Noises from the Planet Harris
The week’s experiment of writing in response to your suggestions begins with an attempt to answer Padraig’s question about whether life has some predestined path or are we here to experience diversions as much as anything predetermined.
Until my wife and I got together, the only other time I have truly felt I was following Destiny were the years I spent chasing my dreams of musical success. My brother plays guitar, an uncle played bugle and guitar when he was younger and my father claims to know some guitar chords but when challenged he either changes the subject or picks up the instrument and proves he has no idea where to put his fingers. Yet I wrote my first (limited) song aged four, sang in the school choir and started guitar lessons aged ten. The music in my blood had to have come from somewhere, didn’t it? As I grew up I began to feel that I had a lucky gift and that perhaps life wanted me to make the most of that gift.
An obsession with The Beatles helped and ensured that the first providential/coincidental influence in my life came along. Alf was a guy who had been two years ahead of me at school but we got to know one another after I’d already left. He was slightly impressed that I knew a few guitar chords but wanted to know if I’d tried writing songs because he had. I wrote some words down but could not quite link guitar and singing together at the time. We made some cassettes with a more talented and much older guy, but it didn’t feel like a real band as we weren’t doing gigs.
That summer I moved away to work in a holiday camp but providence seemed to step in again, and more decisively. On a visit to London to see my father along with the girl I’d had a brief romance with during her fortnight’s holiday at the camp, I became ill and had to spend a couple of weeks in hospital. My job was given to someone else and so I ended up living with Dad almost by default. We’ve rarely seen eye to eye about most things so I soon moved into a shared house with some crazy guys and lived a party life. One night a whole gang of us were trying to annoy my room-mate, Tom, by singing Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’ at him. He hated it but was surrounded by at least eight of us all yelling the lyrics in a mostly tuneless manner, so he couldn’t escape. A couple of other people had just watched the strange entertainment rather than joining in and the next day one of them, a friend of Tom’s called David, called round again.
“Tom’s at work.” I told him but he’d come to see me. He said he’d been impressed with my singing and did I want to join his band.
“Hell yes!” I replied. “Who else is in the band?”
“Just you and me right now but I know some other guys.”
The Name: Paul, David, me, Kevin Number 1
We were quickly joined by a good friend of Dave’s, Paul, and a drummer named Kevin. Over the course of the next fifteen months, while the drummer was changed for another drummer named Kevin and then for one called Mick, my guitar playing came on in leaps and bounds as I watched Dave and Paul, stealing chords from them, writing songs with them, staying up till the sun came up talking about life and music and books and how we felt lucky and different because we had music in our souls. I think it was Dave but it could have been any one of us three who first wondered aloud about the chance aspect of us all meeting and forming a band. Although Paul had been born in the town were we all now living, Dave and I had been born in entirely different places. We felt we were destined to go on and become a huge success (as you do, when you’re eighteen years old and writing songs with crazy cool guys) so the fact that we’d all been placed in the same place at the same time in order to meet up seemed like the hand of Fate.
By the following Spring the band had fallen apart. You can blame musical differences, or the fact that drugs were playing too large a part in some of our lives, or the fact that we stopped knowing how to communicate in the same way. At the time I was devastated and thought that my musical dreams were all over. But the discipline to learn more and more about the guitar, and to drive to write more songs, better songs, never left me, so perhaps that band had just been a step along the road.
Me and my best friend, Glastonbury Festival 1989
For two years I drifted, hitchhiked across France one summer, was homeless a couple of times when I got back, sleeping on people’s floors and sofas, even in the back of a car for a short while. My guitar was my most constant companion and the songs I wrote became a chronicle of my misfortunes and dreams. But any notion of having a career in music had stalled. One day I woke up and realised that my drifting days had caused me to fall out with one or two people who mattered to me and I felt like I could not move forward with my life until I had gone to try and make amends with those people. The phrase’ facing the music’ has always seemed appropriate because, after I’d
Dead Men Don't (early promo shot): Dave Harding, Giles, me, Niall
made amends things began to fall into place for me again. I joined a new band and the next four years were mostly spent gigging and recording and writing with those guys. Once again it seemed providence had stepped back into my life. It was during the third year of my time with that band – Dead Men Don’t, we were called (and yes, two of us were big Steve Martin fans) – that the guy from EMI records was making excited noises about our demo. One of the reasons nothing came of that time was the fact that we did not act quickly enough on his interest. What we should have done was record more songs straight away, prove that there was enough for a decent album. We did not and once he stopped returning our calls the band began to disintegrate. A shame, as Britpop was just around the corner and we would have fitted in quite well.
I might have decided that music was no longer a destiny for me by this point as I was a father (albeit in a disastrous and quite damaging relationship with the baby’s mother) and I was much closer to my thirties than I was to my teens. Rock and roll is a young man’s game, isn’t it? The next year I grew tired of my own obsession with ‘making it’, an obsession which had played its part in making my relationship disastrous and which had alienated some of my friends down the years. I replied to an ad in a local paper: some guy wanted to form a band playing cover material in pubs. Just for fun. I thought to myself that maybe I could get my relationship back on track as well as earning a bit of extra money through music. I was even looking for ‘proper work’ for the first time in some years.
It turns out that the guy who’d placed the ad soon changed his mind about forming a covers band when he heard the demo stuff I sent him. I had no idea when I went to meet him for the first time that he had received several calls and demos from guys much younger than him (he was already in his forties). Two of them were barely out of school and were quite talented. And when he heard my material he decided he wanted to put us together as a band and be our manager. Did I mention that he was rather rich? Although he’d been an ex-professional musician himself (a drummer) he had made his money through business, a business which he and his partner sold a year or so later and came away with several million each. That first time I turned up at his house and walked into the custom built studio he’d had put in the previous year, providence gave me yet another nudge back in the direction of professional music.
Isis: Danny, Joe, Rob, me
The band that eventually formed around my songwriting and voice did not include those two youngsters as we spent some months auditioning people. When the line-up was complete we were put on a small wage and set to work rehearsing four or five days a week for six/seven hours a day. We systematically worked through my back catalogue of songs, which by this stage had reached over three hundred tunes, and whittled them down to make a tight, powerful and diverse set of original material. We recorded a five track CD demo in the winter of that year and by the time it came back from the pressing plant we finally had a name to put on the cover. We were called Isis.
The story of the following year and my eventual decision to leave Isis and leave professional music altogether once and for all, I will have to leave until tomorrow. For now I just wanted to reflect on the fact that it still seems, all these years later, as though music was a vocation, something I could not give up on in those early years even if I had wanted to. I kept getting another bite at the cherry. Maybe I wasn’t as big as the Beatles, but I’d spent a decade and more writing, gigging, learning, growing and expressing myself through music. My father once asked me, when I was still in that fledgling band with Dave and Paul, why I didn’t “stop fucking around with music and get a proper job”. At the time I simply shrugged and muttered something about why didn’t he stop being a wanker. Ten years later I was able to send him the Isis CD and remind him of what he’d said. This time I wrote a proper reply – it looks like music IS my proper job, after all. I was actually wrong, in the long run, but more of that tomorrow.
14 Comments
October 26, 2009 at 18:49
Is this what you had in mind, Padraig, or have I trailed off into my own little world again?
October 26, 2009 at 20:50
Nice clip Steven I enjoyed the reading all the way through and after listening into some of your music on myspace it sounds as if music HAS BEEN a very proper job in your life, and one of many!
For a brief moment I got Steve Martin mixed up with John Martyn reading your post and also after listening to your music… Sorry, hope that is not an insult to you?!? I quite like of John Martyn’s stuff but am totally clueless about a Steve Martin…. Huh!?!
October 26, 2009 at 21:28
The big question here is, whether it’s some kind of “providence” that directs us (i.e. “coincidences”, “chances” etc) or the it’s the man himself who sculptures his life from A to Z? I’ve been reflecting over this issue recently (what a coincidence
and reading your post now reminded me that I stick to my original opinion: there is no such thing as “determinism” (at least I believe so). We make choices consciously or subconsciously and said coincidences exist only to guide us in the path we have ALREADY chosen (by the way, lack of choice is a choice as well). Just like you wrote about music that has been threading all along your life – naturally, when you want it so badly, “destiny” comes to help and sends you the right people and opportunities.
To summarize, I would say (again, in my opinion), that our desires, dreams and wishes are always preliminary (whether we are aware or not) to coincidences and chances. A “predetermined path” is merely a secondary event.
Now allow me some compliments ))) Your story and the way you put it, is enchanting. Thrilling, breathtaking, slighly bitter and emotionally appealing. I devoured it in one blow))) and now intrigued to read the rest of it. A saying (in Russian) goes that “a gifted man is gifted in everything” – it fits here quite well )))
October 26, 2009 at 21:57
Steve Martin is the American comedian who made great movies up until the mid nineties, my two favourites of his being ‘Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid’ and ‘All of Me’. John Martyn was a wonderful musician (check out his early stuff with first wife Beverly Martyn too) and I was lucky enough to see him play at my first ever Glastonbury festival. I tried and failed to learn to play guitar like him, or like Nick Drake, but at least I discovered my own style in the trying.
October 26, 2009 at 22:00
That’s very like a piece usually quoted as being by Goethe (although some say he stole the idea from an earlier source). He argues that whatever you can do, or believe you can do, do it, with all your heart, as the commitment you give to that thing will focus your energies and thus enable you to find the right opportunities along the way that you might otherwise miss. I go along with it in general but there were genuinely times when I thought I was ready to quit the music world (before I eventually did) and yet was still pulled back by circumstance and ‘chance’ events. So am not sure quite what i think. Was I being guided? Did I guide myself? Or is it a combination of the two, as Richard Bach once argued when he claimed we are the co-creators of our lives?
October 26, 2009 at 22:01
And the slightly bitter bit? I guess you’d say I have father issues, but they were intergral to the drive which made my music and my songs what they were so I wouldn’t change things if I could go back.
October 27, 2009 at 09:06
THAT Steve Martin… ok. Long line to my brains, especially as I clearly read your band was named ‘Dead Men Don’t’ – I was scrolling for a musician named Steve Martin in my head. Sigh…
Dito Ostrix, the read was fabulous and we have great appetite for more!
October 27, 2009 at 10:33
My favourite Steve Martin quote – “Oh pointy bird. Oh pointy pointy. Anoint my head. Anointy nointy.”
October 27, 2009 at 10:55
I guess it is a combination of the two indeed, it’s just that self-motivation comes first – this is how I see it (though I may be critiszised for being too narrow-visioned)). Richard Bach, the amazing fantasist with his sea-gulls and flight obsession ))) yes, I agree with him on that one.
Bitter parts of our life stories are inevitable and integral, just like you said )) This is life. Supposedly, the drive of “negative” power is often a lot stronger than that of the positive. (It worked well with Chopin, Pushkin and some more
October 27, 2009 at 11:01
Hahaha! How perfectly fitting to my ‘long line’
My favorite were ‘Schweinehund’ and ‘Reinemachefrau’. It always seemed perfectly fitting to all situations all ways.
October 27, 2009 at 11:27
‘Illusions’ is my favourite Bach but ‘Running from Safety’ seems to be more direct from the soul. Most of my favourite authors have that negative drive, it is true: Kafka, Orwell, Palahniuk, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy. When it is done well, tragedy is beautiful.
October 27, 2009 at 20:33
Fascinating journey. I love hearing stories of how people got from point A to Point B (with all of the little detours inbetween). And your journey is no exception. Thanks for sharing it with us — I’m looking forward to the next installment.
October 27, 2009 at 20:39
Thanks for being so open with your life story. It’s something that I have tried to do also …don’t know if I could be half as honest as you have been!! But I will try to stop the self editing in my future posts. One positive affirmation from reading your story was a ressurection of old memories for me….the ones that were locked away in the attic kind of memories! That’s the whole beauty of the writing for me …sometimes you can get lost in a flow of thought that never seems to want to stop. I have always felt that I can express myself in far greater detail through my fingers on the keyboard…and for others to share in that is a bonus. You obviously have that gift to get lost in the flow and that may be a liberating experience for you the writer and also for the readers. We all have similar life experiences where we fall in and out of company with all kinds of wonderful and eclectic people. One thing I have learned is that you don’t always end up with the people that you started out with in the first place and your little story confirms that theory…Keep tapping on that keyboard!!!
October 27, 2009 at 22:07
Thanks you Padraig. Chronicling one’s life story is a matter of selecting certain memories rather than others so it does not always feel honest. But then, to select everything would take almost as long to write as it has so far taken to live. Getting lost in the flow of the memories is often a wonderful process, although there are some things that it is obviously painful to recollect. I tend to think of Western culture as being very much about disguise and sweeping uncomfortable realities under the rug. We learn it from an early age, from family, from figures of authority, from television and most especially from advertising. So to go back over memories, to reclaim certain experiences, to remind ourselves that they are real, no matter how trivial or painful they might sometimes be, is a healthy act of rebellion against the cover-up culture. But if I were to say that I have not re-edited some of what I have written because I found it was too painful or explicit, it would be untrue. Wordsworth once called poetry the ’spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions recollected in tranquility’. I am finding these blogs this week to be a similar experience.