How long, oh lord, how long?

Well, I just got back from playing Indieboy's night at Tommy Flynn's and I must say I'm in a pretty grim frame of mind. Strange how around the time of my last post I was just about ready to take on the world, and now I'm back on the bottom of the pile again.

A little background information, perhaps; the aforementioned independent label thing fell through in a spectacular and singularly disheartening fashion. The one hand giveth, and the other taketh away. The people who were so wildly enthusiastic and optimistic to start with, who I'd had serious, guinness-fuelled shouting whirling gesticulation talks with about things as grandiose as providing a fresh, spirited ideal and wholly new music platform and dealing in heavy honest artistic reputation instead of gnarling hype machine paranoia, turned around and said they want to start off with someone more commercial. The word 'poppy' was uttered. So it goes. They're nice people and they're still offering me gigs, but I hope for their sakes they grow some balls because they'll be eaten alive if they're trying to go the commercial route with a tiny fledgling label.

So now it's the Ides of March and morale is waning low in the Newman camp. I hadn't played a gig in over a month before tonight, and I rehearsed like crazy which worked completely to my detriment. First I forgot the words to "I Fought the Floor" and then my voice completely gave up on me towards the end of the set. I have another gig tomorrow night at the Open Wan... I mean, Hope & Anchor on upper street, hopefully it will have recovered by then. I decided to take a risk on a new song I just finished, and screwed it up royally. I also tried out a song by a friend of mine from Belfast, and played it in too low of a key turning a beautiful and heartbreaking song into a real dirge.

Ach! Enough of this whingeing flagellation. Everybody has their off nights. It's just that when you've played a few really blinding gigs you wonder why they can't all be like that. So it goes. I look forward with a kind of cringeing trepidation to seeing the footage James took, hopefully it'll be useable.

The plus side of all this indulgent self-loathing is that I'm writing some really great new material, which I hope to have recorded in some form in the coming weeks for your listening pleasure.

Keep it lit