Techno & Me page 2

In my youth, well, my pre-the-age-of-25 years (the official cut-off point in the entertainment business), I mistook my parents’ protestations for a lack of confidence in their progeny. Now, in the grand old dotage of my late twenties, I see that they simply could not comprehend how companies were quite willing to expend not insubstantial sums of money on individuals of whom they had no prior knowledge,  on the vague, albeit beautiful promise of future success. No credit check. No resumé. No drug test. No references. Nada. Citibank wouldn’t go for it, but I can give you the number of a man called Lucian Grainge and he might. Still, unlike commercial banking, if by some remarkable stroke of luck you actually recoup (whisper those words with reverence and awe, they are like Halley’s Comet – seen every 75 years, by very few and usually as a portent of extreme ugliness about to ensue), any major label will reap an APR that makes 45% appear unseemingly generous. I realise now, that to normal, intelligent human beings like my parents, the sheer folly of this enterprise is incomprehensible. Or perhaps that given their realistic and grounded approach to life, they marvel how they have produced offspring so capable of denial. It’s like Russian Roulette where every chamber is loaded. Just give me the gun – I’m game. 

‘You look exhausted love’, my Dad remarks on the drive home.

 This makes me quite cross and pleased all at the same time. Cross, because for £3000 I think Air New Zealand have a moral obligation to throw in a facial peel and free botox, but pleased because exhaustion means that I have been working hard and my Dad, who has the finest work ethic ever possessed by a man, will not think I am a slacker. Because, while I may wring my hands and exclaim ‘I am an artist! I am, I am!’ (or, when very very drunk ‘I am a rock star!’), I am under no illusion that this is a proper job. I may vent my spleen, even wear it on my arm, but I cannot build a wall to withstand a hurricane, diagnose a serious illness and cure it, complete a tax return or negotiate with terrorists. (Although, I have dealt with journalists, or rather, they have dealt with me.) Is this the heart of the matter? Is this what plagues the musician or the actorrr, this wholesale lack of concrete evidence of our work? We just observe and re-enact life, while everybody else goes about actually doing it. We want the world to love us for telling it what it already knew about itself. If my hypotheses has some foundation, what does Britney Spears (whom I adore) tell us about ourselves? Is she the voice of my inner hooker? Or, for example, my sister, who has an unnatural passion for Jamie Cullum. She presently sports a nose ring, but I fear she is about to replace it for a lifetime subscription to the L.L.Bean catalogue and collecting up stamps on her Starbucks Loyalty Card.  

Some of these things are running through my mind as we weave along the river, through and then past the city the morning I arrive in Brisbane. It is the day before Christmas Eve, the first since the attack on the World Trade Centre, and the introduction of plastic knives on airliners. A few days later, some nutter with a very unfortunate hair-do will attempt to blow up an aeroplane using his sneakers. My mother and I will have another argument, the family will give each other presents nobody wants and spend subsequent days sneaking around trying to exchange things without anyone realising; there will be the usual New Year’s party round my Aunty’s house where she will promise to not bring out the karaoke machine, but will do it anyway when she guesses everyone is too pissed to know better; I will sing an appalling rendition of You’ve Got A Friend and make all my folks and their friends wonder how I make a living out of this, my boyfriend will almost win the lottery (5, not 6 numbers) with a ticket my mother bought, and she will be secretly annoyed about it and thus disallow thoughts of him as a future son-in-law from entering her mind. And I will not spend enough time with my grandmother, and come to regret it bitterly when she dies little over a year later from the cancer that is already creeping insidiously through her body at that party. 

A week after the New Year, I spend a day in Brisbane doing the rounds of local press. There are only one or two local music magazines, but the journalists I meet are sweet and refreshingly unjaded, and don’t lead me into making some catty comment about Sophie Smelly Fester that I shouldn’t but can’t resist and will retract later. ( I might have said something to one about a sort of well known navel gazing type with whom I went to school, who mysteriously lost the second part of his double-barreled name around the same time as his dad went from being a diplomat to someone  who just travelled a lot.) The last engagement of the day is with the main newspaper in Queensland, and results in a clipping that seems to be on the fridge in the all the kitchens of my family.  (Just recently, in a fit of pique at my Godparents’ house, I sneaked into the sewing room where it graces the pin board and ritualistically stabbed my likeness in both eyes with a big fat drawing pin. I added glasses and a moustache and felt much, much better.)  

That same afternoon, the very nice woman from the label office drives me to the airport. For those few hours I chat and joke with her like we have known each other years, get on the plane feeling like I have made a great new friend and by the time I get to Sydney, cannot for the life of me remember her name. This means I am getting better and better at my job.

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