So this is what it feels like to be homicidal...and broke.

What a life I lead!


If all I did was music, I’d probably have starved to death already because guess what? My show got cancelled!


Yup! After weeks of rehearsal, nerves, finger and nail damage, some event manager decided my band wasn’t well known enough to cut it. Hell! If all event managers thought like this, Hendrix, Kansas and every other great musician who started just like me would never have made it. Not to say that I’m as good as any of them but when starting out, it’s good to have yardsticks that are better than you might ever be.


So here I am pretending to the black version of Courtney Love playing for Kurt Cobaine during the dress rehearsal and before I know it, midnight comes a’ knocking. Everyone but the singer is present but we’ve been so engrossed in perfecting our parts that we didn’t notice she hadn’t arrived. Front-men and women are generally dramatic, moody and ‘fashionably’ late so we let it slide this time. It was now two days before Sunday’s scheduled show and we get the rude realization we’ve been snubbed.


True to character, our front person, Kelly, dramatically depressed, explains everything and the fact that the employer – those guys they like to call corporate – had decided to go with a better known artist. This had us all crying on account of the oestrogen saturation that characterizes an all female band.


Not to sound new-agey and stuff but hasn’t it ever occurred to lady I-don’t-know-who- Sandpaper-are, that maybe even they need a new sound injected into their monotonous track lists. You can’t possibly have the same listeners forever. There is such a thing as a new generation. But that show was not to be, for Sunday came and went and all I did was stage an imaginary kung-fu duel where I beat the crap out of the event manager with my guitar.


Boy, was I miffed! I’d spent nearly all my money knowing that Sunday would be payday, my outfit was all ready and sparkling, I had a manicure – Jeri the all round tom boy had a manicure and it cost me five hundred; five hundred that I would have spent on two copies of last year’s Q magazine.


Diary, it’s not so much that I spent a lot of dough preparing for this, it’s that people, supposedly of influence can write you off just because they’ve never heard of you. As if people start out by being as famous as say, B.B. King. He was a nobody at some point too. No one is paying attention to new comers; exactly the reason why the people dominating award shows now have been doing so for fifteen, twenty years.


No. The world, no matter how unreceptive, will not push us down for we are the sun. We’re never really gone; we’re just on the other side.


It’s just like Kansas said: Carry on my wayward son, there’ll be peace when you are done.