✨Love, thanks and appreciation to all my followers and open mic friends.✨

First off, I want to say a big thanks to everyone who has taken the time to listen to my music. You are without question the best audience I have ever had... I honestly never imagined when I signed up to Steemit that people would take any notice, but I found an amazing community of musicians and music lovers almost straight away. A couple of days after joining, I entered my first ever online open mic, hosted by luzcypher, and to my complete surprise ended up winning 3rd place and getting a payout of 75 steem! And then people were starting to follow me.. That was it, I was hooked. I started uploading my original songs and got so much amazing feedback from talented people all over the world, I've made friends here, I've gotten to hear beautiful songs by songwriters I would have otherwise never heard of. And after a couple more open mics I won 2nd place with my song Born to Forget and received another payout!

The warmest possible internet thanks goes to @luzcypher and @pfunk for making Steemit an awesome platform for sharing music, rewarding and encouraging artists in every way. Without your efforts I probably would have faded back into cyber obscurity weeks ago, along with many others, but here I am one month later.  💝😎 

Also I have to give credit to @curie and the curation community for boosting and promoting minnows like myself struggling to be heard. You have propelled my songs onto the trending music page several times and spurred me on to upload and even write more music... Thank you! 💚

Just throw some Steem in the hat. ;) 

Now, introducing me. Who am I? And how did I get here?

Questions I ask myself at least a dozen times a day!... Well, I believe that the best place to go if you want to understand something is the roots, and I'm getting a strong feeling this is going to be very therapeutic for me.

So, I grew up a troubled working-class kid in a post-industrial Yorkshire town in the North of England called Huddersfield. The youngest of 4 kids, with a tormentous older sister two years my senior, I always felt I had to fight my corner and have my wits about me. My dad worked in the last of the textile mills here when I was growing up in the 90s, and my mum was a cleaner in the hospital.

That was me in the cap, with my friend on a school trip.

Like any child I knew what made me happy: playing out, insects, sticks, video-games, films, the protective world beneath the raincover of the pram I lived in till I was 4 years old!... But my childhood was littered with scenes of my sister and I huddled in a corner, and under the kitchen counter while my dad screamed at my mum about money, and anything else that was bothering him. He drank a lot. This went on for years until she finally had an affair and left us when I was 11, and just starting high school.

I'd developed my sense of humour by then and realised that laughter was the best medicine, and I had a talent of being able to imitate literally anything, so I quickly assumed the role of 'class clown'. I was always an intelligent kid, but it didn't take long to see what being clever at high school really meant, memorising and repeating the answers. I stopped giving a shit and my oh so important scores took a dive, with no encouragement at home from my drunken father I didn't see the point in being 'clever'. I was too busy trying to impress my peers. I was always on some kind of crusade for justice, a rebel without a cause, arguing with teachers for anything I felt was even slightly unfair. It makes me laugh now when I think about how I was... though I definitely retained this attitude long into my adult life!

Adolescence

My early teenage years were golden. I have always looked back and longed for those times... Just chilling out with my friends, chasing girls, drinking, music, films, games, pretending we were rappers. Mostly we just hung around on the streets in the evenings after school, amusing ourselves. It was actually a blessing that my dad didn't care much, he was always either working or at the pub, and my sister pretty much stayed away at friends' and boyfriends' houses. So it was mostly just me. This is when I learned to enjoy my personal freedom, to be independent and to think for myself. The situation also made me quite popular with the homies, because my dad conveniently wrote all his work shifts on the calendar, so I knew exactly when I could invite them all over for a party, impressing them all with my impersonations and flawlessly memorised rap verses. Ahh the good old days.. Like I said, golden...!

Then it all changed...

Eventually playtime was over, and the world got real. I had left school having done not very well in my exams, but I didn't really care. All the 'clever' kids from school were rewarded for their memorising and repeating, and went on to do some more memorising and repeating in higher level education. All I had was a head full of 2pac and Eminem rhymes, but at least I had memorised something I could repeat with passion.

I was 16 and ended up on some stupid training course which funneled lost kids into low paid apprenticeship jobs and probably got paid on commission for doing so. I had to take 2 buses to go to work in a warehouse packing pram parts for £2.50 an hour, and I was learning absolutely nothing, I was just cheap labour with a fancy name.

But my passion for music (mainly hip-hop at the time) stayed with me. Although, in all those weekly "music classes" at school, not once were we given an instrument and told we could learn to play. Their idea of teaching us about music was "listen to this song, how many instruments can you hear?", or "watch this video".

How they managed to get us through 5 years of classes without teaching us a damn thing is beyond my comprehension, it's actually impressive. An impressive waste of human potential.

That's the one thing I can whole-heartedly thank my dad for. No, he didn't put a guitar in my hand, but he gave me music. I don't remember a single day in my childhood when my dad didn't play a record or a cassette or (later on) a CD. He loved music, and I remember becoming conscious of the effect it was having on me too, certain songs just got me so much, and I really felt my dad's enthusiasm for it. "Listen to this bit Clinton!" he would say with childish glee and excitement. I grew up hearing so much Beatles, Electric Light Orchestra, Queen and David Bowie that I pretty much know all their songs off by heart. And I feel the strongest nostalgia when I hear them now.

One of my dad's favourite albums which seemed like pure magic to me as a kid.

Moving out at 16 and my mental health problems...

Well my relationship with my father ended at 16 when he pinned me up against the wall in our living room with his hand around my throat. I knew I had to move out. I had quit my job packing pram parts and had to move into a bedsit, one self contained room with a bed, a fridge and a cooker. I got a new job at an electrical warehouse where my cousin worked, but that didn't last long either.

I went from extrovert to introvert overnight. All the world around me was saying "get a job, that's all you're good for". Like a crab in a bucket. But I was just a kid, isolated, with no opportunity, and very little hope. It was no surprise that I started to develop severe social anxiety. I shut myself away and began to grow very frustrated and paranoid about what people thought of me. I pushed everyone away. All my wit and humour and teenage charm went out the window, my friends had all moved on and were living conventional young adult lives, at home with their parents, supported.

I began to nurture a strong feeling that there was something very wrong with the world. Everything seemed like bullshit to me. My opinions grew into a kind of personal ideology. I saw the conformity around me as the absolute enemy, because it was threatening my very being, my freedom! When I knew there was something more to life that just wasn't available to me in my sheltered upbringing. And the only way I could find it was by resisting and NOT conforming...!

My first taste of creating my own music!

The turning point I now realise - thanks to writing all this, was in being fortunate enough to have my eldest sister (the non-tormentous one) to help me in the right direction. She knew I was passionate about music, so she got me enrolled on a music production course at an adult education centre. I met some great people there and it helped me come back out of my shell. A few weeks in I was drawing notes into music software (I think it was Reason) and creating my own beats and melodies, stuff I had never done before. It may seem like pretty basic stuff to some people but it was thoroughly exciting to me. I'd hardly even been on a computer before! I started doing my own amateur versions of my favourite hip hop tracks, using MIDI drums, strings and synth sounds, and found out I had a very good ear.

My suspicions were confirmed I was meant for music. There was a purpose to my existence!

But I was yet to pick up an instrument...

In Part Two I'll tell you how I went from being a paranoid wreck, scared to leave the house - to using a guitar as a weapon against the world, singing on the street and hitch-hiking all over Europe!

😜👍🏼🛣