My Blog

I play guitar and sing in a band, are we any good? well, we’re okay, people seem to like us, and on Saturday 8^th July we had the privilege of playing support to a truly superb band – ‘Xander and the Peace Pirates’. If you like great musicianship and excellent on-stage performances, then check them out and you won’t be disappointed. When I tell people about them, the first question will be “What sort of stuff do they play?” well here’s the thing, I can’t really say, they were just ‘good’. They played some covers, including a couple of Prince songs.

What will happen in the majority of cases is that people will say “I don’t like Prince” (when what they really mean is they didn’t like the image that Prince Rogers Nelson presented). And when I go on to say that they played some songs that they had written, there will be the blank ‘I’ve not heard it, so I don’t like it’ look on their faces. That look is a look I have come to recognise over the years that tells me that they won’t even consider going to see the band.

Recently I watched an Alecia Keys gig on TV. While that was on, my wife was on her iPad looking up some stuff about her and came across a discussion between two woman on an America media show discussing Alecia Keys. Did they mention what fantastic singer she is, or what a gifted piano player she is, or her excellent performance? No, of course not. They spent ten minutes discussing why Alecia may or may not have decided to not wear any make-up.

Going back to ‘Xander and the Peace Pirates’ if they ever get the recognition that they deserve, the focus of the public’s attention will not be on Xander’s great voice, his superb guitar playing or the quality of the band’s musicianship. No, it will be because he is a gifted guitarist that doesn’t have a right hand.

Why am I saying all this?

On speaking to some other authors recently, a general consensus emerged and that is the difficulty in getting the media interested in anything creative. I naïvely thought that as I am an author born and raised in Essex, England, with two novels out and two more due for publication, this might be vaguely interesting to the Essex media. But it seems now that unless you are already known, or a ‘celebrity’, the media won’t be interested, because they believe that the public won’t be interested. The public get their information from the media, who don’t publish positive stories for the above reasons, so the public never get to hear about things that they actually might be interested in. This is a beast that feeds on itself, and the same rules apply to social media that is even more obsessed with celebrity.

There are so many talented people out there creating great stuff in all areas of the arts, producing original material that should be enriching society, yet it seems increasingly that the people who should be supporting it, don’t.

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