Hello - Goodbye. That'll be £12.50 thank you.....

So, musicians charge their fans for a meet 'n' greet huh? Excellent article that posits a status quo of what musicians of my generation (stop sighing at the back there!) believed and operated under. What follows isn’t a pretty read and could cause a stink here but, fuck it, I've written about it a lot on my daily blog on music last year so... Anyone who believed the Punk movement was built on a cuddly franchise of equality between musician and fan was not only fooling themselves but were also perpetuating the myth and making it ‘real’. Yes, there were/are certain individuals/bands who's ethos was right-on with the message (Black Flag come to mind, although there are one or two questionable episodes even here) but, in the main? Follow the money, my friend.

All rock/pop musical movements believe themselves to be the new, unheard voice of their society, built on the dangerous oppression they perceive themselves to be living under, and a desire to change it, usually, for the better. A belief they try to hold onto in the early years of their career. Thing is, this lamp that is ‘fame’ attracts both moths and bugs. The praise and back-slapping, given to you by people who depend on your position as a cash-cow to keep refilling their bank accounts, gradually takes hold and, before you know it you cut the word ‘no’ from your dictionary and start to believe in the brown Smarties lifestyle and your own press cuttings. Easy trap to fall into; of a sudden one goes from ‘an appreciation of your situation’ to ‘knowing the cost of everything and the value of nothing’ in just a few steps. This can (and does) lead to a level of resentment of the intrusion into your life by people who consider you public property, an intrusion you invited, let’s not forget, because you were told this was the only way to get noticed. And, no, you didn’t have to do anything; you did it through either your inexperience or your ineptitude and shallowness; if I may paraphrase the WW1 bon mot, ‘you were a lion led by a flock of gannets’, and ‘X-Factor’ or ‘Search for a Star’, or ‘The Voice’ etc, etc, etc, and the abysmal Simon Cowell promulgates this parade of the mediocre as the presenter becomes the story and everyone else a disposable commodity. This was something allured to in another article posted on FB, about how bands and solo performers were bypassing the circuit slog and becoming ‘stars’ overnight (literally) where the auto-tune demon worked miracles and where no work ethic or dedication was required to ‘get to the top’, just the right connections and a willingness to prostitute your art; a world where you charge people for your time and pay to play, a form of bribery by any other name.

And so we find ourselves here; a destination so far removed from the point where music that meant something, meant so much to us, now means nothing; where the desire to become rich and famous (those words aren’t written that way round for nothing, you know) overrides the desire to be excellent in our chosen field first. And, in honesty, it was probably ever thus just that now it’s easier to become the bloated carcass of stardom, and the hyenas are just as greedy but now more tenacious and cunning.  Malcolm McLaren was a con-man par excellence; it wasn’t about changing the world but making some change. Elvis had Tom Parker, Jimi Hendrix had Chas Chandler and then Michael Jeffery (and the leech’s still make money off’f his corpse by writing books – books they sell – suggesting Hendrix was murdered by his manager) Slade chopped and changed their image to suit the trends, the list goes on. Thing is, you see, in order to get your message across to as many people as possible (if indeed a message is what you want to spread and, I mean, why write songs, poetry or prose if it’s not to let people know of your take on love, life and liberty) any band or performer has to become ‘popular’, and as a doorkeeper in a little play by Mr. S. once said, ‘There’s the rub’; to be popular and yet innocent is an oxymoronic state of seemingly unachievable proportions. So, in the face of all this, how can anyone keep their social beliefs and musical truisms intact?

Well, it might be useful to take a peek at 17^th Century England. In the 17^th century, when you stripped away all the façade where, just as now and, in Rush’s words, there was ‘so much style without substance, so much stuff without style’ all a woman had, in the end, was her honour, and all man had was his word. Without those you were nothing. So, simply put, keep your word and your honour. Jettison all the hype, hangers-on and blood-suckers with your ‘best interests at heart’ and stay true to your principles; those almost childish principles that made you go into this crazy, wonderful world of music in the first place. Unlike politicians, remember who put you there, be kind to people on your way up ‘cos you never know who you’re going to need on the way down.

Maintaining your innocence in such a fucked-up business is hard, few have managed it, very few, you have to want to be one of the few.