New Hope For Those With Writers Block!

Let's have some history before we carry on. In the punk/new wave era of 1979-80 - i.e. prehistory almost by current standards - I was in a couple of bands, most satisfyingly The Relatives, in which my ego and creativity were given free rein as there were only three of us. I assumed the roles of bassist, singer and song-writer. Along with guitarist, Charlie Mac, I wrote an entire repertoire in a matter of months. 


Exhilarating as this was, and it was very exciting, what was far better was to realise that the songs we wrote improved in quality almost on a song by song basis. I had a 'job' in a solicitor's office supposedly updating his Rolodex and in between entries I used to type up my latest lyric ideas to take to the band later that day in our squalid rehearsal room under a deconsecrated church in Brighton, UK so that we could construct music for them. (That was if the rabid glue-sniffers outside would give us the peace to do so.)


It was the new wave and, hey!, everyone was a social critic. We were pissed off with everything and wanted to change the world, change the music business so that it would accept us grubby little tykes with spiky hair and spiky attitude and also get rich quick. (Though we would never have admitted as such for fear of credibility death.) Subjects for songs were ripe for picking and there never seemed any danger of drying up. 


So far, so prolific. All was well until the small amount of money I got dried up and I got to living below the poverty line, relying on a bunch of thieving, alcoholic hippies for food and boiling up my strings in order to get some life into them. I relocated to Athens for a couple of years as a teacher and thought I would take my muse with me. Fair play, I did write a few things with which I am still quite pleased. But then the moment passed and when I came back to UK I found that new wave had morphed into new romantic and the tables had turned. Now everyone wanted to get rich quick and it would have been seen as socially gauche to actually care about anything. 


Feeling too old and too much like a fish out of water I went back to being a jobbing bassist and that's pretty much how it stayed until I abandoned bass for guitar and started on my own little Murph and the Magictones moment in the supper clubs of Muscat. As far as song-writing went, my only creative activity was to add occasional verses to old jazz standards for the fun of writing in character. I never had the urge to try anything more challenging and had to all intents and purposes dried up as a song-writer. If I ever tried to do anything, I would get panicky and abandon it. 


Cut to January 2010 and I am sitting on the front door step on a winter's evening with my partner.  I should state that my partner has ridiculed me all along for this practice of completing other people's songs. My answer to this was that I had run out of things to say to the world. Suddenly, unbidden, a song starts insinuating its way into my mind, only I don't yet know its a complete song or that it could become a complete song. A phrase or two are enough to make me grab a guitar and suddenly it's coming together. In an hour or two it was finished and suddenly the floodgates are open. Then I couldn't stop them and for the next 9 months, they come thick and fast. The only constraints are time and energy. Human nature provides an inexhaustible fund of subjects and stylistically they are a far cry from the rather po-faced efforts of by-gone days.


Now I don't worry about whether I will dry up again. If it happens, it happens. If it doesn't, it doesn't. 


Is there a moral here? Probably not. Maybe sometimes it takes 30 years and innumerable changes of life-style to kickstart the creative juices.