Well, it turns out quite a lot really.
I managed to step on a social-media landmine… The worst kind… The “cancelling” kind.
And that’s before being cancelled became the new black. Back then this was news worthy (albeit on what I am certain was a quiet news-week) and made national press. I had TV companies ringing me up for comment. It was front page of the Times, Mail, Twitter trending. I’d had a pal trend on me a few years back and he had warned me that it is one of the most unpleasant experiences of his life. We’re not designed to try and quantify and cope with THAT amount of hate, projection, objectification. It is utterly de-humanising. Utterly bewildering. From an exposure POV I was thankfully given a royal pardon two days later when Elizabeth II sadly passed away. I was glad to be robbed of any remaining vestige of column inches as a consequence.
The details of what happened next surrounding it is not for this Journal. I’m writing a book about it as a cautionary tale. What is totally jarring about the whole experience is that something you elected to do, voluntarily. Something you were in control of, leads to something totally out of your control. Its like a book you were writing suddenly gets snatched out of your hands and finished on your behalf without any discussion as to the plot arc and character development you had planned. That book is your life, and suddenly it is being authored by strangers. Who you are, what you stand for and indeed what should happen to you being written and decided upon by a committee of faceless narrators who haven’t even so much as had the pleasure of taking tea with you.
People around you will witness how terrifying this is and many (rightly so) want to get as far away from the dumpster fire as possible. It is here where the effects of these things go from psychological to material. I found myself in a cascading force majeure that I could never have prepared for. I won’t trouble you with the gory details but shit went south very quickly. I had over a hundred thousand pounds worth of private samples and a week’s worth of confirmed studio time & musician hours at Air. All for a score for a computer game being financed by a massive international corporation that was incredibly sensitive to public opinion, and the opinions of their staff. They politely pulled me into a zoom meet where two lawyers were present to tell me with well-rehearsed diplomacy that “they had decided to take the score in a different direction” (I hadn’t yet written or presented a note). I clung onto the rest of my work. But the money I had spent, and the invoices that were in the post, what I was on the hook for as “HOD” had cleaned me out completely. The reason I bother to write this in a journal about Crow Hill is not for sympathy. I took some risks that had always paid off in the past. This time they proved to me that they were a set of risks too far. But the reason I mention it is to merely illustrate that the barrel was empty, cupboard dry, pockets pulled out, backs of sofas harvested, the piggy bank smashed and pillaged before even considering starting this. I love being creative, but financial creativity is a bull I always hate fucking rodeoing on.
I loved the company I had helped build and had lost. That is a grief that will take years to deal with. I had worked hard and had given it immense dedication. But the true gutting sensation was reflecting on the extraordinary relationships I had struck with the many thousands of people who had become intimate in some way with what we, and to a certain degree what I made (undoubtably because of all my attention-seeking on YouTube). This relationship meant I had support flooding in and it was this that gave me the determination not to go quietly (or is it gently?) into the night.
Victimhood is a dangerous state of mind to put one’s self into and should be worked at to avoid. However it was the sense of loss… Not of money, or all that hard work (there are numerous fond memories from those escapades which are ample compensation). But it was the countless relationships I had developed with people trying to make music, or make it in the industry. Many people had expressed that they liked the way that I could be honest and NOT be appear to wallow in the victimhood we can all suffer in this pretty nasty industry. But to some degree be a good example of being a tenacious SOB (to fault) in my desire to make stuff I believed in and enjoyed doing happen. To crawl up into a soggy, beery ball and vanish would be a betrayal of so much of the advice I had been sharing on my YouTube channel. No matter how tempting the sodden beer-ball idea was at that time (so I kind of did both for a bit… But I’ll talk about that when we get to September 2024).
I still have some good years in me and feel nothing but strength from the encouragement I was getting from my friends, family and well-wishers. For that I will be forever thankful.
So it was on top of a hill near to where I live in Edinburgh, Scotland. Where I dreamt up the plan and the volcanic complex I was standing on is called Crow Hill.