As of 13 October 2023, I should have been just starting a PHD – right now.

In Autumn 2022 was just in the final stages of submitting the proposal to the University of Leeds.

The proposal would be unconditionally accepted, but the idea began to fall apart in early 2023, when I was trying to apply for the absolutely necessary funding. It wasn’t just that in the gap created by the Pandemic, my stamina and capacity to take in the necessary academic literature had contracted almost entirely into my go-to theorist; Mark Fisher, it was also that I was trying to create something so unbelievably impossible to pull off, that I’d convinced myself I needed to create ‘genius’ to get myself out of hole I’d found my late 30s self in.

I began to see holes appear all way through the idea, and could see that my potential supervisors could see this too. I ended up admitting defeat. It was too vast a project, and I decided I needed to get away from things for a bit, winding up working 6 months away in Cumbria. 

I’m now glad I didn’t do it. No disrespect to anybody who undertakes a research-led degree, it’s just that I have realised that what I do is a compulsion, arguably an aspect of a personality disorder, and isn’t applicable to structures of research culture, no matter how much I try to twist it into a ‘lived in’, autoethnographical project.

A big part of this project, was setting up a conceptual basis to argue for the need for a grassroots space in my home town of Barnsley, and to work with @codac_community to create this, for people in the area to continue their creative pursuits in a supporting community, with the all aspect of having the bloody space to do it in!

Nothing is lost. At the least, my ideas and work in creating this will be really useful for @codac_community going forward. I have learnt a lot about myself as an artist, and am working on developing new projects for the foreseeable future. Now this break is ending, it’s time get ‘doing’ again.

Sometimes the kind of space you need to flourish doesn’t exist the world as it is. The task is to create what isn’t there. This was the shared dream that got CODAC going. Let’s hope it comes into fruition.

To relapse into my pre-2015 premonitions. The rise of what felt like a workable hope in-between 2015 and 2019, now mysteriously absent. But the way things are accelerating at the moment it feels like it has been wiped from history altogether and we are at the the other end of line of reality stitched back together – one of hopelessness.

The dominance of the political despair that defined the late Noughties and early 2010s is now characterising our current moment, but in a more advanced stage, and despite many good deeds, many good people, nobody really knows what to do about it again.

Listening to Tory party conferences, seeing interviews from the attending Nigel Farage, was a form of torture made more horrificly so because they, those attending the conference, seemed to like all of this so much that you felt like a different species separated by 400 million years of evolution, and not just mere difference of opinion (also, why are these people drawn to such terrible music?).

Difference of opinion, as a term, is just one example of the dead language that still floats around dominating our tongues, as we engage in polite conversation. Few words strung together to make a workable the late 20th century term, can affect the living any longer, without experiencing their deadness chip away at our fake smiles.

I hate writing like this. I hate that 4 years ago, I was at the tail-end of a quasi-Millenarian sense that a better world would manifest itself through the force of its own sheer necessity. This lift, encouragement, was absorbed into my daily undertakings, I perhaps wrongly, sensed its atmospheric presence, within out shared breaths.

Ironic then that it vanished during an airborne pandemic. But it’s taken a couple years afterwards for the void to be filled by a government within governments who seem to have no depth they cannot descend into.

I hate to say I told me so.

I hate that what in the late noughties and early 2010s felt like the mid-point of a self fulfilling prophecy, was interrupted by a hope so thick that it enters the bloodstream, only to vanish into a void.

Sorry I can’t do more with myself right now.

(Part of a series of ‘Noughties’ excavations that will eventually be worked into a much larger project).

I’ve been a doing a lot of ‘unearthing’ of late, most likely because I turn 40 in around 3 months.

I’ve been trying to do a bit of excavation and salvaging of works and creative former selves, that became subsumed under other creative selves. To own what I used to do and be, without feeling that somehow they were errors in direction that needed to be buried. It’s been an act of reclaiming and redeeming my past.

Over the course of 20 years I have invested an incredible amount of time to making and thinking about making.

I wrote a stupid amount of songs in a four year period right in the middle of noughties, and coincidentally stopped making music more or less around the same time as the financial crash in 2008. We all knew something big was happening, but nobody could foresee how it would pan out. But I could sense a change in the wind, and decided that my visual art was more equipped to blow with the new wind.

Perhaps if I’d had carried on I’d be in a different position now. Although I suspect my lack of self-belief at a level that has caused so much self-sabotage would have caused identical issues of inertia.

Also, because the wind was changing in September 2008 – the time when I decided to stop being an aspiring songwriter, I encounter these songs as a time-capsule for the Geist of the Noughties.

Now, the Noughties are going through an excavation of their own at the moment, largely precipitated by the sudden rush of allegations being made about celebrity Russell Brand, who, in the mid-noughties was every bit a personification of the culture and norms of that time, especially in the knowledge that he pushed the ‘norms’ to their extremes.

These songs remind me of writing specifically about trying to function with depression, anxiety, fluctuating in a moment from self-disgust to self-obsession. They remind me about what mental health meant in the noughties, when it was certainly an issue on the rise, but wasn’t to the level of near-universal acceptance that it is at now (responses like “needs to pull him/herself together” or “he’s/she’s making it up” were still very common responses).

But the songs also remind me of then-unexamined attitudes that I sometimes expressed in my songs, which have since become socially-unacceptable, and thus self-scrutinised. Passive mysoginy, attitudes now ascribed and ghettoised into the ‘incel’ culture. And a ‘punching down’ culture aimed at those who made you feel uncomfortable in an age where it was harder to physically avoid those you didn’t want to associate with.

The noughties were the ‘after-party’ after the last party of the 20th century – the after taste of 90s hedonism. The new century hadn’t yet found itself, and was populated by attitudes and actions of a previous one, but with emerging technologies that was allowing them to spread like never before.

Insulated into my home town’s reverberated manifestations of the noughties white boy indie scene (as it was almost entirely white), when I look back I see a distorted sense of my place in the scheme of things, which is also possibly an outcome of youth. I recall having a sobering moment of realisation in 2013, after enough things had gone wrong in my late 20s, and I realised my total insignificance: I wasn’t special and nobody really cared if I was an artist. In my 30s I encountered people who said they didn’t dare come to speak ‘us’ back then – our ‘group’ of young scenesters. The attitude is reciprocated by those in their early 20s now, who can see your desperate strain to stay young and relevant a mile off.

The Noughties feel like this wierd time capsule sandwiched between 9/11 and the financial crash, in which I became a young adult. Their last whimper was stamped out by the time the Tories began asserting their reality agenda on us in 2013.

It must also be added that I am excavating to repurpose many of my life-relics for a personally large show I’ll be doing in a couple of years – so vague in detail as of yet that I can’t even begin to give any detail.

That these songs touch upon personal and socially problematic subjects makes them important to the story/projects I intend to develop over the coming years.

One song, for example, the first on the ‘Ooon Badger’ set of songs above, would probably get me cancelled these says (although I think the song is just too ridiculous to be taken seriously tbh!). But, to be honest, the song after, about living in a perceived Nanny State, shows that I had swallowed some of the kind of right wing opinions on the welfare state, the kind of shared attitudes that would go on to justify the absolute criminal damage the Tories would do to society in the 2010s. It’s uncomfortable to hear passive attitudes that would be weaponised in the forthcoming decade to roll out austerity, for example.

I slotted into the ‘arty oddball’ persona, an acceptable masculine archetype of sorts in the noughties, with beta male meditations on women of interest. Expectations no less problematic than more violently expressed ones, ones that are currently being interrogated as we pathologise and scrutinise our behaviour and the behaviour of others like never before.

The Noughties were like a ghost dance of 20th century icons, wishing our boring semi-detached upbringings would be possessed by dead rock stars of previous decades. I thought I was a star, but I was merely the dust of its aftermath. Yet, this conviction drove me to to create at a rate I could never achieve now. An impulse that resulted in many naive mistakes that I find it hard to retake. But the last thing I want to do is pretend it never happened.

Anyway, for now I’ll leave it there. And leave the YouTube videos up this time!

I walk down Eastgate, and cross Regents Street, towards the back road down to the bus station.

It’s a grey October, and I’m porous to this greyness. Any deeper colours are reserved to the warm cosy culture of comedown 90s TV. It’s like the decade has put its winter coat and gloves on – taking a break from its hedonism.

Yet, down here, right now, it remains a distant promise of ‘ok-ness incorporated’, which I do sincerely expect the coming Millennium to deliver.

I have the line from a pop song in my head. As is always the case. With every coming month, sometimes every week, a lyric from a song with enough airplay to pursue you will proceed to momentarily define what you’re going through.

#Nothing really matters. Nothing really matters.

The lyric delivers legitimacy to what I really want to do: resign.

I’m too young to resign. Yet I want to. I want to resign, and retreat for the bright lights of having to show up, of being a body that must compete. I want to hide in the big cosy coat that 1999 has promised, until the world changes and it’s ok to come out into a less abrasive daylight.

Nothing is fun. Everything is routine. Routine is the coping strategy. Restrictive eating habits.

Nothing to excess, except exercise that is. Routine keeps me protected from internal condemnation but not from external exposure.

I’m 2 weeks through work experience. I was part of a group who got sent on a college construction training site. None of us fit in with this life role, but this has been dealt as a kind of punishment for what, in 2023, could be seen as a group of teenagers with ADHD.

It’s been 2 of the longest weeks of my 15 year old life. I’ve become the target for the boredom and displeasure from the rest of my group.

In the 2020s, the language I’m about to use would sound like I’m victim blaming myself. But, Somehow I’ve allowed this to be. Somewhere along the line, I’ve learnt how to be the whipping boy.

Perhaps I deserve it, perhaps it’s part of larger narrative I have that develops this relationship dynamic with other folk my age.

Perhaps it’s part of a story I’m developing where I HAVE to be the ‘good person’, and in order to maintain innocence in an already consumer-weighted world where one is inherently complicit, one must thus become a victim.

Who knows where it all began? The story feels like a thinly-vieled one of Christian reward.

“Once this new Millennium comes, and I leave school, the threats will dissapate and I can finally ‘be myself.”

“I have done well, I haven’t indulged, I haven’t been bad, so I DESERVE my reward, of nice easy life and beautiful woman.”

The seemingly innocent seeds of this relation to what the world is what it owes me will come back to bite me one day, surely…

However, the atmosphere of the moment tells me I’m in my right to feel this way.

The whole culture is autumnal, not just the weather. The whole culture feels like a solemn walk around a duck pond and a bench with a grown up Ronan Keating.

“Indie bedwetting” music is in vogue. It’s the age of feeling sorry for yourself with impunity. It sets an unfortunate precedent of expectations of an easier world to come on the eve of a new Millennium.

With a sense of relief I get on the bus by myself, still young and unknown enough in this town to feel safely anonymous.

I’m happy to resign from 1999. I’ll sit this one out now, please.

I won’t be prepared for this new Millennium for another 20 years.