My Black Folder and Me

My favourite thing in the whole world is a blackA4 ring binder. It's one of those fat ones.  It's quite battered and has torn bits where I have tried to unsuccessfully peel labels off it.  Yes it just looks like an old school file on the outside. But inside it contains everything I have been for the past 11 years and everything that has made me who I am today.

It has lots of plastic wallets in it filled with bits of torn out notebook with scribbles and doodles and pages and pages of lyrics. All on different scraps of paper. Alternating between the pages are smaller plastic wallets. Each one contains a CD... some just with a song title on it and some with CD covers. Every now and then you come accross an old photo.
This folder contains my music. All my songs from all my bands since 1998.

I am so very lucky to have so many years documented in music. Songs that have been written for me, about me and by me. Every single one has a meaning and a memory attched.

Due a Broken Heart is the first one in the fiolder. This was the song that i learn't when I was 17 for an audition with a rock guitarist. It was a bit of a prophesy song actually. Little did I know that I was singing about the exact situation I would find myself in a few years down the line. I remember skiving off my mock A Level exams to go into the studio to record this. It was the first time that I really truly realised I loved singing.



A few songs on is one called Eternity. I was just a kid but I felt like I had been living a hundred years when I sung this song. The song was actually written by my guitarist about his childhood and wanting to go back and tell himself as a little boy to not give up through the really tough times he experienced growing up. But I was singing it from my point of view and it meant something completely different to me. Even though the recording and performance is rubbish I still believe I have never to this day, put so much emotion into one song.



A year or so later (and several CDs) and there is a song called the Kosovo Song. The name speaks for itself and it was in 1999 that this was recorded in Cornwall with a management company. They had picked up on the story that I was organising a concert at Wembly Stadium and Michael Jackson was going to perform at it, Max Clifford was doing the PR... if you don't believe me then see this link http://www.prweek.com/news/100340/

Anyway, my strongest memory from this time was actually the fact that I had recorded a version of this song back in our little basement studio and it was really beautiful and passionate. And then when I re-recorded it with this company, they changed the backing and put modern sounds on it and then made me stand it their tiny singing booth for SIX HOURS solid. I was literally in tears by the end because I was so exhausted and I can hear the strain in my voice on the recording. That was my first taste of what the music industry could really be like.




To be continued...