My history of being a multi-instrumentalist journeyman with imposter syndrome
A long meandering biographical piece written in the early hours of the morning on a phone while rocking a baby to sleep. A tale for the young-uns about how you never know what direction your creative career will take. Or a tale for me to remind me where I’ve been when I feel my playing isn’t up to scratch.
So I am now a father and you don’t need to have many baby toys before one of them is a musical instrument. My daughter works on the assumption that anything is a drum if you hit it hard enough. She shouts, bangs a piano and claps. All at once. Very aware that a musical career is basically just making as much different noises as possible. It’s wonderfully cute.
She got me to thinking. When did I know that I wanted to be a musician? I have vague memories of rushing into the room for the start of top of the pops and it being a bit of an event. The earliest tune I can think of is ‘I just called to say I love you” which came out when I was 4.
There was a few bruised and beaten guitars that we danced about with in front of a mirror, but I think our first real instrument was the ubiquitous Yamaha keyboard of the 80’s:
I was awful at keyboards. Beyond the demo button I could never find anything that inspired me creatively. My sister was already in high school by this point so recorders and keyboards were now a thing. I went for keyboard lessons and hated them. I knew what I was meant to do and couldn’t convince my hands to do it. I’ve always been academic and I think it may have been the first time I’d found something difficult. It created a long lasting hatred for electronic keyboards. I loved the sound of an acoustic piano though.
My real musical education started when I was “chosen” for brass lessons at school. We got an aural test. Which note is higher? How many notes are in this chord? I thought my answers were mostly guesswork, but I got an unusually high score and was chosen to start playing Cornet.
Sticking at it meant I was automatically in the School Brass Band when I got to High School. The school was in a mining village, or in a post-thatcher Ayrshire, an ex-mining village where coal had been replaced by heroin. An education indeed. One of the positive remnants of coal mining was an active brass scene. I’d like to think the brass band were like the football team in other schools, but maybe I’m taking it a bit far :).
Through a series of overbearing grandparents and some MBE awarded local teaching heroes we would win competitions left right and centre. This was even more impressive given the background of some of the families involved; as our lowly little school competed against regional bands made up of privately educated weans with posh names.
For me the the band had it’s own common room and section of the school. It was an easy way to escape the playground and PE(and often English and Maths too). Provided we were passing exams, we were untouchable. “Sorry. I can’t come to class, I’ve got band practice cos we have an important competition coming up”
This left us with time to kill and access to “cool” instruments. I had started drum lessons at about 12. It suited my personality more than keyboard lessons. I was able to pluck away at a guitar and knew the basic chords. I had discovered my dad’s vinyl collection and attacked music biographies with a ferocious enthusiasm. I was consuming books on Hendrix, The Beatles, The Stones and the Who. It coincided with the explosion of grunge music and all things Seattle.
Music had become my life.
Given that one of my friends was an older, better and cooler drummer, by the time we were considering starting bands I was relegated to Bass.
Initially we had more band names and logos than gigs, but eventually we played my first gig at a pub in Kilmarnock at 14.
Kenneth would like me to point out that he hadn’t started designing my gig posters at this point
Around the same time, it was also the venue for the first gig of fellow Ayrshirites Biffy Clyro.
By the time I was 16, I was gigging at least once a month. I was sitting in with other bands, playing in several brass bands and I had been to recording studios and all sorts. Every now and again we’d head up to Glasgow for a big fancy gig where we’d fall out of one or more minibuses from deepest darkest Ayrshire. The bars and venues thought it was Christmas as a ready made audience of seasoned drinkers entirely made of leather and hair fell onto their doorstep.
At the age of 18 I arrived at University as a seasoned gigging musician. My brass career ended in freshers week. I attended a practice with the university Brass band and everyone gave me the cold shoulder from their cleeks at the break cos 1st years weren’t to be spoken to. I decided my life was busy enough that it didn’t have a vacancy for a bad teen movie and never attended again.
With the guitar bands, we’d never done anything with it cos we knew nothing about distribution networks, management or record labels. There was just a kind of assumption that if you were ever good enough someone would come up to you after a gig and tell you how to take it further. No one ever did, but there wasn’t an expectation that they would. We just played away in our own wee bubble, we’d never met anyone that had taken their music further, so why would we?
Eventually I’d been in various bands and played everywhere you could imagine across the central belt of Scotland. We’d written songs, we’d recorded songs. I was competent in drums, bass and guitar and was studying music and electronics at Uni. When the opportunity to go to Europe for 6 months as part of Uni came up, I left my band. I’d managed to get in and out of the Scottish music scene. and just miss Nu-Metal.
I didn’t know at the time, but it would be a long time before I was in a band or gigging again.
I arrived in Amsterdam with a guitar in hand. I had decided that if I was going to spend 6 months in Europe , I would make sure I kept my music muscles active by attending jam sessions and open mikes. Amsterdam is a great city. It’s full of music bars, but different from Glasgow(in 2002) it’s all cover bands and blues jams. One of my first nights there I went out to a jam session and sat in on the drums as guitarist did a blistering version of Hey Joe. The next week, I headed along . He did it again. It was all the same people doing the same party trick. I think 20 years later , the ones that are still going are still on the same circuit doing the same songs.
Once you’ve been in Amsterdam for longer than a week you really realise how small it is. Within 6 months I knew just about everyone that was involved in music there. 6 months turned into 10 years and the office job got in the way. My guitar gathered dust as my suits got more expensive. One of the perks of the job was that I was constantly travelling all over Europe. Every now and then I’d take a notion to get my chops up again and I would arrive in cities having googled where the music bars and jam sessions were. As a result I can proudly say I’ve played blues in E in dive bars in more countries than your average lonely planet journalist has been to.
At some point my friend Fraser moved to Amsterdam. We had listened to music and went to gigs together since we were teenagers. I had never managed to convince him to take up an instrument. Once he’d been in Amsterdam for a few years he decided that he would start playing music. After a short period where he believed that Ukulele was the future, he decided to take up Bass. Step 1 was to buy a £3k Fender Custom Bass. To this day, I can’t tell the difference between that and my £89 one that I bought in 1995. I tell you this as a shortcut to explaining his personality.
Fraser’s boundless enthusiasm eventually convinced me to work out a few songs together that we could take around some open mikes. Before we could get to that stage he had already booked us a gig. Despite my protestations, we had a fortnight to prepare for two 45 minutes of acoustic sets.
From this point I was back in the game. Fraser had offered our services to a local Irish bar to run their open mic. It was a lot of fun and we started to build quite a following. I think it was really clear that we weren’t very good, but we weren’t very good in quite a heartwarming way. People seemed to feel comfortable to turn up with a few mates and play their songs. As a veteran of music events who has a short attention span, I also knew that no one wanted their Tuesday night post-work pints interrupted by an endless stream of people complaining about their ex-girlfriend over an A minor arpeggio, so I was always ready to jump in with a Stones cover or a badly constructed mash-up of Pearl Jam and Lady Gaga.
A checked shirt for every occasion.
I was obviously doing something right because I started to get involved in all sorts of different music things. I was getting asked to run jam sessions, I was playing guitar, drums and bass in bands and I was recording bands and singers. All things being Amsterdam, I don’t think I ever had a consistent band, but I played here there and everywhere. Gigs, Festivals, Weddings and gatherings.
I had been recording on the side my whole life. From 4 track cassette tape up to using DAW’s and software instruments. It’s another blog completely, but I added to my live work the ability to offer recording to people. This was the start of my living room becoming a recording studio and my significant other smiling politely. I had also started doing video and photography as another means of scratching the creative itch. This was all going on while I was working quite an intense office job. I’d cycle home from a pub in the early hours with guitars and amps on my back and then turn up for meetings at 9am the next morning, or fly off to a European city to sit in meetings hungover in a suit.
The end of my 20’s existential crisis coincided with redundancies being available from my work. I was already at a crossroads in life where my motivation for work was waning pretty quickly. Just like when I was 14, I had never conceived that I could make a living from my creativity. It just never seemed a possibility. With the question of what to do next, the possibility was now a spreadsheet.
I took the dog for a big walk and decided I would head home and live at my parents for a few months while I worked out what to do. The cost of rent and life in Amsterdam made it a no-go for funding a life through creativity, but in Scotland I might just manage it.
Within a few months, I had ruled out basing myself in Ayrshire. There just wasn’t enough happening for me to build a network from scratch. I liked the idea of being central to a creative scene in Ayr or Kilmarnock, but 10 years later, it’s still struggling to keep its head above the water.
I moved back to Glasgow at the same point as my friend Marie came to visit. This meant I had a bit of my Amsterdam life to ease me back into Scottish living. It was also really useful having a musician friend to go to open mics with.
I attacked all the open mics and jam sessions with a new found fervour to try and build a network and make a living. Before long I was also getting asked to host them. This gave way to being asked to do live sound. Within 6-12 months I cobbled together some sort of network that meant I could make money from it.
Musical performance wasn’t the main component of my work. I’d do video, photography and recording and sit in with bands or record sessions as and when they were needed. At some point I was flush enough that I decided to buy a trumpet.
It had been over 15 years since I’d even thought about playing. No one minds when you borrow their drum sticks or plectrum at a jam session, but it’s very hard to dip your toe in the water of Brass playing without an instrument. I bought a Yamaha trumpet and for a few months taught myself to play again. It was incredibly hard. When you are a teenager, tiredness, stamina and sore muscles aren’t even considerations. Now I was googling things like:
“Why does my shoulder hurt when I play trumpet?”
I decided that I’d dipped a toe in the water and that I could do trumpet with enough notice and put it aside.
At some point one of my many musical connections asked me if I fancied a wee holiday in Ireland to do photo and video for a small tour. The support was a Morgan Woods. Morgan and I got on like a house on fire. She was active around Scotland as an acoustic folk act called Something Someone. She kind of fell into my world and got involved in everything I was doing.
At some point she asked me to start playing guitar for her at some festival dates. I thought this was a terrible idea. She should use someone with some guitar skills or at least someone that is young and photogenic rather than someone who is big, old and beardy. She decided that she’d rather have someone she could talk to on long van journeys.
So despite my money coming from video, photography and recording I started to be a young hip performer in my late 30’s. I started out playing my trusty Guild electric through a little 5 watt valve amp with some overdrive and lashings of reverb. This seemed to ease Morgan’s transition from acoustic to electric as we continued to play festival dates where they were expecting her to turn up with a double bass and fiddle. This was great fun. Hebcelt in Stornoway, Trips to England, trips to Barcelona.
After a name change to Emme Woods, things escalated quite quickly when her first single got released by a new record label called Last Night From Glasgow. The gigs started to be populated by people beyond family and friends(all be it people of a certain vintage who were getting behind the record label). We were working with my friend Barrie on some songs and after a memorable sold out gig at King tuts, my friend Jamie asked if he could play guitar and I could play something else instead. Having played all the lead guitar licks I knew by this point, I moved to Trumpet and Bass. We started to have the makings of a band.
Morgan fell out with her record producer, so now that we had a full band in place, I was tasked with making the second single.
From there it was a meteoric rise. Within a year, we had played The Great Escape, Wide Days, The SAMAS and Xponorth. All the industry touch points for getting your name in front of the right people. We were getting asked to do interesting supports in big venues, we were playing festivals and our tunes were getting played on the radio.
So what do you do from there? Well we were back to waiting for someone to come up to us at the end of a gig and tell us :) It quite quickly becomes wash, rinse, repeat until you find management to make decisions for you and open doors. Until then you just argue as a band about where the best focus for your energies should be until that happens. As I ran out of buckets still to tick on the list, I was ready to call it a day. I’d already been asked if I could dress in black and stand nearer the back. There were songs still to be recorded which had been tackled in several abandoned sessions. There was even money in the form of a successful crowdfunding campaign to pay for them, but my time spent as a musician was seriously hampering my income because I was spending more time recovering from driving around the country in the early hours than I was doing actual paid work.
A glutton for punishment, around this time my friend Alex asked me to drum in his band Dirty Diamond & The Gunslinger. I’d always loved the band. In their hey day they’d never moved beyond being weekend warriors and had fizzled out when their drummer left some months previous. In 10 years, they’d only ever released one single, and I think Alex saw me playing big gigs with Emme Woods and fancied a piece of the action, or at least thought I’d bring some of the shine along with me to move things on a bit. Reluctantly I agreed and bought a drum kit on the promise that he would put some effort into making it a consistent thing and it wouldn’t just take up space in my wardrobe.
Sadly 4 forty year olds playing blues music didn’t have the draw that Alex expected. We practiced weekly and it was a good work out on the drums, but the momentum and focus just wasn’t there. I was turning up having played gigs with an audience and trying to find enthusiasm for playing smaller venues with no audience. To add to this the bass player hated me for having replaced the previous drummer who had left at least 6 months before I was asked to join. His ire was further shoogled when him and Alex put together a reunion of their previous band for their 10 year anniversary and played to a bar of unaware drinkers. They couldn’t find a drummer and had to use me :)
After about a year of practicing, half finished recordings and a handful of gigs, it kind of fizzled out. The drum kit took up room in my wardrobe. Alex had just left the police(Nee Naw not Sting) and was now putting his effort into starting a new career fronting a wedding band. I knew the maths and was already playing the same set on repeat with Emme Woods to dwindling enthusiasm from myself. He made allusions to it being a financial means to doing our own stuff and owning a studio and all sorts of fantasies but I made it clear that I couldn’t make it my priority. I found video, photography and recording wonderfully rewarding creatively(and financially)and I was getting less and less time to do it with my Emme Woods commitments.
I get tired just looking back on my diary at this period. Down to work at Abbey Road, back up to take photos at T in the park, Festivals, Sessions, Rehearsals, Scoring Horn parts, gigs. I was the driver for all these things as well, so I was constantly loading amps and drum kits and guitars in and out of cars. I was gigging or practicing for hours a week and the Emme Woods gigs were getting bigger and better, but I still didn’t think of myself as a musician. This confirms that for ever more I will have imposter syndrome and feel I could have practiced more.
As our first wedding gigs got ever closer and everyone’s nerves got fraught, Alex questioned my priorities at him not having free reign of my calendar(despite the impending cash cow to yet have delivered it’s first penny). I argued that if Emme Woods was playing Glastonbury then I wouldn’t prioritise a wedding gig at The Holiday Inn in East Kilbride. He questioned my commitment and told me there was no chance of me playing Glastonbury. He pointed out that Glastonbury wasn’t on that year anyway.(which seemed to miss my point somewhat)
We seemed to get ever closer to someone knowing what direction the money was in with Emme Woods but not quite getting there. Should I put good time and money after bad? For everyone else it was their hobby, for me it was my job. Having ticked just about all the buckets left on the list, I was in the mode of sticking it out until I could find a suitable jumping off point. The promise of being added to the PRS had dwindled as it became worth something. In my head my amicable resignation speech was going to be based around offering to come on for a song if a stadium support or Glastonbury came up.
SXSW is the most important festival in the world. The music industry converges on Texas where everyone scrambles to climb the ladder. It hadn’t really been on my radar. Jamie and Tenement TV had been in the past and not had a great experience. I think it’s difficult to jump from the relative safety of the music scene you know and then try and navigate something so big. I think it can be quite demoralising to be so close to the nexus of that “thing” you have been chasing for so long but not really having the road map for what you need to do with it.
We were told that we were incredibly likely to be able to get funding for the trip. Eventually this money - the emerging artist fund - went to Gaz Coombes from Supergrass - in 2018!! Granted I think he might have been a better return on investment, but I hope he spent it well, cos we were going to be thousands in the hole for our wee holiday.
I loved SXSW. It rejuvenated my love of unsigned bands and music and people making loud noises on guitars with passion. The Emme Woods project fared less well. Gone was the adulation of the local scene and concert attendance in double figures. Band politics got fraught. We got back and the band had come to the agreement that I was the issue and if I was gone, everything would be hunky dory. The 5 years of inactivity that followed showed that I wasn’t the sole turd in the u-bend preventing international stardom. That sounds dead bitchy, but I can write that now as I’m pleased that Morgan is about to do great things with her new band Joy Hotel.
One of the main reasons I write this now, is that I can no longer use the internet as an archive of the memories. Morgan is slowly getting everything from this period removed in preparation for the launch of the new project and not just the stuff that features band members accused of sex crimes. I’m getting untagged from photos and memories and history is getting deleted. It’s now a mainstay of the music industry that you delete your past when you start new endeavours. Musicians used to wear their days playing clubs and huddled in vans on their sleeve as some sort of rite of passage. Now musicians are born in their late 20’s with fully formed social media accounts and no back story that can be deemed ‘Uncool’.
I took some time to lick my wounds. I made sure that I had good plans on the days that Emme Woods had gigs in the diary to avoid the inevitable FOMO. Morgan asked me to come back when she remembered I drove the van to let everyone drink, but I decided I preferred cutting ties.
Having taken a whistle stop tour of the bucket list and being primed to start playing weddings, I set about returning to focusing on the stuff that actually makes money…. Music videos and recording.
People say you shouldn’t play for exposure, but it’s the key way that I network in order to get asked to do the work that pays me. The Emme Woods debacle had been a solid year of constant exposure and adventures. I found I was getting regular paid session and live work as a trumpet player. It’s a funny old world. I was still getting to play with cool bands in sold out venues, but without the stress of trying to move a band towards a sustainable career.
For some reason Alex had misunderstood how much we were getting paid per wedding, so after 6 months of work, I found out on our first pay day that the wedding work was going to be more of a cash calf than a cash cow.
The wedding work is the ultimate stamina test for musicians you load a van, you sit in a van, you unload a van, you play for 3 hours, you load a van, you sit in a van, you unload a van. The only other people doing three hour gigs are playing stadiums and have yoga before stage time instead a drive up the A9 and a load in.
Trumpet is a stamina instrument, you constantly need to practice to keep the muscles in your cheeks ready for a 3 hour gig. Hence the phrase “keep your chops up”. It becomes a curse for the imposter syndrome to be one hour into a gig and not know what notes you’ll be able to hit by the end of it.
The movies will have you believe that the life of a travelling musician is all about looking cool and impressing the local populace. You actually have very little downtime. The truth is it is a constant battle to minimise how much time you are spending at a gig to try and get to bed for 4am instead of 5am in the hope that your shift doesn’t destroy the next day, or in my case my creative work.
To make matters worse, despite promises to the contrary, we were using my recording gear for the wedding work, so at best I was dismantling and rebuilding my home studio for every gig - at worse, I was having to travel to go and get my own stuff before I could do my actual creative work the next day.
After Emme Woods gigs, I was constantly getting networking opportunities. A high enough percentage of these would turn into paid work that you could justify some of the more pointless treks up the A9. I don’t think I had one wedding that translated into paid work from where I wanted to be.
In an attempt to make the best of it, I pushed Alex to be working on original music. Dirty Diamond had become Al and the Bad Decisions. The wedding work was supposed to buy us freedom to do “real” music. We conceived of a vehicle where we could setup different bands with different people depending on the occasion and do collaborations with various connections I had further up the musical ladder.
It really just became a version of the wedding band with a bigger horn section doing originals. It was fun scoring for a bigger horn section, but enthusiasm was sporadic. We were constantly trying to build momentum and then doing nothing for months. Any ticketed gig we did had more folk in the band than in the audience.
I was getting far more interesting gigs that were one offs. Recording sessions here there and everywhere. Trumpet with Byson family and drums/bass/trumpet with Anton O’Donnell - including a gig at Glastonbury which definitely came with a wry smile :)
By the time lockdown put a pause on the wedding industry I’d played close to a 100 weddings. Most on the trumpet, many on the drums, some on bass and even a few on lead guitar.
The wedding industry is a constant battle to be taken seriously as musicians
As we went into lockdown my girlfriend and I had a month holiday planned in the states. It was going to be a well needed break to catch my breath and assess which plates needed dropped from the many I was spinning.
We’d hit SXSW in Austin, New Orleans, Mississippi, Memphis and Nashville. I’d a list of all the jam sessions and music stuff. A dream holiday….
Then it got cancelled and we went into two years of lockdown. If we look past the deaths and the destruction of the economy and collapsing of global infrastructure and also your local pub, we actually had a great lockdown. It was a wonderfully creative time and musically I had more focus, momentum and work without the everyday mundaneness of life getting in the road.
I was getting work as a session musician(mainly trumpet) and my recording and video work was levelling up constantly. Clients were getting bigger and better which was getting represented in my bank balance.
As we slowly emerged from the cocoon, I was in a changed place. I had a folio of work that was more rewarding financially and creatively.
I gave up the weddings at the same time as i moved to a big lovely house in Greenock with a pregnant girlfriend.
At first I thought I would miss the 3 hour long sweat-fest gigs, but all I remember is being uncomfortable in a van for not much money. I definitely don’t get to play the drums as much, but I also don’t have to load in drums as much, so swings and roundabouts.
Fatherhood means that I don’t have much interest in playing far away, but I have a handful of bands and clients that let me keep at it. I have far more time for video and recording work and far more space in the new house. With the schedule of the tangerine tornado dictating your working hours, it teaches you to be focused and efficient. I’m also far less likely to waste time on costly cul-de-sacs.
I’ve played on charting albums, been on the radio enough that it’s not quite as exciting as it once was and the PRS and PPL gets healthier every year.
Through the medium of playing Beatles songs to a sleeping baby, I’ve even managed to teach myself keyboards :) I have yet to feel the need to seek out a Yamaha PSR-27 and show it that revenge is a dish best served cold.
At time of writing
All my fellow musicians from my teenage years were more talented than me. They’ve all taken up more sensible jobs away from music.
No one knows where Fraser is. He visited a few times a year or so ago. It’s unknown whether he’s still playing.
Marie never really left Scotland after visiting. She married a highlander and moved there. She doesn't do nearly enough with her musical talent.
Morgan(Emme Woods) is about to blow up big in a band called Joy Hotel along with Luke who went with us to SXSW. I hope she achieves everything that we didn't with Emme Woods
Anton has an album ready for release which is coming out on a label in California. Many of the people involved have Grammy’s. Its going to be a great source of future adventures.
The wedding bands I played in are still going strong. You can book them here - Borrowed Blues The Revues
Al & The Bad Decisions activity is still sporadic, but now it’s just novelty football songs.
I work with loads of bands and artists, so just keep an eye on my social media to see me feeling like an imposter on the trumpet, drums, bass, guitar…. and recently Keyboards.