A Different Kind Of Virus

I left Penzance in 2018, but I didn’t leave Cornwall. The Yorkshire coast had been found wanting. North Wales was a pipe dream that an angry tide might on any given day wash away. There was Wick, a mythic-seeming town at the opposite end of the railway network, but while the concept of moving from one to the other appealed to me on a conceptual level, the practicalities of pulling it off proved too big a barrier. And the cold and dark winters would never have been profitable for my mental health.

I nearly made one more sojourn north, this time to Berwick (conveniently placed one hour by train from two appealing cities in Newcastle and Edinburgh) but online investigations failed to illicit many promising leads.

Why move at all?

Well I’d pulled myself from my 2009 financial slump and I’d also inherited some money from the sale of my parents’ house in Sussex after my mother passed away. I couldn’t live in rented rooms forever. Freelancing (which was the route I’d chosen after my job at the council went – along with the council itself) was too unstable an income source to gain me a mortgage, but now I had the option to purchase something modest outright. Cash is king, as they say. And what else would I do with that cash except (obviously) fritter it away.

I didn’t yearn to leave Penzance, but after close to 18 years it felt like time to move on. I did almost purchase a flat within a converted bakery building which was actually visible from the kitchen window where I currently lived. (I could’ve walked my belongings piece by piece on foot had I done so, but not grabbing for at least a modest change of scenery seemed a wasted opportunity.)

I’d have found cheaper (or more bang for my buck) up north, but Cornwall wasn’t London or much of the rest of southern England when it came to house prices. It took most of what money I had, but I finally made the move, not from one end of the UK’s rail network to the other but one end of Cornwall’s rail network to the other. Say hello to the borders and Brunel’s striking bridge that had first linked Cornwall to the rest of the British isles. Greet the River Tamar and its snaking tributaries and estuary hinterlands. Saltash was to be the final resting place, my slender Cornish roots just about still intact.

*

I gave myself a grace period of a year to acclimatise and explore my new surroundings. To settle in. I was still earning money, but on a modest scale.  Alongside adjusting to my move, I was still keen to pursue my musical endeavours. Creativity was like a virus that I couldn’t shake off. I restrung my guitar, dusted myself down from the loss of Ilaria, and plotted the next stage for my illusory band The Goodbye Look.

It was a stop start affair and I abandoned several songs that I’d written with Ilaria in mind, but eventually I came upon another Italian singer (well they were Asian, but located in Italy) offering their services as a session singer under the name Alice Grey. They sang in a different vocal range and they didn’t have the magic of Ilaria, but they enabled the debut Goodbye Look album to have its own vibe, to add some darker tones to the palette and to fit the sometimes more downbeat nature of the lyrics I was writing.

Shipwreck Songs was more crafted than the original ep had been. It benefited from strings at the start and end of the second side (courtesy of my niece on viola). Tim’s arrangement of one of the stand out tracks on side one (Night Bus) had been built around the tiniest sample of my original recording and captured the mood of late night lovers walking home alone through suburban London perfectly.

I still hadn’t quite grasped that there was no longer any money (or even the potential, never to be realised, of money) to be made from making music. The game was up, unless you could tour and sell some merch off the back of it.

In fact too many people had now been enabled to become creative. The barriers that punk had eroded a generation ago were now completely flattened. Anyone with even a basic smartphone could make music of some sort if they wanted to and this was both a good thing (democratising) and a bad thing (much of it was inevitably garbage and even the good stuff was hard to discover, amongst all the garbage).

Why was I still making music? Why was I still writing, but now never completing, new stories? Was it just a substitute for love? A need to leave a legacy behind – these works of (ahem) art substituting for the fourteen children I’d neglected to help bring into the world? Answers on a postcard, please – preferably to one of my half dozen or more previous addresses. My brother had a much healthier perspective to the whole situation. Music was therapy for him and where I rushed headlong to release my latest creations to the world, he was mostly reticent to put anything out at all. (No one’s listening, he’d point out, no one’s knocking at the front door like they were back in the 80s and asking to purchase your latest music. )

But creativity was the virus that I couldn’t seem to shake off.

*

I’d not been long settled in my new surroundings, but I’d reached the point where I needed to actively search for more freelance opportunities – or worse, return to the real world of employment and sacrifice myself to a physical office, colleagues I’d see face to face, office politics and all the highs and lows I’d mostly tried to put behind me.

Then came lockdown.

I’d not seen that one coming. And I was not the only one (but thankfully I wasn’t running the country, so I could be excused any negligence - unlike those in power). It felt genuinely terrifying in those early days and my first instinct was to hunker down as best I could and hope to see it out. I furloughed my job searching ambitions for the duration.

The rub was that I didn’t actually have to make much of an adjustment to my day to day living. I was a certified recluse. Don’t mingle with other people, they said and I would’ve said fine, I don’t do that anyway. Nothing had really changed apart from everyone else being brought down to my level.

It became for me – once the original uncertainties gradually dispelled – like that expression of an older generation, ‘I had a good war.’ From March to May the weather was sublime. We had our allotted hour a day to go out and embrace it. The rest of the time I couldn’t distract myself with further adventures outside and I also had no work commitments. I’d never been given such an open invitation to be productive.

I wrote on average a new piece of music each day. I was at the peak of my guitar phase. I was writing a lot of new songs. But I was also producing more abstract and experimental music. A couple of months earlier I’d launched a new project, this time under the name North Loop. North Loop was the title of a track on the debut album of Sheffield band Clock DVA. Released in 1981, that sweet spot in my musical adolescence, it was a dark and brooding work that inhabited as alien a space as the Associates Sulk was to do a year later. It didn’t have Sulk’s swagger or energy, but it had something compelling that still excites me now many decades later.

My music was nothing like Clock DVA, but it harked back to fellow Sheffield pioneers Cabaret Voltaire and a raft of what had been categorised as Krautrock bands from the 1970s.  It was where the Ghostword side of my musical past had mutated to – electronics, but now supplemented by guitars.

In that first and strictest of lockdowns, I accrued enough material to furnish 3 separate North Loop eps (to follow the original ep I’d already completed) alongside a solo album of 7 songs in The Goodbye Look mold which I wrote, recorded and mixed in under 14 days. There was the outline for a new Goodbye Look single. And that still left a further twenty or more pieces of music that I’ve only recently rediscovered.

If that wasn’t dizzyingly enough – and bear in mind I claim no brilliance to any of this, although I do rate much of it by my own measure when viewed against the wider body of my work – I also finally sat down and made a collection of my favourite stories for publication. These were my published works of the noughties alongside almost a dozen unsold tales, many of which I considered to be as good as or better than those that had been sold. This mostly involved admin rather than creative work, but I’d never had the patience to do it before and it took that enforced confinement to enable me to do it now.

Self-publishing was financially viable where it hadn’t been in the previous century thanks to print on demand options. It still wasn’t a credible route to a professional writing career, but I’d given that dream up long ago. It just felt nice to put something together that I – and any interested third party – could own. It gave those stories and the people contained within a little bit of agency. It was an indulgence, but one I didn’t begrudge myself.

*

Lockdowns grew less strict and then the world slowly reset itself. I was certainly never as prolific as I had been then. I’m not so deeply introspective as to lose any sense of what many/ most other people suffered during those Covid years, but I can’t report on experiences I didn’t have. They were odd times for all and this is merely a recounting of my route through them. I’ve left out all the hurried trips to the supermarket for food, the tales of hoarding, the regular family Skype calls to keep everyone connected and all the day to day minutiae of navigating those plague years. But you can read about that sort of stuff elsewhere I’m sure. My experiences were not unique and I don’t have anything of value or colour to bring to them.