Does Anything Actually Matter More Than Music?

Well this one has been a while in the gestation… not because it’s been a difficult write, rather that I’ve been busier than a one-legged man at an arse-kicking contest over the past few weeks. 

Oh, and I had The Covids of course…

As inevitable as an iceberg breaking off the Greenland sheet at the same time the Titanic left its Belfast shipyard, when my mother was admitted to hospital in December following a minor fall, at the end of nine months in which she and I had so assiduously kept her (and me!) “safe”, it seemed predestined in her brief home-release at Christmas that she’d develop “a bit of an infection”.

It was Coronavirus of course and (after passing it on to me!) she sadly died on New Year’s Day, ten minutes before all her octogenarian friends received their first dose of the vaccine. Such is life (and death).

Besides working every job the so-called “Live Events Industry” could throw at me in this new Virtual World and looking after my Ma until her unfortunate demise, back in December, I’d scheduled the release of my new Bikini Test Failure single, “Kiss Me Like You Mean It” for the end of January.

By the time the big moment arrived, my plate was so full I barely noticed and honestly just thought, “Oh, forget it!”

But then something extraordinary happened. Somewhere in that (rare) moment of emotional extreme, far from ignoring the only truly creative, stress-relieving thing I’d done in the previous weeks, I decided to put it front and centre; grieving, funeral direction, house-clearing, work, could all go whistle and find their own place in my schedule; I had this lovely new tune to unleash on the world.

Then, perhaps predictably, the world of music took me over, calmed my soul and diminished any horror that was going on. Not for the first time my own musical outpourings, or those of a select few others instantly gave me that godlike perspective which is usually absent in times of personal distress.

And what’s that? Two people in Stoke-on-Trent have retweeted the link to my new video? Ahh. All better now.