In the Moment

Picture the scene: Chris and I are standing in a queue outside the O2 Academy in Bristol. I'm shifting from one foot to the other, trying to keep warm. It's February, it's dark, and we've been standing in this queue for a while. My legs are starting to ache. I've caught someone mid-conversation a few people ahead of us. A tall man, with a booming voice, speaking at top volume.

'Yeah, I've done a few this past year,' he says, arms crossed, legs wide apart. A power stance. He stands out among the crowd here for looking like a regular middle-aged bloke; most of the queue is comprised of younger people in bright, vibrant outfits, glittering under the streetlights like fallen stars.

'Really?' his friend, too short for me to see from my vantage point, responds.

'Yep. I've done ... let me see. I've done Sam Ryder. That was back in April. I've done Paloma Faith. I've done The Libertines. I've done ...'

The list goes on. No elaboration on what the gigs were like, no excitement about a particular act, he just keeps on naming them, across a wide spectrum of genres and locations. He is spectacularly dispassionate. He is collecting live music experiences like a Pokemon trainer forced into the role because his parents make him do it: almost with an air of exhaustion, as though this live music business is extremely inconvenient, actually, and he'd be able to get on with his life much more easily if it wasn't for all these pesky gigs he had to endure.

'How were they, then?' his friend says, eventually.

The tall man shrugs. 'They were alright.'

I'm being lighthearted here, not judgmental. That could just be the way he speaks for all I know. But to hear his dry, resigned tone among a crowd of excitable Carly Rae Jepsen fans was a contrast that struck me as funny.

It's just occurred to me that he could be a music journalist. Perhaps this was his job, reviewing live music, and thus the joy of the hobby he once loved had been stripped away from him via capitalism. He didn't look like a music journalist. But then again, I don't think I look like a person who reviews video games for a living. Mostly I just look like a tired mum. I guess you can't judge someone by what they wear, or by a short, if loud, conversation unfolding a few feet ahead of you.

Carly Rae Jepsen was excellent. She was a spur-of-the-moment ticket purchase because I like her album Dedicated, and it worked out really well. She's one of those magnetic people. Passionate and charming and a tiny bit awkward. Most of her songs are about the sex she is or isn't having with various men, and she sings them with such joy and cheekiness that you can't help but be swept along in the romance of it.

Next to us on the balcony stood a mother with her ecstatic teenage son. He wore a sequinned fishnet tank top and scream-sang along to every song as she smiled, looking both awkward and proud. Every now and then I glanced over and felt a surge of warmth for them both. There's something special about obsessing over songs, listening to them again and again until you know all the words, and then seeing that person in the flesh. I loved that he was having this experience, and I love that his mum facilitated it for him.

I kept thinking about the tall man in the queue, and whether Carly Rae Jepsen's twinkling warmth was enough to win him over. I imagined him in the crowd, in his power stance, smiling a little bit against his will.

I don't normally people-watch at gigs. I don't normally watch anything, because I'm five feet tall and I never attend these things with the expectation of being able to see stuff. Since Covid, I find it harder to cope with crowds; we went to see Louis Cole a few months after Carly Rae Jepsen, and I wanted to be in the middle of everything, only to find myself nearly hyperventilating as people started crowding around us. We ended up standing way at the back, where I could see a little glimpse of Louis every now and then between swaying bodies, and I could breathe properly. I don't mind being back there, or up on the balcony, slightly removed. It doesn't impact my enjoyment. I just like hearing the music. I like the excitable buzz of it all.

It feels like every creative industry is in crisis. There are big players who kind of float above things, well-protected with the legacy of their name and a decent body of work already behind them: these are the Stephen Kings and the Taylor Swifts of the world, the untouchables. But everything from the mid-level downward feels very precarious. While I've been stuck firmly in the battle of writers and their copyright vs. AI tech giants, I haven't been aware of the similar, but slightly different struggle musicians are going through.

Like every creative endeavour, it's hard if you want to make a living from it nowadays. Everything is about going viral. Everybody is chasing a TikTok-friendly song. You're one small fish in a ridiculously large pond, fighting for the barest of scraps. Streaming barely pays the bills. And tours? Some bands find themselves thousands of pounds in debt even after a successful tour, so that's not reliable, either.

I worry about all this, in an abstract way, and sometimes I wonder if I should be more concerned about it than I currently am. It's always been the case that extremely talented people have had to pursue their passion alongside a normal job, or face starvation. Right? That's why we romanticise (and sometimes, fantasise about) the idea of the brilliant artist, plucked from obscurity and thrust into fame and riches. It does happen, sometimes, and these stories are verging on magical, like modern-day retellings of Cinderella. Rescued by a combination of talent and luck, rather than a prince.

But there's something about the uncertainty of this exact moment, combined with a general dismissiveness or even outright dislike of people working in creative industries from certain sectors, that I find quite troubling. We need the arts to stay alive. When writers are having their work stolen by Meta, and musicians are being ripped off by Spotify, and everyone from digital artists to VAs are having their jobs diminished by OpenAI and co., what will be left? We're bleeding talent. People are dropping out of their respective industries because the emotional labour of it all is just too much. I almost fell out of love with writing last year because of it all. People get burned out, you know? They plunge into the creative industries with an open heart and an optimistic mind, and they're spat out of the other side, scarred, poor, and unnervingly cynical.

What will we be left with? A barren wasteland of user-generated content? Films and music and books all tinged with that slightly uncanny, slow-motion, 'hello, fellow humans!' vibe? Mushy, bland, safe nothingness, spoon-fed into our tired brains so we can feel a little bit better and, most importantly, never stop to consider how shit everything is and who might be responsible for it?

I think the answer is a bold and emphatic no.

I've been thinking about why I'm drawn to doom and misery all the time, but that's a subject for another newsletter. The truth is, the arts are in a dire state. We're reaching a boiling point, and every development feels critical. Rightly, a lot of us are angry and upset. We're prickly and defensive and putting up barriers because we feel attacked. It's good to make a stand, here. It's important.

But despite all that - despite the relentless fucking misery of it all - people still keep making cool things. And I've said it before but this is the only thing, at times, that keeps me from losing it completely.

I've seen more passion for human-made art over the past 18 months than I have done in my lifetime. Perhaps it's the threat of having something taken away from us, but even people I know who don't normally care about this kind of thing are up in arms about it. I know people who haven't written a single thing in their life, but who refuse to read anything written by AI. I know people who will only buy art if they can guarantee it was made by man, and not machine. It heartens me. People do care.

And while putting your stuff 'out there' feels particularly precarious at the moment, given that it could be stolen at any moment, people are still doing it. I'm discovering new music constantly. Over the past few years, I've discovered so many new (to me) artists that my playlists are constantly evolving. I've read delicious and weird literature by authors I've never heard of. I've witnessed a surge of artists boosting each other's work on Bluesky. At this moment, the enjoyment of art almost feels like a protest. A joyful middle finger to the world, that seems to want to constantly devalue these things at the exact moment that we need them most.

I'm trying to be more in the moment, myself. If you've ever lived with financial insecurity, you'll understand how I feel. I find myself checking and rechecking my bank account. Opening my cupboards and staring at the food. Lying awake at night with worries ticking over in my head, one by one. Right now nothing has changed for us on a practical level, but that doesn't stop those feelings from springing up when words like 'recession' start getting bandied around.

I find it hard. I've talked about this before, I know. I keep it simple; what can I see in front of me? I think, as I pace around with armfuls of items, restoring our half-term house to some kind of normality. I see a lamp and a bag of clothes ready to go to the charity shop in the distant future. I see a cat stretching luxuriously in a patch of sun. I see handmade Easter cards on the side table. One of them is backwards, because my son always forgets which way around greeting cards should be. I cook dinner, and I do the same thing: I'm washing green beans, I'm carving a cross in the bottom of Brussel sprouts because I have a vague, inherited suspicion that they might explode if they don't. Sometimes I get so wrapped up in my thoughts that my body moves on autopilot. I forget to see. I have to remind myself.

But this environment is so familiar to me. It's my home. I'm here every single day, for most of it. It's a lovely and safe space but it does not allow me to escape very far from my mind. I'm surrounded by everything I could lose if things go wrong. I have to get out more. (I do mean that in a kind way to myself. I'm not a loser, necessarily, just a bit lazy.)

I keep thinking about music. Not many things make me feel as alive as this; standing in a dark venue, feet half-stuck to the floor, music thrumming through my body. Here I am anonymous. I don't feel self-conscious, I'm not aware of people looking at me, and if they are, I don't care. I'm just here, one of a huge crowd of people all singing the same song, and nothing else matters. I am alive. I am feeling a mind-body connection that I often don't feel. I should work out how to take that feeling into my everyday life.

That's music for you. That's art for you. How you engage with it is an entirely personal thing. (I think that's what I love about writing, that I never know how people will feel about it, and when I get comments or responses they often surprise me in some way.) I can walk into a gig and sing or cry or just stand back with my arms folded, observing. None of it is wrong or right. It's just important that it exists. If we lose any of it, it will be a tremendous loss, but for what it's worth, I don't think we will. Perhaps that's me trying to be optimistic in the face of doom, but I think people underestimate how stubborn humans can be.

Anyway. I wrote this and then looked back on my last few newsletters and realised that I keep trying to say the same thing, just in slightly different ways. I think sometimes I get stuck on a thing and I can't move on from it until I've expressed it right. I haven't been playing much, because I'm about to hit my final project for uni and I'm (rightly) pouring my heart and soul and the last feeble scraps of my energy into it. But at some point, I will finish something. The project, yes, but also an actual video game ...