This is my first ever blog post on SG and definitely won't be the last so HEY EVERYBODY! Thank you for reading this and following me and checkin out my page, please leave me comments, likes or messages too! :)
I'll get right to the story. As a young British long haired gothy kid, playing rock music and dreaming of being a big band playing on a big stage somewhere one day were like fairy tales. You knew that was always what you wanted to do but could never imagine how you'd get there or the time it would take. Late 20s? 30s? Hopefully not 40s to first play your dream stage right? Would you ever even make it to your dream stage? How many bands/ genres would you have to go through before you got there? Would you have to sell out a long the way?
Many many questions, always left unanswered especially as a kid. I had dreams i would be in a band that was cool enough to play in 'Camden Town, London.' Didn't think it would happen. I had dreams I would play a major festival one day. Didn't think that would happen either. Then there are those dreams you have that are so so fucking ridiculous, that it's not even a dream it's just pure fantasy. 'I want to go to outer space!' 'I want to cure cancer!' (which are super awesome dreams by the way and you should still fight for those dreams) but back to ME. My ultimate yet impossible musical dream was one day I would play Glastonbury on a big stage. The biggest festival in the world! With way too many stages, music from the best acts in the world from all genres and apparently becomes its own gigantic city for 6 days. I mean it was just so far fetched and fairy tale like to me that I didn't even think about it much because you just know its never going to happen. Like whats the point getting sad over it? So i just got on with life and set my expectations for Camden.
Well at 19, and my first year with my band, we got asked to headline a show at Camden. Wow! I was just so so fucking happy. I couldn't believe it! And yeah yeah I now know Camden is actually a kinda shitty place to play and after my hundreds of gigs I understand that now but that's not the point! The point is my little kid dream came true and we didn't even ask for it, it came to us! And i felt like I was on the track to becoming a super cool rocker... fuck yeaaah haha. Little did I know or expect, life had many more surprises waiting for me.
Soon came the dreams of getting asked for enough shows to do a tour, then being wanted for a European tour, releasing an album that was in the NME!!! (which yeah yeah i also know is actually quite a shit music magazine but hey when your a kid that shit seems like THE music magazine) then being asked to play a UK major festival out of the blue. Then came the support slots, playing for your favorite bands! Bands I'd of never dreamt of meeting; let alone supporting them, hanging out and getting them baked/ fucked up. Over the next 4 years my expectations just went through the roof and all my little kiddy dreams were unraveling before me. I promise I'm not trying to boast or anything, I'm genuinely so happy, proud and thankful for these things that have happened to me.
But life has a funny way of pleasing you still. We had a show at our last summer tour that had the wrong date billed everywhere. On the poster, on the internet and on magazines. So we found out like 2 days before we showed up to play, put a little post on facebook as that's all we could do and hoped for the best. What we got was the worst and actually the best! Only 4 people saw the facebook post and showed up to the right date, then a 5th person was a friend, then we went outside and banged on drums in the street for 30mins and managed to grab like 2 or 3 more people. Anyways, we ended up playing to like under 10 people but still played our hearts out. After the show was done we packed up and noticed some gentlemen standing near us who looked like they wanted to chat about the show, and we always talk to anybody we can so I said hey to these guys. Well very luckily I did... they turned out to be the organizers of Glastonbury! The big stages! And they loved us! And we also found out that me and the 2 guys birthdays are all within the same 2 days of Glastonbury! haha and they said they had heard about us, hunted down our show from facebook (thank god for the last minute post right?) and came to check us out! They said that we might be able to play, we got their details and that's about it.
The thing is we didn't hear from them for months really. One or two vague emails about a possibility of playing a small show but nothing confirmed. Then there was silence for a long time.................. :(
:'(
I guess my message to take away from this is that you can have dreams and you can have impossible fantasies, but just start off small and work towards your tiny dreams because they are much more likely to come true. You can always create newer bigger dreams and work towards those. New situations arise which you don't expect and they can be really pleasant too! But hopefully by completing your smaller dreams you get closer to your ultimate impossible dream, which for me did come true even when I didn't ever think it would, so I'm sure it can for you! Go out there and fulfill your destiny mofuckazzz!!!!
Sam
XX
