The great procrastinator and other tales.

 Since I started finally writing on this blog last month I’ve been thinking about the nature of my creative block and more specifically my quite spectacular procrastination skills. I’ve actually procrastinated writing this particular post for a good week or three. 

I’m treating this as a fresh start and like I’m going right back to the beginning (whatever and wherever that is), with that in mind I figured it would be a good idea to try and see what patterns I have to my personal roadblocks and self sabotage. Time to try and break some of those and find a way around those blockades.

One of my favourite and most used excuses to myself regards my work space and environment, like I can’t start making anything until my work space is ‘just so’ and if I can just get this space sorted or add/remove this piece of furniture then I can think and create. It’s odd how I feel like I just can’t create within any sort of chaos, everything has to be tidied and sorted first. Back in the 80’s and early 90’s I literally (and happily) lived within a maelstrom of utter chaos and filth, it didn’t bother me at all. I’d just push things aside, set up somewhere within it all and draw/paint, completely engrossed and utterly oblivious to whatever was around me. The first Deviated Instinct covers and a bunch of Napalm Death album covers were created from within that detritus. 

In the middle of a Napalm Death cover back in my old bedsit days, a free penny chew for anyone who can tell which record cover that is. Also note all the big crazy canvas paintings/collages on the wall. I miss doing big stuff.

Since my bedsit days I’ve lived in 5 different houses and trying to find and make the perfect work space has always been a struggle and an excuse I’ll use as to why I’ve not been able to work. After I finished my visual Studies degree in 1999 I finally did what I’d always dreamed of and got a studio. I got a space within the Warehouse Artists Studios, a co-op studio space in the centre of Norwich (sadly no longer there and long since demolished for a housing development). You had to be interviewed to get a space and once accepted had a space among 20 odd other artists. There was also communal spaces for workshops and group shows, a darkroom and access to computer and admin stuff for networking and promotion. I had a space for about 5 years and spent some of that time serving on the management committee as well as working as the marketing and media manager for a while ( a role I got a reduction of my studio rent for). Looking back it really was perfect and I miss it a lot and yet it still didn’t lead to me making huge amounts of work or taking great creative leaps. Sadly moving into that space also coincided with a time when big aspects of my life were in turmoil and falling apart coinciding with a rapid downward spiral for my mental health. Much of the time I had that studio I was struggling with at times crippling depression and anxiety which literally took me years to work through. Coupled with having to constantly increase my hours at my day job I was able to spend less and less time there until I just couldn't justify the money I was spending on rent for an unused space and had to reluctantly give it up. By this time I’d then moved into a small flat on my own so also had to move all my accumulated art supplies, tools and often very large and cumbersome work into every corner of my apartment. 

My old studio circa 2000-ish.

Gubbins in my old studio during the dark days.

As I was writing this a memory just popped into my head, there used to be a local regional arts magazine style TV programme called 'The Biz' on ITV in the early noughties. I can't remember how it came about but I recall being featured one week and someone who used to be in Eastenders coming down with a camera crew one day to film me and my work in my studio. It was all quite surreal. I recorded the short piece (where they also created a montage of my work to a Napalm Death soundtrack) onto a VHS which is gathering dust in a cupboard somewhere. I haven't seen it since and haven't had a VHS player for a decade or so, I should try and get that converted and post it though, unless it's too cringingly embarrassing. Anyway, I digress...

When I’m feeling particularly hard on myself I tend to beat myself up for wasting such a great opportunity but in truth it was just shitty luck that the universe had various planets colliding for me at once and I’m not sure there was any other way I could have muddled through. In the years since though I do feel like I’ve lost all connection to any kind of local art scene or network. Also my work when I’ve done any has had to adapt to my lack of space, thus I went from making big, messy relief pieces and large wax sculptures and 6 foot charcoal drawings to tiny, tight illustrative drawings and not much else.

Since we moved into a new place last year I've actually got a choice of spaces in the house I can work in but still find myself making the same lame excuses. However I’m really trying to make the effort to just shut up and work through it this time. I’ve set up a little drawing corner in the spare bedroom we’re lucky to have plus we have the luxury of having a large garage (with currently no car) so have no excuse for not getting back out and dirty, making some bigger, looser work. I’m looking forward to sharing this as it develops, definitely feeling some Spring optimism growing.

So basically so long as I can find some spare table space somewhere or room to set up my easel if I want to paint I have no excuses, even if I had an amazing gigantic dream studio no doubt I’d be able to find a reason it wasn’t quite right yet. That’s not to say I’d not like to get back to having a proper studio space of course. A Mid can but dream.

One of my current little sketching corners. From here I plan to conquer the universe.

One of my other primary creative roadblocks is too many plans, ideas and infernal lists to the point where I just can’t focus and feel totally overwhelmed by it all, which leads to not knowing which to start with or focus on and thus nothing gets done at all. I’ve started multiple little journals and sketchbooks that are just full of lists of proposed projects and ideas and inspirations. These go back years and years and then I see I’ll go back and revisit old lists and leave myself snarky little comments about not having done something five years later or something. I mean, scribbling ‘fail, fail, fail’ over something really helps!! Yeesh.

I did just look over a bunch of pages and lists I’d made back in 2010 and noticed a good few things (that weren’t even new in my head then) that I’ve still not got around to and would still like to do.

I’m not sure what the answer to all this is, I know that I should just choose one thing, focus on it, work on it start to finish, sounds simple but yet I seem unable to quieten the noise in my head whilst working already thinking about the other things I want to. Maybe I’ll actually write myself some sort of timetable for how I propose to use my free time over a 2 week period and see if I can stick to it. I’m usually hopeless at these things though, my many futile attempts at “okay, I’m going to draw every single day even if it’s just a two minute doodle” rarely get past day 3.

I probably need a list of ideas of how to tackle my lists. Yep, that’s the way.

I need to reboot my brain.

Other things...the pressure of feeling like I need to justify everything in a piece of art. I blame art school for this but that’s a whole other post at some point I think.

Also, the scourge of social media and the modern brainfucking disease of distraction and total lack of an attention span and…..

...oh, look, a butterfly.

Yep that’s another topic to tackle in a post of it’s own.

I think there is a lot more on all this I could waffle on about but that’ll do for today. You see what I mean about attention spans, mind you when I wrote a post on facebook that was longer than about 2 sentences my brother told me “no ones got time to read all that”, so cheers to anyone who got this far.

Things I've been digging this week - 

I’ve been really getting into the ‘Gas Lit’ album by Divide and Dissolve. I usually find I can take or leave a lot of drone/doom but there’s something otherworldly about the whole vibe of this album. I can’t quite put my finger on the feeling it evokes, even though they sound nothing the same I get a similar under the skin feeling from Ulver’s ‘shadows of the Sun’ album.

Also I guess some of the oppressive noise is in a similar vein to the Body but I get more of a positive kick. Whenever I listen to The Body I always have the mental image of a beaten naked man chained up, kneeling in his own piss in the corner of some vast empty warehouse while a figure in a pig mask holds a snarling dog and shrieks at him as he weeps and snivels. Happy stuff.

Divide and Dissolve don’t make me think of that.

Also it’s all about Context.

The world probably doesn’t need any more bunches of beardy blokes just tuning way down and playing very loud very slowly.

Divide and Dissolve most certainly aren’t that.

Taken from their website -

Divide and Dissolve are:

Takiaya Reed (Black and Tsalagi [cherokee])

Sylvie Nehill (Maori)

“We would like to observe a radical shift in the current paradigm of complacency in regards to oppressive power dynamics, genocide, racism, white supremacy and colonization” the band have previously said “to give weight and validation to voices that are traditionally misrepresented and crimilinized before given a chance to speak”

I was also going to write about a couple of great books I just read but I think I'll save that for next time. This has already taken me way too long to post. One of the reasons for doing this blog was just to get a flow going, keep it fairly brief, rough and ready but I've already found myself sort of obsessing over it and things taking 10 times longer than they should. Not to mention that I'm continually thinking of other things I want to post about that then get added to all the physical and mental lists and suddenly I've got even more stuff to get overwhelmed with and slow me down.

So enough.

Hit publish, move on and stop wittering ya dithery old get.

An introduction and finding a path out of the fog.

 As is evidenced from my meagre and sporadic activity on both my Instagram and Facebook art pages I’ve hardly been prolific with my artwork over the past few months/years/decades. Indeed that is how long it feels like this creative funk/slump and general block seems to have been dragging on. Of course it’s all about perception and maybe from the outside looking in it doesn’t seem quite so barren but from my confused, constantly overthinking inside the struggle to get back into any kind of meaningful flow feels never ending. Scrolling through social media it always appears that the entire world is making amazing work though of course I know this is but an illusion and all you are seeing are peoples very best, curated lives and in all likelihood everyone is struggling just as much as you….but it doesn’t help.

As part of my apparent intention to be the world's greatest procrastinator I have been planning to do a blog of some form or other for about the past 10 years, it’s always on my end of year well meaning ‘to-do’ lists for new beginnings in a new year. There it generally stays, never getting out of my head onto the screen but I finally broke the seal and made a post with last month's short piece about one of my old bands ‘Angst’ so now it’s time to make a start on the other aspect of the blog - my artwork/life. 

I’m planning on splitting my posts here between documenting and talking about various old and current bands and musical projects as I go through the long process of digitising decades of old cassette recordings etc and then hopefully working through my creative block regarding my visual art  by discussing and sharing my ideas, working practices etc. I’m also planning on doing a bunch of small interviews with some of the amazingly talented friends I have working as artists or makers within the creative fields, finding out about others particular working practices and how they deal and overcome various hurdles and issues. We shall see.

The infernal list maker.

I have heaps of old journals where I’m constantly berating myself for not making any art, trying to unpick the knots of twisted wool inside my head plus literally no end of lists. I make lists. Lists and lists and more lists. Unfortunately the things on those lists very rarely get done, just moved onto other future lists. Looking at my most recent lists from the start of the year it really isn’t a lack of ideas or plans for work I’d like to make, quite the opposite, it’s TOO MUCH stuff, too many things, too many ideas. I never know what I should/could do first, where to start, and so inevitably I get so overwhelmed I do nothing. I’m hoping that by keeping this blog I can at least feel like I’m doing something and gradually find some focus. I know I’m a year or ten behind the times and blogs are probably very much yesterday's thing. Probably there are very few, if any, out there interested or with the attention spans to wade through my waffle and stream of consciousness but I don't really care. I’m mainly doing this for myself, however, if by some small chance anyone reading should find anything interesting or want to offer any comment or feedback or start a discussion that’d be most grand and appreciated.

Looking back through old sketchbooks, photos of old atwork plus all the cassettes of personal musical experiments it seems like I was most productive through the 90’s plus that’s when I took more chances with art and music and there were the biggest leaps in both ideas, styles and output. I was wondering why that was? Did I have more free time? In some cases yes, as I wasn’t working long hours at a mind numbing and physically exhausting day job as I have been these past 15 years or so, however it was also a time when my daughter (born in 1992) was small and I was designated stay at home dad while her mum was finishing her degree and Uni and working part time so child care was taking up a lot of my time. Also it was the decade where I did both my access Art course at City College and then my 3 year Visual Studies degree at Norwich Art School both of which I absolutely loved. I’d be an eternal student if I could afford it and being in that environment my work thrived. However I think the biggest difference between now and then is the lack of time destroying distractions. This was largely a time before the internet invaded our everyday lives and brains and also before Netflix and TV on demand. I want to write a whole separate blog post at some point on my views on Social Media and how I feel it has (largely negatively) affected the way I work and think. I feel like we have all been irreversibly re-wired and trying to override this and free ourselves to work in the way we used to (for ourselves, without the need for constant validation etc) feels increasingly impossible.

Never enough sketchbooks.

Anyway, I guess this will do for now. This is just a basic introduction, in the meantime please keep an eye on my anti-social media for new stuff. I’m hoping to write here at least once or twice a month to start with and have already a list (of course) of several topics and posts I intend to write soon. 

If you got this far, thanks for reading, I’m really hoping this will be a bit of a spring board and that it will prove the start of a new period of creative productivity. Looking forward to sharing my random meanderings along the way.

Facebook page - https://www.facebook.com/bonehive

Instagram page - https://www.instagram.com/mid_bonehive

Currently playing while I write this - 

Myrkur - Folkesange cd

Other recent musical inspirations - 

BIB - Deluxe lp

Neil Cassal - Fade Away Diamond Time cd

Wardruna - Kvitravn cd

Black Country, New Road - For the First Time cd.

Emma Ruth Rundle, Thou -  The Helm of Sorrow EP

Currently reading - 

Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock,Revolution and fall of the Berlin wall - Tim Mohr

Norse Mythology - Neil Gaiman

Steve Ignorant / References with Mathew Worley 

My muse Maia

Angst - A short and sweet history

 

It's kind of amazing that it's taken me almost 35 years to finally share some noise from the short lived band I was in for a year or so in the mid-80's, ANGST, even more so that the recordings on super cheap cassettes had survived and still play after following me around from house to house over the decades.

As with almost everything during the hazy days of the 80's my memories are extremely cloudy at best and appears after talking with Snapa and Sean their memories of that period aren't much better. Too many braincells lost in the daily cheap cider, homebrew and Thunderbird pickling no doubt.

Angst first came about sometime around the end of 85 / beginning of 86. I was playing in Deviated Instinct and I think at the time we were just beginning to transition from our more straightforward Anarcho punk sound to some metal inspired riffs (i.e. songs like Distance and Mindfucker). I think at that time me and Snapa (this is before he'd joined D.I) were particularly listening to a lot of new thrash metal and stuff and decided we should form a band to do heavier/harsher stuff than I was playing in D.I.

At first it was me on Guitar and vocals, Snapa on bass and our friend Charlie on drums (who I don't recall had played in any other bands at the time). Interestingly enough this would eventually be the D.I. line up that recorded NAILED a few years later in 1990. This line up of Angst didn't last too long. I did find one practice recording of this line-up but it appeared to be mostly a terrible 20 minute jam session so figured it was best left alone. We did play one gig which was in Lowestoft in February of 1986 with Extreme Noise Terror, D.I and others. I have a feeling I have a tape of this gig somewhere but I've been unable to unearth it. 

As was often the case back then we had hired a coach to take us and a shit load of punks from Norwich to the gig. As ever it was an extremely drunken affair and I remember despite the fact that we'd both played that night (in fact I'd played in two bands) somehow after no one noticed neither me and Snapa were on the coach and it left without us. Luckily Sean's folks lived in Lowestoft so we were able to crash there before hitching home hungover at the crack of dawn in the morning.

I found another flyer from April that year where we were due to play in Norwich with Generic and D.I but 'due to  a line-up change Angst will not be playing' had been hurriedly pasted over our name. That change was that Charlie had left and Sean previously of local band Paradox (and later of D.I) joined on drums and Alex (who'd just moved to Norwich from Bury) joined on guitar so I switched to vocals. We immediately dropped the few songs we'd been playing and started from scratch again with a much faster, rawer sound, still with a slight metal edge but a lot more hardcore punk in the mix.

I think we took things a bit more seriously than before and started regularly rehearsing in this great little rehearsal room Sean discovered in Lowestoft.

I've compiled the best of the rehearsal recordings from the tapes here onto YouTube. These were recorded on a knackered boombox in the corner of the room so are raw, rough and ready and as they were taken from various sessions the quality changes a bit throughout but I think definitely encapsulates the vibe and energy. I was surprised how great it sounded and really enjoyed hearing this stuff again. It was a bit of a challenge trying to figure out song titles from the one little lyric sheet I found and there's a couple of songs I've no recollection at all of what they were called. 

From what I can work out the track list is as follows - 1 - Satan Sucks Shit. 2- The Enemy Within, 3 - (Riding on) The Dragons Breath) 4 - Satan Sucks Shit 5 - ?? 6 - ?? 7 - The Enemy Within. 8 - The Usual Shit. 9 - Bloodbath. 10 - (Riding on) The Dragons Breath. 11 - Satan Sucks Shit. 12 - The Enemy Within.

Snapa and Alex

Alex and me

Sean and Snapa

Snapa and Alex at the Norwich Rainbow Fair.

On the train on the way to Angst practice in Lowestoft.

From what I remember this line-up of Angst also only did one gig. A rather chaotic affair at the Norwich Labour club sometime later in 1986, I haven't been able to find a flyer and have no recollection of who else played. I did dig up a rough and ready live recording though. I remember the on stage sound was atrocious, none of us could hear each other (it shows) plus being drunk didn't help a lot, still despite all that I remember it being a total doss. Enjoy the racket.

Track list as far as I can tell is - 

1 - I Spit Upon Your Grave. 2 - (Riding on) The Dragons Breath. 3 - Satan Sucks Shit. 4 - ?? 5 - The Enemy Within. 6 - The Usual Shit.

These are the only two shots that have ever surfaced from that momentous night.

And that folks seems to be it. On the lyric sheet I found it does say 'Demo soon' and we certainly planned to continue but it seems things just faded away as is often the way. I remember after Mark quit D.I Sean joined our tattered ranks and soon after we kicked Ian out and Snapa jumped in on bass, so with 3/4 of Angst now in D.I, plus Alex moved back to Bury I think that was that. It's a shame we never did get to record anything properly but it was fun while it lasted. I'm glad I do still have these few photos and recordings to document the whole thing. It was a doss and hopefully something that's been worth sharing.