The above title is a lyric from Pink Floyd’s iconic Syd Barrett-era ‘Pipers at the gates of Dawn’. It’s seemingly a throw-away rhyme to go with ‘cloak’.
There again, don’t our ‘throw away’ moments of creativity sometimes turn out to be our most poetic, our must truthful?
Barrett-era Floyd was short-lived. Yet in this one album they created something that walked that fine line between artistic masterpiece and something that was ‘a bit of a joke’.
This album taught me about how creativity must straddle the line between artistic seriousness and the utter ridiculous.
20 years ago, it is most likely that so many people viewed me as a ‘bit of a joke’. I had realised, perhaps prematurely, that I was incapable of adapting to acceptable forms of adult personhood, and in turn I was bursting with a desperate need to prove my worth via creativity.
I’d spend all my time trying to come up with artistic ideas and music lyrics, but I would be in such a rush to share my work, it was always embarassingly executed.
I would rush making recording after recording and then hand copies to random people in town, bemused to have a CD copy of recordings I’d often taped in a toilet prior to having other way of creating reverb. I even once walked up to the singer of a small indie duo called Slow Club in the Sheffield Leadmill and shoved a cd in her hand. Slow Club’s singer is now known as Self-Esteem.
Exactly 20 years ago (the final week of May 2006) after month after month of making heavy and rigid work that largely documented depression, I shaved my head, stop caring so much, and knocked up a ‘silly’ little CD turning a ‘nickname’ that once was a point of humilation into my creative psyedomyn: Ooon Badger.
This knocked-together, bit of junk, proved to be a kind of wierd creative fluke. As a friend told me, “it’s shit, but really good at the same time”.
It was one of my most enjoyable artistic projects, ever – one I’ll never forget.
Social piers loved it, even if they thought I was kind of ‘a bit of a joke’.
However, validation-seeking never creates good energies when trying to be creative, and perhaps it’s rightly so that this a was one off piece of art, rather than the start of a music career.
But “as the first song says “I may be dirty, but I’m not rat – I’ll never join the rat race”.
I’ve uploaded 4 of the tracks from the project here:
John B Ledger 