Fallen Heroes....

Last night, I was at the open mic night in the place I work and I started to get unfeasibly excited. A guy that played the open mic night all the time when I had first started working there was once again playing. He'd been on Hiatus for ages and ages, and I knew like everyone else who'd seen him before that the only reason he'd been away for so long is because he was working on putting together a band to help support his sound; this was a sound that was at the time so vast, so incomprehensibly good, containing ethereal vocals, decency, humility and grace that he would need a band behind him because he was just that good.

The Open mic progressed in the same way it usually does of a Sunday. Everyone else plays, the headlining band plays, then I play... it's something of a little vanity project for me. I get to play sticky sweet acoustic ballads about love and loss that just wouldn't fit into the band... The songs are in general too angry and all about my exes, and when we get together and play I have to stop being selfish in order to write good music. While I'm there, I plug the band and play "crimes," which in turn lets the Sunday night lot know that I'm made of sterner stuff and not just a teen angst complainer in the form of song... and everyone goes home happy. There was however a palpable buzz from the people who had gathered to watch this musical collective unleash what was surely to be an epic swirl of soaring vocals and huge cavernous sounding guitar work....


...And we were all horrendously disappointed.

Before, I watched a lion roar. Now, I saw that same lion with his mane shorn and his throat ripped out. There was no roar. There was just a formerly great musician and his backing band of pub standard session musicians.

Proof that if we are not careful, the mighty can fall if we listen to our own P.R. and bullshit. I like to think of myself as humble. I obviously wouldn't be pinning all of my future on this band if I didn't think we weren't good enough, but after last night, I no longer think that being cripplingly self doubting is a bad thing. I think it keeps me honest. And I think we're all like that actually... Mike and I give the impression of being either difficult to approach or just plain arseholes, but it's armor... or at least it is for me. What if you get to know me and don't like me? And good god... what if you don't like my music? I put 100% of myself into that, it's the most honest thing I do!

That's what keeps me honest. If I constantly doubt my abilities but still push as hard as I can and try to be the best musician I can be and put everything I have into it, then it means I still have something to prove, to me as well as everyone else. I'm never going to stand there thinking "I'm so great I never need to try..."

The minute you do, you should put down your guitar, stop singing and leave the band you're in. You've just turned into a cock, and you do not deserve the opportunity to make music.


News on the band front.... we have another gig confirmed! See www.myspace.com/thekalmar for details, but it's the 13th March, The End in Cardiff. Cheers Jeff, we owe you one buddy!