I was very sad yesterday. One of the
projects that I was hoping to be working on next year with poet Susan Richardson, didn't get its funding. We'd been
shortlisted after the 1st round of applications and had, had some very positive
encouragement from the funders, but this round was unfortunately unsuccessful.
I know so many folks who know all about the highs and lows of the funding game-
but as I've been posting a fair bit about successes lately I thought I'd keep
it real and post about the disappointment also.
Most of the time it’s a gamble being creative. You do it, but you have
no idea how things are going to be received. You hope that what you’re making
will fly, knowing full well that the opposite is always possible and that your
creations might fail, flop, crash and burn. Sometimes they do fail. Sometimes things go quite well, but
not as well as you’d hoped. Sometimes they’re incredibly well received, but
that doesn’t translate into anything substantial beyond the moment of critical
acclaim, and occasionally everything seems to come together at the right time,
in the right way and all is hunky dory… till the next time you create…. And
then it’s back to square one all over again…
I am still waiting on the results of another funding application for my big Stone's Throw, Lament of the Selkie project next year. It's hard to hold it all lightly, knowing that all the planning and dreaming may not work out in the way that I want it to,
or maybe even in the way it deserves to. I was aware that last time I was successful
with R&D funding, that for all my joy and excitement there were many worthy and
exciting ideas that didn’t get to be made. How sad this business is that we’re
all scrabbling round and forced to compete to be able to realize the creative
visions we have.
On the up side of things Susan and I following this funding rejection are still
going to find a way to make some new work together and will be plotting the
next strategy for this soon.
Anyway, yesterday I needed a bit of
space to lick my wounds. I walked away from what I had planned to be working on
as I found I couldn’t focus very well and instead I ended up writing a new song
about Jackie Leven. And now today I find myself asking if I would I have
written this same song, without the disappointment of failure? Did something
new get born from the frustration of yesterday’s crushed hope? Could this have
existed without it?
Jackie (for folks who don’t know about
him) was a Fife born singer-songwriter, who started out in rock outfit Doll by
Doll (after having to leave his hometown because of local gang violence). After a
tumultuous time, with the band imploding and a serious mugging that damaged his
larynx and nearly cost him his voice, Jackie became addicted to heroin… Eventually
Jackie managed to get himself clean, created The Clore Trust charity to help
addicts and headed out onto the road as as a blues- tinged, balladeer in the tradition of artists like Kevin Coyne.
Jackie, like Kevin Coyne, observed the
lows, the grime, the seedy, the pain, the mundane and the obscene. Always a storyteller and often
hilarious, Jackie wove a tapestry of complex broken characters within his songs, but in doing so he gave them dignity and a spark of beauty.
I met Jackie when I opened for him back
in 2007 at the Barfly in Cardiff. I’d heard many stories of both praise and disdain about him from other artists, but on the night I met him, he
was a lovely person and an extraordinary performer. Bill and I walked away
from that gig commenting that it was a crime that Jackie wasn’t more well
known, it certainly wasn’t for lack of showmanship, musicality or ability. Riding the rollercoaster of success and failure Jackie, sometimes spoke of his own disappointments that his work hadn't had the recognition over the years that others had achieved. He also spoke of the ongoing need for rejection of comparison. He followed the muse and made the work and that in itself was success... the comparison game is a battle every artist faces, no matter how successful...It takes a lot of conscious effort not to be continually dragged into and down by it.
The day I found out that Jackie died, I
was working on my Selkie project in its original form, a collaboration with
composer Gill Stevens who had introduced me to the folklore tales. Gill and I
stopped for lunch and suddenly we heard an enormous bang. A blackbird
had crashed into her glass conservatory roof and died. Moments later as Dylan,
Gill’s husband carried the dead bird away I saw the news on my social
media feed that Jackie had also died.
It is just a week since the 7th
anniversary of Jackie’s death.
My original Selkie project with Gill
also didn’t get it’s funding. We then planned instead to create a streamlined
version of it that would be performed on my return from touring in Italy. It
was to be the last project before the birth of our daughter and it was another
outcome that didn’t work out as planned. During that tour in Italy I fell
from the stage and injured myself and lost my ability to perform for a season…
Life is funny....The letting go of that incarnation of
the project was painful yet it led to a completely different version of a Selkie project, which
in turn led to my album, which in turn played a part in my mental recovery,
(see the 10 part Turbulence blog series on that) which in turn led to this
years arts council funded R&D project, which has led to me putting in the
application for the big grant to create the full touring show…Which may or may not happen…
Yesterday’s disappointment brought into
sharp focus the reality of the fact that I might not be successful in this next
round of funding for the Selkie project…
But I will cross that bridge in a few
weeks time- when I come to it.
In the meantime, today has been a day
for pragmatism… I’m still sad that specifics of my project with Susan won’t be realised in
the way I’d intended them to at this time. It’s hard not to feel deeply
frustrated after all the effort and time that goes into applications not
amounting to equivalent outcomes, but I can’t stay in that place- I know it too
well and I know that it won’t help me to stay there… Today I need to pick myself
up, dust myself down and reassert my perspective on the general relativity of success
and failure…
So for now I’ll just remember Jackie and
focus on the fact that I have written a new song.
(I’ll see about recording a version of
it soon)
Here’s a link to Paul Du Noyer’s
excellent in depth article on Jackie Leven https://www.pauldunoyer.com/the-jackie-leven-obituary/
Author Ian Rankin on Jackie Leven
Here’s Jackie’s own tribute to Kevin
Coyne, anotherr hugely underrated artist...
