Keep Your Small Talk, I’ll Take the Stage
I am a shy person. The mere mention of a group ice breaker, the kind where I’m expected to do a little dance or reveal something interesting about myself, tightens my throat like a Chinese finger trap clenching my larynx — the more I wrestle with it, the more uncomfortable it becomes. I wake up every day and thank God (or anyone who will listen) that my own family didn’t share in the perverse obsession of sending kids away for agonising summers of team building exercises and institutionally enforced fun. No, I don’t want to shuffle around a circle of jeering strangers while pretending to be my favourite animal, thank you. I find the notion of being made to dance at a party, without alcoholic encouragement, positively barbaric. And, despite having been a vegan for the past four years of my life, I would sooner eat an entire T-bone steak than send an order back in a restaurant, and risk confronting the staff.
This shyness largely rules my life — except when I’m on stage.
Guitar in hand, spotlight in your eyes. It’s about as close as you can get to heaven without breaking the law. Every cell in your body wakes up with a jolt, jumping around under your skin — just offbeat to the electric pulse in your veins. And then you’re standing there at the Pearly Gates, not waiting in line, but banging on the front door with the heavy end of a Fender Strat. And for the next 300 seconds, you’re not the one driving. The part of you that worries about small talk with strangers is drowned out by the distorted drone of an electric guitar. And as soon as it’s over, you want to jump straight back on again.
The idea of headlining Glastonbury Festival is far less daunting to me than the idea of ordering a take-away on the phone. How is it that I will happily open myself up to a room full of strangers, and sing about my most painful experiences, but the thought of delivering inane chat to the very same crowd makes my stomach knot? Half my friends just point out how bizarre this is, while the other half simply don’t believe I’m shy at all. I understand their scepticism. The arts world always seemed to me like the extrovert’s playground; an adoring theatre for the ever-confident guy to sweep the girl off her feet, while the nervous understudy watched from the wings. But you don’t have to look very far into the catalogue of musical icons to find my fellow wallflowers — so how do they balance this aversion of attention, with a burning desire to perform?
They don’t. When Florence Welch (lead singer of Florence and the Machine) steps out on stage, she leaves her self-conscious head at the door. “I have to start giving myself over to whatever it is that’s in charge of performances — the performance spirit or whatever the fuck it is. I don’t know, because it’s not really me,” Welch told Rolling Stone. No one commands a crowd like Florence can — including herself. The ethereal figure we see gliding around her stage, barefoot and flowing in white, is not the same anxious 32-year-old that poured her pain into the songs she sings. In this moment of ecstatic release, Welch is performing even to herself.
But of course, we all perform, every single day. No one actually speaks to their parents in the same way that they speak to their friends. Gilmore Girls is not an accurate reflection of the way that actual people live. David Bowie spent his entire career demonstrating the transformative power of the stage. The unparalleled flamboyance of his mythical career, and the characters that defined it, seems all the more astonishing considering that he lived an otherwise introverted life. It never mattered that Bowie was shy, because Ziggy Stardust was confident enough for them both.
And it never mattered to me that I couldn’t talk to girls, because I could sing to them instead. Think Heath Ledger serenading Julia Stiles in 10 Things I Hate About You, not a stalker with a songbook lurking in bathrooms. I never quite reached the point of painting my face like Bowie, or changing my name, but I used the stage to express things about myself that my nervous teenage brain would never otherwise admit. Shyness is more than just a desire to avoid people, it’s the fear that you won’t know what to say when they find you. When I’m on stage, I know exactly what I’m going to say.
There are those few who walk-through life with confidence dangling around their neck like an obnoxious neon sign that shines in people’s windows when they’re trying to sleep at night. And there are those, like me, who walk-through life with one of those “nervous animal — please give me space” signs that they give to rescue-dogs. It’s easy to ignore the shy voice in the room when those speaking around it have been learning to project since they were five-years-old (where even is the diaphragm?) If music becomes a home solely for the bold, then we put our emotional literacy at risk. If Mick Jagger was the only one to ever write music, we might never get lyrics as beautiful as this from Florence Welch;
“You are the hole in my head, you are the space in my bed,
you are the silence in between what I thought and what I said.”
