft, sensual whispers – being multi-tracked, as mine are, to embolden acoustic music which otherwise could sound anaemic and thin, compared to large-scale, densely layered soundscapes.
Jeff Buckley, another genius soul tragically lost too soon, sings with such sweet passion, such sensitivity, such a dizzying array of emotions, his tender aching voice so poignant, so full of wonder, that when I listen to his music, I feel truly at one with him, a connection at once scientifically bewildering and spiritually thrilling, using his vocal gift – and his universally acclaimed virtuosity as an instrumentalist – to communicate with his fellow humans through the majesty of music.
The gorgeous music of Bon Iver simply cannot go unmentioned when discussing my primary musical inspirations, for many a long day and night I have spent listening to their raw, acoustic songs, spell-bound by how strange, how unique, how original they are; thus, they opened up an alien-seeming doorway through which I ventured into a world of musical possibility I didn’t know existed until I heard their music.
Whereas this experience with Bon Iver occurred in the early stages of my teenage years, the exact same experience occurred with Radiohead in my early twenties when I moved to London to study music and people implored me to listen to Radiohead, for in my songs they heard shadowy glimmers of Thom Yorke.
Radiohead’s music is crafted with such originality, their song structures so strange and yet so perfect for the piece, their harmonic choices so fascinating, their instrumental arrangements composed with such excellence and depth, that I often find myself drifting into another world as I bask in the peculiar wonder of their music; an experience I have endeavoured to offer those who listen to my songs.
Nirvana, whose sole songwriter Kurt Cobain has deeply inspired and influenced my writing, capture so much angst and rage, so much pain and despair, yet also so much sensitivity and consciousness, so much self-awareness and feeling, that I often feel as if I can see the world through Cobain’s eyes when I listen to their music, as if I am transported into their world and, in fact, directly into Cobain’s dark mind and can look out upon reality as he does; in much the same way one can see through the eyes of Lazarus in ‘Within Youth’ and are transported into the dark realm of Golgotha.
These poetic musical artists – whose works are a veritable masterclass in songwriting – have impacted my writing style vastly, informing the development of my artistry to an unparalleled extent and guiding me down the strange meandering path that is the voyage of creative expression I have undertaken. All three combining Literature and music in a way that I would not have thought possible had they not managed to do so with such grace and eloquence, such skill and practised excellence. These artists put such emphasis on lyrics as a medium for storytelling that it inspired me to do the same: forming multi-dimensional characters, creating complex narratives and building worlds within which the story can take place; though, I have sought to evolve and expand upon their legacy by using the techniques I have outlined above over the course of an entire album, rather than within singular songs as they did. In this sense, my style of combining Literature and music is a natural progression from theirs and is in fact built upon the ingenious foundations they originally set; making their exploration of songwriting a necessary prerequisite for my own, meaning I owe them a sincere debt of gratitude for their noble creative toil.
Writing in a neo-folk style, although all managing to do so with their own personal flare and unique twist, these musical artists primarily used acoustic instrumentation to create the sonic landscape within which they place their literary tales, their poetic writing, inspiring me to do something somewhat similar, influencing me to use layers of organic acoustic audio as the skeleton, the fundamental framework, the core of my songs, around which I decorate the soundscape with atmospheric, ethereal, ambient sounds also, inspired by my love of soundtrack music which I will elaborate upon below.
Be it Leonard Cohen, initially a writer of poetry and prose, using music as a medium to express his literary creative expression, or be it Bob Dylan using poetry and influence from his literary idols to add depth and artistry to his music, or be it Johnny Cash, whose lyrics seem to be written with such natural poeticism that he has become, in my eyes, a perfect blend of poet and songwriter; all these musical artists explored in one manner or another the possibilities and potentialities of literary songwriting and in doing so produced musical works of great poetic quality and stature, inspiring me to attempt to do the same in my own personal way.
These supremely skilled soundtrack composers have influenced me no end, most notably inspiring me to use sound as a means of creating a sonic landscape, a tangible sound-world which the characters can explore and exist within and also within which the narrative of ‘Within Youth’ can transpire. In this manner I have attempted to craft the realm of Golgotha using soundtrack-style music, constructing a soundscape which reflects the horror and the beauty of Golgotha and designing my arrangements and compositions so that they serve the narrative and reflect the state of mind in which the characters find themselves.
Hans Zimmer’s style of composing rather minimalist arrangements and then producing them maximally – by multi-layering each individual part so that it often carries the sonic weight of an entire symphony – is a technique which I too have incorporated into the instrumentation of ‘Within Youth’, albeit to an admittedly lesser degree. By minimising the number of parts one uses within an arrangement, it becomes absolutely necessary to put a maximal amount of attention and effort into each individual part, thus stripping the piece of music of any superficiality and making the harmony lean and sinewy, much like the writing of Hemingway, but also muscular, intense and highly impactful on the listener.
Both these extraordinary soundtrack composers use sonic texture creatively, giving their musical pieces depth of character, by using a varied array of instruments in their arrangements, which all seem to touch the ears of the listener in a different way and which, when combined, allow for a thrilling, titillating, sensory experience wherein I often find myself transfixed by the song, my attention glued to each sound as it pierces my mind; an effect I have humbly attempted to induce through the music of ‘Within Youth’, to bring to life Lazarus and Ophelia and allow the listener to feel as if they too are roaming the streets of Golgotha, or brooding within their secluded loft, or lost in a drug and alcohol-induced haze of fantasy, or even sat glassy-eyed within the walls of the infernal insane asylum.
Howard Shore introduced me to the idea of using music to create a world which is, in itself, a blend of fantasy and reality, a tangled mesh of truth and fiction, a grand feat he managed to so astoundingly accomplish in the soundtrack for the glorious film trilogy ‘The Lord of the Rings’, his masterful virtuosity so abundantly clear in each and every note of the epic score.
The visual art movements Impressionism and Post-Impressionism have had a rather substantial impact on my artistry, by showing me that the role of the artist is not just to accurately document or portray a subject – be it an event, entity or environment – but also to convey their feelings towards the subject. With regards to ‘Within Youth’, I therefore realised I cannot only lay down a vivid narrative map, but must also communicate how it feels for the characters to experience it. Thus, this concept album – narrated directly from the first-person perspective of Lazarus – is not merely a documented series of occurrences, but also a collage of emotional expression which allows the listener to experience Golgotha, and the events that ensue therein, through the eyes of Lazarus, as he does.
In my humble opinion, no visual artist achieves this effect more profoundly and poignantly than Vincent Van Gough, whose works seems to explode with emotion; how he feels as he experiences the world seems to become starkly tangible and empirical – when expressed through his glorious brush upon a raw canvas – and we, as viewers, are invited into the intimacy of his mind to not just see, but truly feel the subjects he is painting. Hid bold use of bright, visceral colours allows him to create such dazzling, such spectacular images, so potent, so enthralling, one almost feels intoxicated to look upon them, to feel the exultation of experience that he so magically imbues his paintings with.
Both the Literature-oriented and Visual Art-oriented branches of Surrealism caught my fancy during my youth and have, thus, informed the direction and progression of my creative development. Primarily, Surrealism, introduced me to the notion of blending reality and fantasy, autobiography and fiction, or to put it bluntly: fact and falsehood. This revelation was astonishingly freeing and unshackled me from the notion that the content of my creative expressions should be absolutely true, therefore endowing me with the artistic freedom to write from the perspective of a character, one who is – simultaneously and somewhat paradoxically – real and imaginary: Lazarus. I also applied this approach to the creation of Golgotha, the semi-fictional land within which the narrative of ‘Within Youth’ unfolds, imbuing it with elements of reality which I had, either personally or vicariously, experienced and with elements of fantasy, conjured from the strange ocean of my imagination, to insert a sense of magic and mystery.
Salvador Dali incorporates this technique into his paintings with ingenious virtuosity and skill, primarily constructing his images from objects one can find in reality, yet thence proceeding to bend and warp them – altering and even suspending the natural laws of universe – in much the same way the unconscious mind creates surreal and fantastical dreams out of ordinary objects, or human eyes distort and twist our vision whilst under the influence of a hallucinogen, or even the way our mind unconsciously filters our perception of reality, choosing, unbeknownst to us, what we notice and what slips by unseen. Thus, when we enter the peculiar world of Dali’s paintings, much like the semi-fictional realm of Golgotha, we walk into a world in which the senses can no longer be trusted with absolute assurance and within which we mustn’t automatically believe everything we see.
Whilst the above paragraphs are largely concerned with the content of my creativity, Abstract Expressionism altered my comprehension of the source of creative expression. Previously, I had held that artistic expression ought to be consciously constructed and meticulously crafted, and thus to not create anything without specific and deliberate thought. Having seen the Abstract Expressionists work, primarily that of Jackson Pollock, I came to believe the source of one’s artistry ought to, in fact, be their subconscious – that mysterious realm of the psyche, of which we have only partial awareness – and that creative expression should not be created by the conscious mind so much as it should be released through the conscious mind and, actually, originate from the subconscious.
Pollock used intuition and instinct as a means of passing over the reins of creative control from his conscious, analytical mind to his subconscious, active mind; in this sense his creative expression had far more to do with acting than thinking, inspiring me to follow suit. This influenced me greatly in the development of my creative method: ‘Subconscious Expressionism’, a theory I created in the hopes of imbuing my own works with the same sense of raw, primal energy that Pollock’s contain; not primitive or crude, but ancient and wise, calling on the ageless evolutionary intelligence that courses through our veins and winds up the coiled strands of our DNA, passed down for billions of years by our ancestors. Pollock’s paintings burst with life, despite being abstract, and seem to somehow carry the weight of existentiality and the human condition, as if his very soul’s animalistic writhing is contained within every splash, flick and drip of paint upon the canvas.
It was during a period of utter fascination with Cubism and Pablo Picasso, that I happened – rather by accident – to realise that my songs all seemed to contain within them a miniature narrative, like a single piece of a puzzle, and that – if I were to carefully arrange the songs in a specific order – those two narratives would conjoin, becoming one longer story, like two pieces of a puzzle connect to form a larger and more coherent image. Looking back, I believe this revelation to have been catalysed by my immersion in the art movement Cubism; Cubist paintings being a composite of individual images, all from different focal perspectives, which – when combined – represent a singular, more complex, entity and ‘Within Youth’ being a series of story-telling style songs, all from different temporal perspectives, which – when combined – form one complex meandering narrative.
In much the same way Picasso’s Cubist portrait ‘Weeping Woman’ offers us – the viewer – a multi-dimensional depiction of a character, so too have I not only sought to portray Lazarus and Ophelia with depth and complexity folded into the layers of their personalities like an onion or an origami swan, but also as characters whose identities are fluid and, thus, evolve in response to their experiences, as is consistent with the human condition.
It is not only literary works of a similar style – which themselves draw from the same creative vein and which mine parallel subject matter – that inspire my poetic-prose descriptive passages of nature and the environment in which the narrators exist. It is also the glorious landscape paintings of Turner, Monet and Constable; artist’s whose creative expressions, through an oily visual medium, influenced me to take up the challenge of painting a vivid, tantalisingly tangible, visual world using only the written word, through language alone.
Both Turner’s epic seascapes, often imbued with great theatricality and implied narrative, and his grand landscapes have offered me inspiration, be it either through watching art documentaries or visiting the Tate Britain Gallery in London to view his ambitious paintings in person; inspiring me to be bold in my world-building, to attempt to create an extravaganza of awesome, even otherworldly imagery, to mythologize and Romanticise the scenes I write in much the same way he elevates a relatively benign situation into an epic moment, one of monumental historical importance and filled with extraordinary images and events that are seldom seen in everyday life. So much of life is routine drudgery, the completion of odious tasks upon which the sustainability of our Civilisation is contingent, and so it is with great elation that I look upon Turner’s paintings and rejoice to behold the magical scenes he so expertly creates, reminding me that the great works of Art, Literature and Music are, in fact, a handful of the fruits of our laborious daily toil.
Constable was a great master of Romanticising and mythologising the scenes he painted – an ability I adore and admire in any artist, for to me the greatest works of art are those which portray reality in an embellished state, using artistic license to exaggerate certain qualities of the landscape and ignore other less aesthetically-pleasing or intellectually-interesting aspects – and so he too influenced me to take heed of his legacy and not be afraid to idealise that which my writing explores, doing so purely for poetic effect. Constable’s chosen subject matter was pre-Industrial rural life, the bucolic British countryside with all its beauty and tranquillity, representing farm buildings, riverbanks, thatched cottages and windmills in an idyllic form, almost like a fairy tale, imbued with bliss, wonder and a dream-like quality which is somewhat similar to the effects of nostalgia on our happy childhood memories, allowing the viewer to see the world through angelic rose-tinted sunglasses and offering us reprieve from the bleak dreariness of reality.
Being a maestro Impressionist, Monet not only manages to paint mesmerizingly beautiful landscapes of multi-coloured flowers and hedgerows, ponds with floating water lilies and Japanese style foot bridges, buzzing bees and bright, sensual sunlight, he also succeeds in allowing us, the viewer, to truly feel the emotions associated with actually being within the landscape; an effect Turner and Constable also achieve though, in my opinion, to a lesser degree, as Monet was perhaps more conscious of this phenomena. A great hallmark of Monet’s work is that it not only shows us a portal into another world, but it also allows us to step through said portal and to feel as if we are within the painting. After hours of gazing, enthralled, at Monet’s paintings in various galleries and museums throughout Paris and London, I realised that I too wish for my creative pieces to offer the same effect, the opportunity to vicariously experience another world through the mind of the narrator or a character.
As well as the evolving portrayal of Lazarus and Ophelia throughout my concept album ‘Within Youth’, many of my short stories and poems are character studies, interested in exploring the psychology of an individual and often articulating how the superficial façade of a human being can be a mask behind which there lies a vast well of mystery and horror. The act of existence is inherently traumatic and so, as we grow and experience the world around us, we develop long winding scars within our psyche that reach all the way through our identities and right down to the very core of our being, our soul. My character studies are often interested in journeying from the surface of an individual’s personality, their outer body, down the meandering scars within their mind until eventually we reach the true soul of the character. This was, in large part, inspired by the harrowing portraits and haunting depictions of humans that can be found in the ingenious portfolios of these great master painters.
The haunting and often nightmarish paintings of Hieronymus Bosch have served as a source of great inspiration and influence for my literary pieces; demonstrating to me the unbelievable psychological depth which can be represented on a blank, two-dimensional canvas. Whereas most painters whose subject is also human beings chose to focus on a single character in conventional portrait style, Bosch manages to incorporate a myriad of figures into his pieces, all of whom seem to carry serious psychological weight – as character studies – and somehow have implied narratives and back stories expertly folded into the brushstrokes from which they’re created.
Goya and Francis Bacon were masters of dark character studies and the genre of horror, painting portraits of figures whose facial expressions are often contorted into a harrowing illustration of existential anguish or physical agony. This influenced me to not shy away from the brutally severe end of the emotional spectrum when depicting people in my creative works and that suffering is not only a beautiful and interesting subject to explore artistically, but it is also an incredibly important subject, given its rampant prevalence not just in the modern day but all throughout history, be it war or famine, disease or pestilence, death or destruction. The pristine shiny luxuries of modernity, such as medicine and technology, have arisen as antidotes to the awful suffering in the contexts within which they were created and so artists like Goya and Francis Bacon serve to remind me – not only that the pain of chaos is an omnipresent threat – but also that to be ungrateful is to be ignorant of how truly terrible existence can and could be.
Finally, I am eternally inspired by the extraordinary detail Rembrandt captures within his portrait paintings; it continues to astound me even to this day, after years of adoring his creative works. Being a great master of the art form, he manages to incorporate immense detail into his paintings, giving each character’s facial expression an amazingly nuanced countenance, each brush stroke astonishingly subtle and yet equally impactful, every detailed minutiae of the image is coherently tied together to form a cohesive, powerful character study. Whilst viewing his works I realised that Rembrandt has influenced me, primarily, by his depictions of the human eye, which themselves are so piercing and so communicative it almost feels as if I am in dialogue with the artist himself, through the character’s eyes, and that they act as a kind of window not only into the figure’s soul – wherein we can delve – but also into his own. In this sense, creative expression can act as a transcendent means of communication and connection between artist and audience.
Artistic Identity
My primary method of creative expression is a deeply personal process, which I term ‘Subconscious Expressionism’, whereby I delve deep into my psyche – through meditation – to acquire a state of trance-like self-hypnosis – that’s free from the constraints of my conscious mind’s editing mechanisms – proceeding, then, to freely express the content of my subconscious without inhibition. I perceive this method of creative expression, this process which can be applied to both Literature and Music, as a natural evolution of Kerouac’s ‘Spontaneous Prose’ and ‘Stream-of-Consciousness’ writing used by many artists throughout history, most notably the Surrealists. By using this technique, I – meaning my conscious self – have little control over the content of my creative expressions but rather over how I then go on to craft and construct a piece of music or a poem or a short story using the artistic content, that mysterious substance of expression, that my subconscious and unconscious mind supplies; like a builder who is given a set of bricks and must use them to erect a grand monument. In this sense I am, as a creative, more akin to a sculptor who is given a large monolithic block of marble and must thence chisel and chip away at it to reveal the sculpture hidden within the stone; I do not wish to consciously create my artistic works, but rather to release them from the caged prison of my psyche, that dark dungeon plunged deep down into the sub-levels of my mind wherein the source of my creative expressions is located. Thus, I cannot take credit for my artistic works any more than I can claim conscious responsibility for the lightning fast, instinctual reflexes that my body enacts when an object is dangerously, nay threateningly, flung towards my head.
My first distinct memory of experiencing music was as a child of seven or eight years old. My father sat on the back steps of our rustic old farmhouse in the English countryside. It was dusk and the sky was a magical shade of deep navy blue, even the hue of electric blue as it lightened the further upward from the horizon he looked; tilting his head back and craning his neck casually to see the stars hovering directly above him. My father sat on the hard stone steps and there were black metal hand-railings on either side of him, with flaking shards of paint that would occasionally crumble off as you slid your hand over the railings. He had sitting beside him a bottle of red wine, a glass, an ashtray, a packet of Marlboro cigarettes and a box of matches. Most importantly, however, he has playing an old weathered acoustic guitar. I was standing behind him, about ten meters away, in the hallway of our small house, casting my gaze through the corridor that led to the back door, where the steps then led out into the back garden. He was playing a song by Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young entitled ‘Heart of Gold’, although I didn’t know it at the time. Suddenly I was stunned, stupefied, paralysed with awe and a strange sensation of delight and intrigue enveloped me; a swirling concoction of neurochemicals cascading through my young brain. To my child’s mind, it simply looked as if he were touching an odd-shaped box of wood with tight metal wires and yet somehow the sounds that arose managed to bridge the gap between us, floating invisibly through the air, and trigger within me an emotional response. I couldn’t understand it. I was utterly mesmerised. I remember as if it were yesterday, standing there in a daze listening to him play the same song for what felt like hours. Somehow, I realised, his playing could make me feel something, it was a form of communication and connection, an invisible bridge. All I truly knew was that I wanted to cross that bridge with sound, by playing that strange musical instrument, that object I didn’t understand the mechanics of at all, the same way my father had unknowingly triggered an emotional response in me by his playing, thus forming some imperceptible channel, some mysterious bond between us, he the artist and I the audience. In that moment I knew deep down that I wanted to enact the role of artist in that equation. And so it was, that year – when I went away to boarding school – I began my musical odyssey and started playing acoustic guitar, piano and singing. For hours and hours upon end, I would sit alone at a piano in the music building or with my guitar in the common-room, and play the same chord progression over and over again, seemingly endlessly, instinctively understanding somehow – although I could not articulate it, only intuitively enact it – that I had to put emotion into the playing, so that people could get emotion from the playing. Some deeper part of my being understood this and so I toiled obsessively, desperately trying to do what my father had done with such ease and grace, on the back steps of our house, on that fateful dusk evening.
Professional Information
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