"Scenes From Another Room" - My Story: Part One

After a few posts that weren't so upbeat and full of joy I decided to post a little bit of my story here, after all I am a very positive person and very happy to be finally living the life that I always wanted.... so here goes - My Humble Story, Part One - "London Music":

I come from a family that has always worked in the British newspaper industry, my Father was, and still is, (although he's now semi-retired) a newspaper photographer, he never did anything else all his life and me and my Sister grew up constantly having our photos taken on a day to day basis and also being prepared for endless boring portraits in professional photographer's studios.
My Mother was a journalist and her speciality was the arts: theatre, cinema, music, books... however she gave it up for some years to raise me and my Sister and she worked mostly freelance from home afterwards.
Most of my Aunts and Uncles also work in the newspaper industry as features editors, journalists, printers and copy-taking readers.

So it was inevitable that I would also enter this profession.
Although just before I left school to go to university I shocked my Father with the news that I wanted to become an actor. I had studied drama all my school life and acted in various school plays and local amateur productions and , according to what my drama teacher told me, I had a promising career ahead of me in that field and I had the chance to enter a very good drama school in central London. However at that time I was young and didn't have the confidence to stand up to my Father and his views, who was telling me that acting was a profession for fools who weren't interested in making money or being properly qualified, that I would spend all of my time unemployed...

So off I went to the London School of Journalism to study my future trade and earn my degree.
Incidentally my Sister has been the only "black sheep" in the family as she is a nurse working very long hours in a London hospital, although she isn't working at the moment and I'm not sure if she will ever go back to work as she has recently given birth to a baby Daughter, my first Niece.

I started working for various newspapers as an assistant journalist until finally finding my vocation as an assistant music journalist, following in the footsteps of my Mother who also worked in that field.
It was 1990 and at that time most of my work had nothing to do with journalism... instead I was making cups of tea, answering telephones, running errands and going out to fetch sandwiches for the "real" journalists, the usual stuff when you are just beginning in the job. It sounds easy but in fact it was hard work and I enjoyed it. Then one day one of the music journalists saw a potential in me and my writing and, in also seeing my huge interest and knowledge of music, he took me under his wing and said that I could work exclusively for him.

It was an exciting time, I was overwhelmed, everything was new, I was young, baby-faced and looking at everything wide-eyed. I was taken along to launch parties for new CD albums by many talented artists, as well as many that weren't so talented as well.
I went to many shows and concerts with an all-access press pass and got to meet some wonderful artists and even sometimes got to talk to them about their life and work, which was amazing. I never had to buy a CD as I would always get them free on pre-release and promotional use only.

I spoke to Robbie Williams for almost half an hour at the launch party of one of his CD albums, I shook Elton John's hand backstage at his concert in 1994 at the Royal Albert Hall and was so in awe of him that I couldn't speak... my throat was dry and I was smiling nervously and sweating profusely as he said to me "So you are entering the world of music journalism? God help us!!" haha!
Me and my family are huge fans of his, I grew up listening to his music from the time I was in nappies and when I was 9 or 10 years old I would sing his songs into an old tape recorder which my Father still has and he has been known to play back tapes of me singing "Benny And The Jets" or "Crocodile Rock" in a high-pitched pre-pubescent voice at various times in my life, to embarrass me in front of family and friends! - I'll get my revenge one day!

So all of the 90's I was in this life of surrealism, a kind of sealed bubble, nothing seemed real and I had no social life or family life to myself - none at all! because I was working 9 to 5 on Mondays to Saturdays, I worked every holiday including Christmas Eve and sometimes New Year's Eve, and many nights during the week after work (and sometimes weekends) I had to go to the CD launch parties, concerts and after-show celebration parties which would go well into the early hours of the morning, in fact most times we would all just roll into work the next day straight from one of those parties without any sleep at all... it was exhausting, fun but exhausting and I felt I had no life to myself... it's a good thing that I love music, but I was permanently knackered.

The parties were sometimes complete madness... there would always be a constant flow of never-ending champagne, alcohol and excellent food, all free for the taking, along with a heavy amount of drug-taking secretly going on "behind the scenes"
There was a huge amount of shallowness in that world. So many people at those parties and events were only there because of being a "friend of a friend" and most of the conversation from those people was absolute drivel... sometimes I would be listening to them and thinking to myself "What the fuck am I doing here?!"
Then there were my friends, who weren't in the newspaper business, who would all be phoning me to get them a free backstage pass to some party or concert and asking me for free CD's.
Anyone who I met at a club or a party outside my work would, within minutes of knowing my profession, be clawing at me to get them into that "wonderful world" and trying to take me home with them for the night to "woo me"
Sometimes I went with them because deep down I felt lonely and I needed to feel wanted, even if it was just for one night, but afterwards I would feel very used and I felt like shit.

I didn't feel real, I felt used by everyone and I wasn't happy at all. Many people would say to me "I bet you really love your job!" and I would reply "Yeah I really do!" Sometimes I would complain about some parts of my job to people and they would look at me as if I was mad and say "But you're so lucky! many people would love to have that job!"
Then when I would be sitting on my own at home, thinking about my life and work, I would think to myself "Wake up! you're not really happy!"

But even so the years went by, the 90's were almost coming to an end, I had given up working on Saturdays so that I could have more of a normal social life. I was good at my job but the music scene had changed vastly over those years and we were entering a phase of "throwaway bubblegum pop" new artists that were so cheesy and talentless that I was becoming more and more tired of my work and meeting so many "hanger-ons" and shallow people who had no conversation other than "Ooh I'm such a huge fan of his or her's...."
There were the solid gold talented artists of course: Elton John, George Michael, Sting, Lisa Stansfield, Robbie Williams, Annie Lennox, e.t.c... whom I love, but they usually only release a CD album every 2-3 years, and in the case of George Michael even more...
As for those that regularly do concerts and world tours Elton John is the only one who really falls into that bracket.

I had started going out more at weekends, now that I wasn't working on Saturdays, and I made a point of not mentioning to people anything about the work that I did, instead I would say that I was just an office boy in a newspaper and so I started meeting some real people, people who didn't want to use me and many were very genuine indeed, I started to enjoy myself on my own terms for the first time in my life.
Then Bam!!! One night I was out with friends in a tapas bar in Notting Hill (the place where I lived in London) and I met someone Brazilian and fell head over heels in love!! I felt it so strongly that I knew it right there and then, it was as if my heart had exploded with joy and felt naturally connected at the same time... It was amazing and my life was beginning to change entirely from that very point on...
I had been saved by an angel and I was the happiest guy in the whole wide world, I was walking on air and I knew that nothing else mattered in my life, all I could think about was being in love and how ecstatically happy and elated I was.

Then Brazil started calling me....

To be Continued.............