Thom Yorke and Bono are Raging Inside Me
Ollie Judge is a Musician, thinking about creativity, stress and success.
“What is Bono doing in lockdown?” I ask myself, staring down into a pan of Quorn chicken pieces.
“Is he cooking dinner for his wife? Is he married?” I continue staring.
“I know he has a son. We played with his son’s band at that Radio 1 thing. I guess he isn’t cooking RIGHT now because he probably lives in L.A, so there’s a time difference. What’s the time difference? Is he making breakfast?”
I Google “Time in LA”.
“Ah, it’s 9 hours behind, so he’s probably making lunch. But all of this is depending on whether or not he actually lives in L.A. I’ve never seen a picture of him without sunglasses. He must live in L.A*”
My concentration on the whereabouts of Bono and cubes of fake meat is broken by my girlfriend shouting “The quiz is starting at 8:30! What’s your Zoom password?” from the living room of our flat.
I’m in a band called Squid and our 2020 is quickly being written off by an ‘invisible mugger’. It was going to be a big year for us with some career defining moments lined up (Mum, Dad…we’re not going to be on TV this year, sorry!). Fortunately, we’re signed to a record label, have some royalty payments coming in and have a loyal fan-base who buy our merchandise. In other words, our heads are just above the water. The thing I have found hardest about this is that I cannot play music and hang out with my bandmates. I often get a pang for a warm can of lager in the backroom of a grotty venue and even long for the strange relaxation of watching WWE dubbed in French in an Ibis Budget next to an airport. We will not experience these things for a long time now. There are an overwhelming amount of negatives we’re facing in the entertainment industry. Great and vital venues facing closure, sudden loss of income for touring crew, artists, agents, managers and the list goes on and on. There’s been help from lots of charities and organisations, which is really amazing to see. Spotify have launched an initiative to help artists by giving audiences the option to donate money to artists directly. But this has ended up being quite an insulting gesture. It’s basically the digital equivalent of trying to balance 2p on a floating lemon tip jar. Why not just pay artists a fair royalty? Why not pay more than $0.0003 per stream?
Like most people, I swore that I’d use all my spare time doing things I’d previously never been given time to do. I’m finally going to make that ambient techno record, my girlfriend and I will do a kitsch album of lockdown themed covers, we’re going to write the rest of our album remotely, we’ll do an amazing live streamed gig from our living rooms akin to the time I saw Rage Against The Machine at Reading Festival. Of course we haven’t done any of these things. It’s a crushing feeling to set yourself unrealistic goals and inevitably not achieve them. Being surrounded by artists and bands making whole albums in lockdown brings on the dangerous feelings of unhealthy comparison and bitterness. I’ve got nothing against the people who have done this, in fact, Charli XCX’s lockdown-created album how I’m feeling now, has been a great source of joy for me. But every time I listen to that album, there’s a bratty voice in my head that says “Well, I could have made a lockdown album if I had a mansion in Hollywood and not a one bedroom flat where the line between sofa and studio-space is inherently blurred”. These emotional and career driven negatives have forced me to try and play the role of the optimist, which is something I’m not usually that good at. However, I’ve found one huge and maybe quite selfish positive amongst this mess. For the first time in a year, I’ve been given time to just sit and think about the debut album we’re about to record and not live my days staring at our fully colour coordinated Google Calendar.
Firstly, let me say, the idea of making a debut album absolutely terrifies me. Every few months I have anxiety dreams about receiving terrible reviews for our album that doesn’t even exist yet. The lyrics of Eminem’s seminal anxiety anthem Lose Yourself sometimes feature in these dreams, you know, the song about having ONE shot, not missing your ONLY chance, having only ONE opportunity… you get the jist. To top it off, this dream often leads me down the path of another fear of mine, that my ego is far bigger than I think it is. But since I’ve been at home in lockdown, I’ve begun to overcome these fears and have come round to the clichéd thought that we should be making this thing for ourselves and no-one else. “Sure, whatever buddy!” I bet you’re thinking. I mean, yeah, I’d love to make an album as universally loved as OK Computer, Kid A, In Rainbows, Amnesiac, A Moon Shaped Pool, The Bends and even The King of Limbs!… But, I think I’m going to be fine when it inevitably isn’t as well received as these albums. As you can tell, I’ve been doing extensive note taking on our dreary alt-rock overlords Radiohead, and have even Googled “how does Thom Yorke write lyrics?” in a desperate attempt to thwart a bout of writer’s block (it didn’t work). But as with everything nowadays, there’s always a few negatives to counter these occasional rays of hope. As a result of the disappearance of touring and touring income, there will be no road-testing of new songs that will feature on the album. This is a vital step in our songwriting process. We test structures and improvise parts of songs at gigs, and if they feel wrong, we go back to rehearsals and tinker away, until we have something that feels right or just have an argument and call it a day. With no gigs for the foreseeable future, we’ll be going into the studio without this vital crowd-sourced advice. Whatever we come out of the studio with, the thoroughly washed hands of COVID will be all over it. Our album will be inescapably different from what we thought it would be just a few months ago. Is that exhilarating or terrifying? I still don’t know.
In 2019 we played over 100 gigs that spilled over until March of this year. It’s crazy to think that our last gig in March was still a time in which furloughing, social distancing, superspreaders, R (whatever the fuck that means) and Zoom weren’t yet stitched into the fabric of my being. When you’re as busy as we’ve been over the past year, it’s really hard to take stock of what’s been going on in your life, both personally and in your career. With our 2020 schedule falling out of the calendar, it’s actually really nice to have some time to sit and think about everything we’ve achieved and everything we’re now aiming to achieve. I just wish it weren’t under the context of a devastating global pandemic that will affect the music industry for many years to come. I haven’t had an album review anxiety dream for a while now, only dreams of being in overpriced, damp practice rooms with my band-mates.
* Turns out Bono lives in Dublin.
