And so it begins...

I am embarking on a pretty scary challenge in 2022. An unnecessarily enthusiastic assault on the London open mic scene, aimed at conquering my fear of playing my music live to new audiences. This is the first in a series of blog posts about the experience. My first performance is in less than three hours - watch this space to hear how it went.

My mum’s favourite piece of advice is ‘moderation in all things’. It’s a mystery how she managed to spawn someone like me, who tends to go to extremes. When I’m solving a problem, I figure I may as well throw everything at it. The issue I’m going after right now is stage fright. And the obvious solution to this is…  to completely terrify myself.

So here’s the plan. I’m going to do 3 open mics a week during January. Kind of a “kill or cure” approach. By the end of the month, I’ll either never want to play live again, or I’ll be so over the stage fright that I’ll actually be enjoying myself. Hopefully the second one.

I’ve been writing songs for over ten years now, but live performance has always been my Achilles heel. I used to sing in a band (Sheabou - long since defunct), and while my ex-bandmates will testify that I was always pretty nervous, I did a fair number of gigs with them - but rarely felt that I did myself justice. My nerves would make my body tense up and my throat feel tight, and I could hear the shakiness in my voice playing through the monitors which only served to exacerbate the problem. 

Since the band broke up in 2015, I’ve written a whole load of solo songs, and recorded a few of these, and *in theory* I’d really love to be out there regularly playing them to new audiences. But for ages I procrastinated. Then a couple of years ago, I came across The Guitar Social which was a super-inclusive community that welcomes all standards. That gave me the confidence to play a few times in front of a group of people I know and consider friends. I’ve also been lucky enough last year to become part of the TGS Records community, which evolved to become The MusiCollective - a group of songwriters of all levels of experience - which gave me a safe space to share my own music without feeling excessively nervous.

Since the middle of last year I’ve been intending to perform at more ‘real’ open mics - in front of strangers rather than a community I know - but I keep putting it off. It feels more frightening to be on stage by myself - with just my guitar and voice - than when I was in a band. And I have spotted an interesting psychological block. Playing at an open mic, suggests I think my music is good enough to perform publicly - and that random people might want to listen to it. Some part of me feels that is arrogant - that the audience will wonder how I’ve become so deluded and I will be making a fool of myself. The imposter syndrome is strong here!

So my New Years resolution is to bite the bullet and commit to a whole set of performances, starting tonight. That’s forced my hand to practice over the Christmas period. I was pretty antisocial over Christmas, shut up in my parents attic practicing for most of it. Despite that, I made less progress than I’d hoped and still feel woefully underprepared for my first open mic later.

I then nearly fell at the first hurdle. The first two open mics I tried to book in for turned out not to be running on the bank holiday. I was kind of relieved… but thought I’d try one more. And now I’m due on stage at 8:30. I also have one lined up for tomorrow and am booked in for a third on Thursday. Gosh. So that’s given me a hard deadline to publish this first blog post (which I wanted to do before I start - and have of course left to the last minute to write!).

Hope you enjoyed reading this, and are keen to follow my progress on this little journey. I’ll keep you posted - wish me luck!