Geez, I can’t believe I haven’t posted on here at all this year. Admittedly a new arrival in the family popped up in January, so all hope of a truly peaceful night’s sleep is way off in the distance so energy levels aren’t what they could be, but it’s no excuse and unacceptable to expect readers to “hang around”…

Thought that I’d take this opportunity to articulate what’s going on in what I believe could be a brain in this head of mine:

Somebody very knowledgable about careers and business once gave me some surprising advice. He said that motivation in work as well as relationships tend to suffer from the “seven year itch”. These situations reach peaks (or troughs) that make momentum pretty difficult, and can create real make or break moments in someone’s life. While my relationships don’t seem to have, in the past, held to this rule (Naivety and emotions making them brittle and not lasting more than a few years) I can certainly look on a calendar and see that many of my vocations have quite literally lasted approximately 7 years!

This brings me to my crossroads. For the past 7 years I have returned to my educational roots – my qualifications in graphic design have led me to a self-employed existence. This has been great while work has been plentiful, but with the recession, work has been scarce and tricky to maintain. It’s at times like this that motivation relies on your heart being in the work when the moivation isn’t putting food on the table, and I’m not sure it is any more.

So, I return to even further back in my youth. From the age of 2, I could regularly be seen lying on my stomach drawing countless dinosaur, superhero, Doctor Who and finally Star Wars sketches in biro on sketch pads that gradually increased in quality. Always a fascination in the human face and emotion.

My teenage years brought with it an overwhelming passion for pop music. A desire to deny the school bullies attempts to hammer me down led to learning to play the drums, then keyboard and then guitar. I went to a school where being good at sport meant more than academic prowess. Some were lucky enough to be as confident physically as they were mentally – for the rest of us who found themselves physically insecure, it was an opportunity for the under-achievers to put us in our place. Exam success meant nothing when you were being made to feel inferior and fearful on the rugby field. One day I will write a song called “Good And Bad At Sports”, based on a film I saw on Channel 4 years ago.

Perhaps through my love of music and the imagery that went with it, I pursued study in graphic design – it seemed the coolest of the arts at the time, and the closest to my love of music. The 80′s were an incredibly visual time for music and Peter Saville rocked my world. Those days have now moved on. I’m not the greatest designer in the world, but I’m passable for the work I’ve created. While design has a limited brief (Particularly if you’re dealing with a restrictive client) and possibly a predictable resolution, hand drawn artwork has an individual and freeform quality. Only the luckiest and most talented designers get the opportunity to “be themselves”, but I feel that it’s on the sketch pad that I get the freedom to be an individual.

It’s taken me until my 40th year to feel comfortable in my own skin and to put things in their place in my head. I still battle a huge lack of confidence ironically paired with a fairly large but fragile ego – this leads to constant frustration. “I should be successful – why am I not successful? Oh yeah – I’m useless.”

I need to make a decision. Illustration artwork gives me a buzz that design no longer inspires. I’ve proved I’m a pretty good (With a lot of work) songwriter and musical ideas man. It makes sense to throw my energies into those things, so that’s what I’m going to do. The bullies have controlled me long enough.

If ever there was a voice of sanity, pointing out the randomness and general stupidity of the universe, it was the wonderful Douglas Adams. Humour and a hefty dose of lateral thinking and common sense detailed amazing stories and creations that reflected clarity on our own lives and reality.

Towards the end of the second Hitchhikers Guide novel, The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe, our heroes Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect find themselves on a spaceship housing a third of the supposedly doomed inhabitants of the planet Golgafrincham. Eventually it comes to light that this “B-Ark” while initially appearing to be the first of three arks is actually the only ship to leave home. The ship is inhabited with hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, management consultants, telephone sanitisers and so forth. In essence, what is perceived to be the “useless” third of the population, hoodwinked into being shot into space, and to land and populate an outlying world, which eventually turns out to be prehistoric Earth, leaving the remaining populace of Golgafrincham to get on with things.

Now this brings me to X Factor and it’s cousins.

Shoot X Factor into space? Nice thought, but no, I’ve actually got a realistic point to make about this.

The prehistoric apes of Earth become intermingled with the banished Golgafrinchans. In essence, we became a race evolved from the “useless” segment of another planet’s population. I’m getting images of the cast of Hollyoaks – but I digress.

I put forward that shows like the X Factor, in being allowed to smother the popular music culture are nothing but a “B-Ark” of the music world. Populated by singers – usually with no songwriting abilities, experience or creativity, skyrocketted into the public eye with nothing to back up their karaoke-style performances other than back stories. These are normal people – no mystique or masks. Ironically in the days of punk, the thought that anyone could do it gave the scene a level playing field on which to create and express regardless of ability. All you needed was a crappy guitar, an amp and some homespun lyrics. These days all you need is a karaoke mic and the impatience to bypass hard work and sell your soul to a business man.

These are people who in days gone by would have stayed in the pubs and clubs singing other people’s songs, emulating other’s creativity like selling forged handbags. That’s fine for those of us happy to buy fake goods – if you know what you’re getting then you can accept things for what they are. There are good and bad fakes after all – but they’re not the real deal.

But A-Ark and C-Ark haven’t left the launch pad. In a masterstroke of TV programme design Simon Cowell has created a format by which the useless segment of the musical population appear to entertain the bloodthirsty masses, with the more palatable rising to the top to become marketable figureheads. Hell, he even gets paid to advertise his own, new acts. The hairdressers and insurance salesmen are looked upon for the future and progress of music – like monkeys with typewriters there will be the odd flash of random brilliance, but in general the task lies with the established songwriters in the established music industry to babysit the green gilled winners.

In short, if you allow the ship of fools to flood the populace, you set back musical evolution. So don’t be surprised if you end up with monkeys.

I’ve been discussing an idea with a few people…

One of my greatest revelations in using the social networking site Twitter is the realisation that we are all surrounded by incredible, inspiring, creative and downright talented people. The crime is that so many people of this kind remain unnoticed for the time of their productivity purely through a lack of luck.

The idea is that in a combined effort, creatives can work together to produce a complete ‘product’ without the need to rely on any of the established organisations. For example…

Creative No1 is an unsigned singer songwriter. He needs a way to record his tunes.
Creative No2 is an amateur producer with his own recording studio. He offers to record Creative No1.
Creatives No 3,4 & 5 are aspiring acts well versed in the art of remixing. They offer to remix the tracks recorded by C1 & 2
Creative 6 is a photographer looking to increase their portfolio. They offer to photograph C1 for publicity use and covers etc.
Creative 7 is an illustrator/artist looking for ways to get his/her work “out there”. They offer a piece of artwork for a cover.
Creative 8 is a graphic designer. He offers to create a logo and the artwork for the CD…
and so on.

We’re left with a finished product ready for distribution to the masses. Might even be quite good. Nonetheless, we have a cross-promoted item pushing a large number of aspiring creators in one shot being distributed and promoted by all of those involved.

That’s the idea.

My life hasn’t really run in a convenient order. Don’t get me wrong, I have pretty much everything I ever wanted from life. A beautiful, funny, intelligent and loving partner, 2 gorgeous daughters and another littlun on the way. I’m self employed doing a creative job that for the best part doesn’t feel like a job. It’s just that things haven’t necessarily run in the way most convenient to what I’ve wanted to achieve in life. Poor me.

At the age of 16 I decided that I wanted to make pop music. I’d started to learn to play the drums at 11 with a drum tutor at school. I quit the lessons when he told me off for teaching myself stuff more advanced than his lessons and continued to learn by ear from my favourite records. In my later teen years I’d bought various hardware add-ons for my Sinclair Spectrum (A Specdrum and a Music Machine – remember those?) and experimented with sampling and composition. The purchase of an Atari ST took me into the proper realms of MIDI music and it was at this point I decided that my future definitely lay in music production.

Fast forward to the age of 26 and my first daughter is born. I’m working in an electronics store in Bude, Cornwall bringing in a respectable wage for the area and me and my then wife are renting a pretty nice terraced house. Through a conversation and computer sale in the shop I’ve been asked to play keyboard in a local band called Obsidian. The band are at least 10 years my junior but I take up a roll of adding “salt and pepper” to their material. Things are going fairly well until my partner starts pointing out that the amount of time I’m spending with the band is detrimental to the new family, and I quit.

Seven years later I’m single again. I see my daughter regularly. I’ve had a few relationships of varying success since and I’m spending much of my spare time drinking and socialising with a tight knit group of new friends. Then I’m introduced to Paul. We have instant common ground and we decide to record a song that he’s written called “Tuesday Girl”. When I’m not working we lock ourselves in my flat above a cafe and record the song track by track. It’s fairly obvious that we have a working affinity and considering the basic equipment we’re using the end product is pretty respectable.

Sometimes life puts creativity into stasis.

It’s now another 5 years later and both myself and Paul find ourselves in steady and supportive relationships. Aside from me being in a local covers band Februarymad for a couple of years and getting a lot of live experience, enjoyment and a sizeable portion of frustration,  our music output has been modest to say the least. The band put 2 or 3 of my own songs into their setlist which had good reactions. Paul and myself have done plenty of talking about it, but for a time it looked like that might be ALL we’d do towards getting productive. It’s only now, in 2010 that we both feel that our heads are in the right state to do what we always intended to do, and that’s make music.

So, we’re late in the game. The majority of bands start in their teen years and we’re verging on 40. Most musicians our age have either given up, are past their sell by date, or have become stale, jaded and have basically run out of ideas. Is it possible to be up to date and relevant at our age? This is where it gets easier – we’re at an age when we truly couldn’t give a shit, and that gives us freedom to not “play the game”. When it come to pop music, we’ve actually become pretty wise. Age gives you perspective and clarity, and if you’re blessed with the sort of “young ears” bestowed upon musical royalty such as the late great John Peel, you have a pretty mean filtering system in place.

The trick now is for me to fit it all in around my life and all the “life furniture”. Not playing by the usual rules means that the music can fit around our lives and not the other way round. The internet means that although we no longer live in the same town (I moved to Exeter, Paul is in Bude) we can still collaborate via software. When we’re ready to publish our music, we can do so immediately on the net and in turn self-manage. We’ve taken a decision not to play live until we have a body of work under our belts. Life took choices away from us when we were younger. Now the time is right to take back control.

Potential Electric Twitter – http://www.twitter.com/potential_e
Paul Fialkowski Twitter – http://www.twitter.com/northernpaulie
Februarymad MySpace (Includes old songs written by me) – http://www.myspace.com/februarymad

The creative process – It’s been written about by a multitude of people, but I guess it’s very much a personal thing. Sure, you can take tips from others with the same leaning, but essentially we all have different buttons pressed by different fingers. I’m going to concentrate on the musical process as opposed to my artwork. I find it a more personal journey whereas my artwork is far more formulaic if I’m being honest – my style is my style and I tend to work in only a few ways.

All I know is that I get an urge to create something in much the same way as you might suddenly fancy peanut butter on toast. It’s like having an imaginary taste in your mouth that can only be satisfied by the real thing. Imagine seeing an advert for peanut butter, and then an advert for fruit jam. All of a sudden you think, “I know, I could have a piece of toast with peanut butter AND jam on it.” It’s the same with my own, personal inspiration.

The food analogy is actually a pretty strong one. “Taste” is an obvious blanket term for all things artistic. I know that when I listen to others’ music there are times when I think, “Needs a bit more salt”, “Those ingredients don’t go together”, “That’s bland” or “That tastes like sh*t”, and of course, there’s no accounting for taste, but the urge is there to try and get the recipe right. As a musician, I’m always looking for the perfect recipe, and hopefully coming up with some completely new flavour or a new spin on an old one. Others are happy to work from the recipe book. I’ve worked from those plans, essentially to see how it’s all put together and to find out what works, but I like to move on from that and see what else can be done.

If the planets are in alignment your taste buds are on fire and something in you tells you immediately what ingredients will work together. A simple combination of elements can be far more potent than a complicated concoction. The more complex recipes take far more tweaks and experiments, and sometimes you can be in danger of losing what it was supposed to taste like in the first place. Sometimes you’re lucky and hard work pays off and you can sculpt a messing into a blessing!

Finally the choice comes as to whether to release your wares to the public, and once again luck plays a heavy hand as to whether your work is tasted and appreciated by anyone other than your close family and friends. Some are happy to cook at home while others hope to open a restaurant. Personally I’m hoping to one day invite the right guest for dinner!

Fred the dustman picks up a bin placed helpfully at the end of a drive on an uneventful suburban road. He carries it to the truck, where it’s mechanism lifts and empties it’s stinking load onto the ever growing pile of rubbish. Once the bin hits the ground, Fred picks it back up, and motions to return it to it’s home. However the container never reaches it’s target.  As Fred moves down the hill, it occurs to him that he doesn’t actually need to go all the way back to number X – he feels nothing for the bin’s owner. He certainly doesn’t feel appreciated in his work and carries a resentment that he isn’t paid well enough for a job that “no-one else wants to do”. The bin lands 2 doors up the road from it’s starting place. The man at number X can bloody well come and get it himself. This is a service after all and they should be bloody grateful.

At the end of his shift, Fred goes to his car for the drive home. He waits 10 minutes until Roger, a workmate returns to his vehicle. He has parked so close that Fred can’t get into his driver side door. Fred would get in the other side and climb across but he has done the same to his neighbour on the passenger side. Roger gets into his car and spends 2 minutes playing with his sat nav before finally pulling out and allowing Fred to enter his car.

At the exit to the car park, Fred sits waiting for a gap in the traffic. He creeps into the line of traffic until eventually the oncoming cars cannot get past him and he moves out in front of them to a variety of car horns. Eventually the roads splits into two lanes, the left being designated for Fred’s home direction, the right for those turning out of town. Fred has learnt that the right hand is less busy, and therefore moves faster. He moves to the right giving the impression of exiting the city and passes a multitude of “suckers” on his left. Eventually the gaps between the vehicles grow to such as size that he is able to push his way back into the left hand lane, ahead of at least 20 frustrated “losers”. For a fleeting moment Fred feels superior as he feels 40 eyeballs burying through his rear window.

Fred needs fuel for his car as his wife used the car last night but left him with little petrol for his drive to work in the morning. At the petrol station he drives past the more patient drivers waiting until a bay is free and settles himself right behind a vehicle on the appropriate side of the pumps. His blood pressure rises as he sees the owner of the vehicle browsing nonchalantly around the shop. Eventually they return to their car and proceed to make a whole host of preparations for their journey without a glance in their rear view mirror. They move away leaving Fred the opportunity to place his car somewhere between 2 pumps, effectively blocking a 2nd position for those waiting behind.

Fred enters the shop, a door swinging back into his face from the previous entrant, and he pays for the petrol (Without a please or thank you) and exits the shop leaving the door to swing back into the next customer’s face. As he walks back to his car, his boot picks up a piece of chewed gum from the forecourt. As he re-enters his vehicle, he quickly scoops the contents of his door’s gulley onto the ground before pulling away.

On the journey home, Fred passes through a number of roundabouts. He does this journey every day and therefore doesn’t feel the need to signal as his mind goes into autopilot. He has to stop a few times as he tries to guess which direction the oncoming vehicles are going at the roundabouts. It seems that, just like Fred, they too do the same journey every day, and therefore no longer feel the need or incentive to signal their intention.

Fred reaches across to his passenger seat for the remains of his packed lunch. At this point he is reminded that he has already eaten what there was of his lunch, and that his wife had decided not to replenish the supply of prawn cocktail crisps as she doesn’t eat them herself.

On reaching home, Fred waits for the person who has parked across his drive to move their car. He eventually crosses the threshold of his home and picks up the post that his wife has stepped over earlier. Not being psychic, he is unaware that a parcel that he has been waiting 6 weeks for was brought to his door earlier that day by the postman and has been returned to the sorting office. A card has not been left as the postman “couldn’t be bothered” and resented doing anyone any favours as he wasn’t paid enough to do a job that “no-one else wants to do”. A demand for £800 for car tax penalties awaits him. He phones their offices where he finds out that they are still asking about a car that he sold 2 years ago and that someone who works at the office hasn’t updated the records.

Fred goes to make himself some dinner but the cupboards are bare apart from his wife’s diet food. As he returns to his car he notices a number of dustbins in random places up and down his street. A different division of waste collectors works this area and Fred is always looking to transfer so that he doesn’t have to drive so far, but he is always told that regulations won’t allow it. The reality is that the girl who was supposed to process his application left it for another girl worker to do on Monday, who in turn went on holiday that week. When she returned she placed her copy of Heat on top of the pile and it was forgotten.

Fred puts the car into reverse, turns, and flattens his wheely bin that has been left in the road between the parked cars.

“Oh, do me a favour!!”

It’s 6.30am and my 18 month old daughter is wrecking the joint. I did a late one last night, my partner in music ”crime” and I having put the finishing touches to a mixdown of a friend’s recording of one of his songs, resulting in finally hitting the sack at around 1am. My little girl tends to wake like clockwork at 6am every morning. Suffice to say I’m bleary eyed and not exactly lucid.

She moves around the room, surveying her surroundings and grabbing whatever sparks her imagination. What I notice is that although she initially picks up objects, say, a hairbrush, and then mimics the actions of her mother, this eventually dissolves into a variety of actions testing what else the object is capable of doing (Including what sound it makes when launched at Daddy’s head). I think back to last night’s musical meanderings, and make a link to these events – this youthful experimentation could be said to be the roots of innovation. At what point does this stop being a priority in our developing minds?

It seems to me that the older we get, the more confident and efficient we become in how we live our lives. The right way to do things, the right tool for the job. This childish testing falls by the wayside as we take for granted that there is a certain way to do things. It could be said that we lead our lives in the template of our predecessors - and I think that the majority of us do just that without question. You don’t need to walk around the world to know it’s not flat, right?

You could apply this observation to many areas of life – the way we talk, the way we dress, our behaviour, our eating habits, our religious beliefs…the list is endless. My initial thoughts relate to my activities of last night. The essence of mixing a sound recording is to get the various components/instruments of a piece of music to sit together in a balanced way. A good analogy is to think of it as a recipe. You add varying amounts of the ingredients in order to create a certain balance of flavour and texture, but is it more important to stick to the recipe book, or do we experiment with different techniques and flavours in order to progress?

To return to the subject of music, my main concern with moguls such as Simon Cowell is that their musical “belief” system is based on fixed recipes. Guitars sound like guitars. Pianos sound like…well, pianos, and so forth. His success is based on being able to market an item once it becomes ‘the norm’. He may profess to know a good thing when he hears it, but that is only once it has become palatable to the masses – it has, in fact, become a template. Mr Cowell will never be in command of a Ga Ga, Radiohead or a Bowie – it’s hard to package a dish if it changes it’s flavour every 5 minutes.

I suppose the observation I’m trying to pin down is that the moment we truly let go of our imagination is the moment that we stop innovating and we begin to live our lives completely shaped by others. It’s also the time that we stop learning, and we allow ourselves to be spoon fed the ‘norm’ by the Simon Cowell’s of this world, and that for me is no life.

I plan to be a toddler for the rest of my days.

Do you ever get the feeling that you’re at a moment in time where things are in flux? Couples are splitting up, people are changing jobs, institutions are ending, governments are being decided, and idiots decide that what they have to say might be of interest to others.

Having just come back from the Polling Station around the corner from where I live, it struck me that now is probably a good time to start blogging. Change is definitely in the air, even though that ironically it seems to be spouted in the same sentence as “Conservative”. I guess that historically this is as good a full stop on the timeline as any.

Now I’ve always been a friend of change. I don’t think that it’s something to be feared. It should be passionately embraced, encouraged and generally sucked dry of all it’s creative potential. I recently posted a comment on a Doctor Who forum with words to that effect. Inspired by a deluge of rabid fans attacking the latest Steven Moffat led series for it’s changes, I decided to reply with equal ferocity to defend those changes, or at least, defend the energy behind them. To be brief, I shouldn’t have bothered. I was accused of being anti democratic, pro Moffat and very little else. Such is the battle with people who think that they know the series better than everyone else – they get very stuck in their viewpoint of what the series should be. So much for democracy. Give it 2 years and they’ll be defending the series as it stands today.

To lean towards something maybe a bit more vital than my favourite programme, as much as it pains me, I have a horrible feeling that tomorrow will bring the dawn of a new Conservative government. Throughout their campaign they have used the word Change as an angle with which to attack the current Labour set-up. However this isn’t the sort of change where rules are rewired for the greater good, radical plans are put in place to make things better for everyone or that new ideas are brought to fruition. This is a change like moving the sofa to a different corner of the room – it’s a different viewpoint from the past 13 years, but it’s still the same TV in the corner, and someone else has control of  the remote. It’s only once they’re sat down that we’ll find out what stations they like, but I think I can guess, and it could well be re-runs from the 80′s.

I put faith in the fact that creativity abhors a stagnant society. In my view, the Tory years of the 80′s and 90′s inspired an incredible flow of invention and ideas, usually in total reaction to the way in which they steered the country. I can only hope that if David Cameron gets his wish and we are led into a new era of freedom for the priviledged, that the creative, inspired and passionately true of heart rally against it.

If change comes without choice, it’s a bitter pill to swallow, but in general if change is truly chosen, be it the end of a relationship, change of employment or the redesign of the Daleks(!), I find it’s very seldom a choice regretted.