So, let’s start at the beginning.
I suppose you could say I first discovered my true self when I was thirteen.
Even then I was an introverted, quite agoraphobic person.
Before then I didn’t really have an identity. I wandered around like a lost boy. I wasn’t very good at sport like the other boys, I didn’t support football or rugby teams like the other boys.
I liked to shut myself in my dark room and write and draw.
I was already being bullied by the other boys.
They were all the same height, the same build, they wore the same clothes, they listened to the same music, they liked to meet up at the park after school and go to the cinema at weekends.
I was taller than all of them, I was so much skinnier than all of them, I wore whatever my mother could afford, I didn’t listen to music because none of the stuff I had heard interested me, and I shied away from human contact, barely even speaking to my own mother.
Then everything changed a few days before my fourteenth birthday.
I had arrived home after yet another beating at school to find my mother in our small living room, flipping through some old CD’s she hadn’t yet sold for cash.
“Your father got me into all this… here, listen!” she’d said, and she’d made me sit on the sofa before playing the first track on a CD she was brandishing in the air on our crappy old stereo.
The music blew my freaking mind. The first song was ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ by Nirvana. I vaguely recognised the riffs and melody from somewhere, but never had it held and captured me like this before. The small box mum had being going through held old rock albums and mixed tapes.
I unplugged the stereo, grabbed the box of CD’s and listened to that music all night long, alone in my room.
The first rock band i was ever obsessed with was Nirvana. They were what got me into rock music.
My mother had a substantial amount of money saved up for my birthday presents. She bought me loads of new CD’s, as well as telling me to keep the old box of CD’s for myself.
“You clearly have you father’s taste in music.” she had said, somewhat proudly.
My other present was a blessing in disguise. In the filled attic that housed most of our treasured belongings, my mother had kept a box of my dad’s old punk clothes. Leather jackets and jeans with zips and safety pins, old band t-shirts and logo badges.
That was where I got my style from, and everything developed from there.
I got a system; go to school, come home, do homework, do chores for money for anyone I could find willing in our neighbourhood. That money went towards music, more clothes, magazines that were a good way of discovering new music…
For my fifteenth birthday I got my first guitar. I’ll never know what on earth my mother had to sell to buy me the guitar and the amp, but I show her my thanks by playing it every day, sometimes all day. It was a beautiful guitar, a Gibson ES-339, and I named her Ebony, after her colouring, as I already knew that all good guitars should be treated with a name.
I played non-stop, I played along with the songs on my CD’s, and I got pretty damn good.
Of course, all these changes in my lifestyle made me into even more of an outcast- and that can never be a good thing.