With the distorting and unreal effects of ‘success’ that we are seeing today, it is better for you as an artist if you fail. Whereas in the past — in that exotic land people call ‘the 1970s’, say — failure really could be called failure, and was a sign that there was something false, bad or wrong about your art, now what they call failure is really a test and an opportunity. It is a test of your integrity and determination as an artist. And it is an opportunity to innovate and create new forms in the peace of obscurity. Of course, there are still many artists today who fail because they are simply bad. One feels sympathy for these individuals, but can do nothing for them. These words are not addressed to them. It is the artists who appear to fail but are still very good that I am concerned with here. I think they are an important class of people when it comes to the kind of creations that we need today. They are overlooked but deeply significant. Of course I consider myself to be one of them. If you are looking for a balanced and objective cultural critique then you had better look elsewhere.
Let me explain why I think failure is preferable to success today.
First, what they call failure is better, because it is better for the art itself. I have come to this belief after years of endeavour in what they call ‘the music industry’.
When I was young, in my late teens, before I had confirmed for myself why it is that I must make music (which is a deeply private motive too sacred for words), I was quite interested in being successful. I had a few songs played on BBC Radio, and was invited along for a couple of days to Abbey Road studios for some ‘workshops’ to do with making it big. The place was full of people wearing the right kind of hats and the right kind of glasses. (I was wearing the wrong kind of glasses and no hat). There were prominent songwriters, famous DJs and the like. I remember being interviewed for the radio. I suppose it was all very exciting. At the time, the people who were speaking at this event — about the art of writing a pop hit, or how to market yourself as an artist, or how to approach live shows and touring — held some kind of authority for me. They definitely did, as when I returned home I embarked on an intense period of writing new material, songs that very much had the ‘audience’ and the ‘industry’ in mind. I don’t quite know what I thought I was doing, or how I felt writing this stuff, but they were by far the worst songs I have ever written. It fills me with shame and embarrassment to even think of them. One, perhaps the worst (though believe me they were all terrible), was about me dancing around my bedroom naked. I remember sending it to a producer who remarked that it was quite odd subject matter for a rather geeky 19-year-old boy. I don’t think he was wrong. My right mind was being warped by shallow ideas of success; it was a kind of cultural manipulation.
Which of course I was stupid enough to fall for. But I was a naïve kid, as are most of the people who end up finding fame and success via the ‘music industry’. Isn’t it odd that we require children to get up and express emotions to us through song? What does that say about the values, and the emotional maturity, of our society? (You could say, well, it’s been like that for decades. I would say that kids aren’t what they used to be). There is a reason why kids are co-opted into the entertainment industry, and it is a similar reason to why it is young boys that are the prime fodder for the armed forces — they are easily manipulated.
Now, as a mature adult male of 33 (and an immensely self-righteous and egotistical one at that), I am incapable of being manipulated. I can sense bullshit from a hundred miles off. And having gone through a decade or more of absolutely no success whatsoever, I believe I am better off for it. I believe, in fact, that I am one of the most serious artists alive. I genuinely believe, especially after the last two years of writing for my next album, that at my best, I am among the greatest living songwriters. And it is precisely my persistent failure, and my blessed obscurity, that has gotten me here.
Failure has tested my determination to carry on making music. Essentially, I have had zero incentive to keep doing it. No external motive, that is. But in the silence of obscurity, I have been forced to look inwards to find a private motive that is richer and more knowingly humane than any I could have developed otherwise. Material success in the arts today creates noise and confusion, and pulls your soul in all kinds of new directions. Luckily, I have had none of that, and have been privileged to be able to focus on my art without unnecessary diversion.
In reality, there are only so many things which need to be said; and especially for the individual artist, there are only so many things which need to be expressed. Because I have been able to practice a sustained and monkish focus over long years, I have been able to clarify for myself what it is that I must say, or what the voice that speaks out of my nature is saying. I said above that this private motive of mine is too sacred for words, but perhaps it would be informative to go into it a little, to see the kind of expression that is made possible by so-called failure and obscurity.
In the late 1990s, I observed a period of difficulty for those around me which basically destroyed my family. When I was 9 years old, after a period of extreme stress, my 13-year-old sister became schizophrenic and psychotic and was, in a state of emergency for all involved, admitted to a mental hospital. She remained there for 4 years and was never the same again. In quite a real sense, I lost my sister, and if I didn’t literally become an only child, I often felt like one. During this period of mental imbalance for her, not surprisingly, my parents’ marriage began to fail, and a year after she went into hospital, they separated and subsequently divorced. Unusually, it was my mother who left the family home, moving a hundred miles away. Though I was left with a wonderful single father, in practice I had now partly lost my mother (I say this in the knowledge that motherhood is at least 50% physical). This partial loss I have been fully grieving in different ways ever since.
One grows up and moves on, but the psychic fallout from all of this echoes in my spirit to this day. I have always had a sense that my family life, and therefore my sense of identity, is broken. I feel even now that my soul is in fragments, that it is in pieces, and that some work should be concocted so as to put it back together again.
Music, for me, is this work. Of course I have scribbled my sorrows into my diaries, but it is through song that I aim to make everything whole. (Written language is not generally suited to making things whole. It is fragmentary by nature and that is part of its value and beauty. The modern development of the novel form has been our attempt at using mere words to make things whole. Wholeness is necessarily fictional). I have had the sense for around ten years or so, that what I need from song is the fiction of unity. The wonderful range of expression that can be achieved through the combination of music and words is the only medium at my disposal that is capable of reconstructing my past. I have developed a deep emotional need to become the voice of my ancestry, and I have learnt that writing songs and making albums allows me to do this. It is the best way I have of bringing the broken fragments of my past together. Because of that, my relationship with my art is unutterably pure. I could not live without it. If I were forced to, life would simply be meaningless.
As you can probably tell, all of this is deeply private, hermetic, and unique to me. And I have only been able to develop this spiritual outlook and possibility for myself because I have been left to my own devices. If I had experienced some form of success — money, travel, connections, fame — I don’t believe that I would have been able to do the deep work necessary to make such a beautiful halo for myself. I would have been distracted, confused, led astray, manipulated. I might well now loathe my desire to make music, which one feels from certain demoralised popular performers. Thankfully I have been wallowing for years in the pure waters of total obscurity. The tumbleweed silence of my creative life has tested me. I am now a greater artist for it.
My artistry has also been enriched by the opportunity that extreme unsuccess affords in innovation and the search for new forms. As a professional nobody, I am contractually entitled to full creative control. I am grateful for this, because if I had experienced any success, I know I would not have been able to express myself fully. After all, my interests and my artistic intentions are wincingly unfashionable. If you asked a thousand successful artists about their work, do you think any of them would mention in connection with it an obscure legal process unfolding over centuries impacting upon agricultural land use and feeding into the matrix of events comprising what is commonly known as The Industrial Revolution? Do you think they would cite 17th-century devotional poet George Herbert as a main influence? I suspect not. Now this is not to boast idly about myself (though I am quite fond of doing that), but only to make the point: there is enormous value in having the freedom to make exactly what you want to make; there is timeless value in being allowed to follow your nature.
If the content of my next record were not modelled on the significance of that obscure legal process — which is known in dusty history books as ‘the enclosure of the commons’ — then I don’t know what it would be about. Years of freedom have allowed me to choose my own subject, and in the process, to broaden the range of contemporary songwriting. Just like we owe inventors for their useful failures, we owe failed artists for their questing into the unknown regions of expression.
Total obscurity also gives one the opportunity to create in the right season. I time my musical acts by significant moments in the life of my spirit, and by no other reference. If I want to wait ten years for the right song to emerge in the right way, then I am free to do so. It might not be good for my ‘career’, but it will be better for the art, and for posterity. If art is literally one of the prime fruits of creation, then it should be brought forth in the right season. Often ‘the music industry’ (a form of factory farming) forces apples on us in April.
But the freedom in obscurity should not cause the artist to discount altogether the needs of the audience. I believe that any artist has a responsibility to their audience. And I mean that word, responsibility, in the true sense of responding to the cultural needs of others. (Tellingly, one of the truly great writers, Franz Kafka, considered titling one of his collections of short stories, Responsibility.) But if you have a vast audience, which part of it, and which feelings do you respond to? I believe that the confusion of masses (or the madness of crowds) is what is to blame for the impotent and misguided eructations of contemporary successful artists. They either are corrupted by the sheer madness of 21st century fame, or they turn inwards into a nihilistic and meaningless pose of resentment and distrust. There is no happy medium here. What I believe is most preferable for the artist (to be preferred even to glorious obscurity) is a small and sustainable degree of success, but just as inequality is deepening in the real economy, and the middle classes being hollowed out, so there is now no moderate success that is possible in the arts. It is all or nothing. I prefer nothing, but the situation continues to the detriment of all.
Far from disregarding what people think and feel about my musical output, I care very much how it is received. And the beauty of it is that my audience is small — it is easily navigable and readable, allowing me to be fruitfully conscious of my artistic responsibility. When I think of the people for whom I write songs, I feel I am at the centre of a coherent and meaningful group of peers. I take pleasure from the thought that I can contribute my art to the flourishing culture of a collective. This dignifies and clarifies the forms of my utterance, the melodies and words that I choose to share; I hope that these artistic messages will reach the people I know and contribute in some small way to their spiritual wellbeing. Not to be too sentimental about it, but I am genuinely touched when I learn that someone has been affected by my music. I am glad to have made something that has the power to do good in the world.
I am not saying that great success makes this kind of cultural contribution impossible. It does not, and there are good examples of spiritually coherent and consistent individuals who bear the burden of success with strength and dignity. But I do believe that the confusion of fame today — manifesting in mass audience expectations — makes a simple and natural contribution more unlikely.
What I have is a natural audience that maps much more closely to what the human psyche is designed for. My friends and the wider circle of people that is receptive to my music can be equated to the large family group, the tribe, or the village. What I have is a community that received the fruits of my creation. This naturalistic formation is a positive good for those involved, and is only possible at the local level, and in relative obscurity. Fame, money, success distort and corrupt everything connected with it.
There is more to be said about the importance of community to artistic creation. Another reason that failure is preferable today is that it allows artists to stick together over a prolonged period of time, developing connections and fruitful working relationships without the strange devastations imposed by international capital. In their own quiet nook of culture, artists growing together are able to express themselves to the full extent of their personal visions and idiosyncrasies. Here, they are free to really say what they see, and to represent the world in the most felicitous way, regardless of the insane proscriptions of mass culture.
I have been experiencing this myself recently, beginning a new project with a friend which, to the slight surprise of both of us, is turning out to sound like much more than the sum of its parts. The songs we have been working on are odd, playful, joyous, and have moments of rare transcendence quite unlike anything I would be capable of on my own. This might sound trite, but I really feel we are expressing ourselves (that is actually much harder than you might think in the world of art); I feel as though we are making singular work that no-one else would make. This is only possible because neither of us has been wrenched from our natural habitat by the unreal compulsions of ‘elites’ in ‘the music industry’. Our friendship has developed at its own pace in the real world, and has brought forth songs as a little of its fruit. This is beautiful to me, and to be cherished.
Contrast this with working relationships in the upper echelons of the entertainment business. They are largely all false, riddled with pretension and anxiety, and people do not trust each other because the only thing that matters is money. Yet I trust my friend, and would give him the shirt off my back if he were in need of it.
There is no natural community in the music industry. It is an ugly monoculture that cares nothing for individual artists. It is much better for your spirit and morale if you make a determined failure of your career and keep out of it.
The final reason why failure is preferable to success today, is that extreme success is bad for your mental health. It is an odd paradox of the times that we are supposedly more conscious than ever of what it takes to maintain psychological balance, yet more and more people — especially young people, who are more fragile — seek fame.
Any right-thinking person can see that fame today puts extreme pressure on your mental faculties, badly distorting your view of others and yourself, and muddying your intentions. There are many examples of people who have suffered in the limelight — psychosis, drug addiction, suicide, general misery. We can all think of some poor soul whose life has been ruined by the effects of success. How, then, is it any kind of ‘success’, to bring on yourself the conditions of your own demise? It is strange that mature people who should know better do not speak against it more, actively counselling younger people to abstain from the lust for fame. In this way, an abject stupidity is perpetuated down the decades.
One hopes that economic and demographic conditions change so that fame becomes a tamer beast. Part of the problem is that fame is not what it used to be. In the 1960s, footballers often took the bus to the match, just like the fans. Now, players drive to the stadium in sports cars with blacked-out windows. Who would argue that our values have not objectively deteriorated in this regard?
It is much better for your mind, body and spirit if you fail to become famous and apparently successful. You will have a more reasonable, more humane perspective on life, and you will be immune to the mad roar of 21st-century mass culture, which seeks only to devour its adherents.
Crucially, you will be free to make the art that you want to make. You will be able to add your singular work to the immortal line of the history of art, something for future generations to cherish and celebrate. That, in the end, is the meaning and purpose of every act of human creation.
I wish you every failure in your future endeavours.
