Lifer

TLDR: I rented me a grand piano and I live in a box of paints

Hello Dear Reader

We all have our individual psychopathies, and I’m sure I’m not alone among those who perform on stage for a living when I question the insanity of what it is I do and what it is that compels me to do it. I look at doctors or engineers or chefs - even estate agents - and I’m like: yeah, I get why you do that. I get why it might be rewarding, enjoyable even. There is a logical trajectory to it all.

When I was young and hustling to make music my full time career, I held down all manner of temporary jobs, including cleaning and nannying. I enjoyed the cleaning gig, and I’ve never understood why some people look down their noses at cleaners. Sure, some folk live like savages, but for the most part they’re not the people that employ cleaners because they prefer to be left to their savagery. What I enjoyed about cleaning was how one started with something in a less than optimal state and by the end of the activity things got demonstrably better.

Often, I would do my job in solitude. Solitude and amelioration is a very underrated combination, let me tell you. I did not get so nervous that I wanted to throw up on the way to my cleaning gig, either.

I always said that when I stopped getting nervous, I would stop going on stage. I never accounted for the fact that I might get more nervous. There was no plan for that. Nobody said, ‘you will be addicted to doing something that terrifies you, that keeps you awake at night with fear, that makes you a horror to live with in the run-up to anything but that within moments of doing it allows you to feel finally at home in a way you do not in your everyday life.’

I understand now why some performers go on the road and don’t come off it for years. It has a routine all its own - a super mundanity, if you will - and a group of touring musicians and crew weave like a shoal of fish through a vast ocean, following the unstoppable current of the road and never resting long enough in any place to consider staying put, always resisting real life indefinitely. You live for the couple of hours a night where you collectively suspend time; or make it move so quickly that a show goes by in the blink of an eye. All the travel, all the loading-in and setting-up of equipment, all the sound checking and rehearsing: all of it coalesces around a single point in time.

The show must go on.

Which reminds me that the best backstage advice I have ever received came from the unlikely source of James Blunt. When I asked him one evening why, while I was rocking back and forth in the corner with stage fright, he seemed utterly untroubled by going on stage to thousands, he replied coolly, ‘well, it’s not like in my last job where people might actually die, is it?’ This pearl of wisdom was dispensed in Modena. Now whenever I see balsamic vinegar I think of James Blunt and I think I might be the only person in the world foods aisle of Waitrose making this association.

All artists have their own reasons for doing it. Or maybe we all have the same reason but no agreed word for it. No drug matches it, that’s for sure. We are seeking something each time, something more than mere attention or validation. Connection? Communion? In rehearsals a few days before the shows, Matt Ingram - who has resumed drumming duties in the band after an eighteen year hiatus - asked me if I was making another album. I told him, no, I don’t think so. Got nothing to say, at least not in song right now.

‘But you’re a lifer,’ he replied.

I thought about this on the drive home from rehearsal and it sent a shiver down my spine.

If you asked me when I was sixteen what I wanted to do with my life, I would have told you I wanted to rent me a grand piano and put flowers round my room. I would have told you also that I am a lonely painter, I live in a box of paints. My ambition did not extend to anything more than some Joni Mitchell lyrics.

And that is the cruel beauty of adolescence. It is so impossibly pure.

I hear myself telling my teenage son to follow his passions and I still, truly - perhaps naively - believe that all of us are best fitted for certain things. That we all of us have an innate ability we are meant to share with the world and to deny that is not just to deny ourselves, but to deny the world itself its birthright.

But I am always, literally every day, every week, trying to quit music. I dream of the untrammelled life that doesn’t nag me all the time to give it another go, to see if I can rise out of mediocrity and do something extra for once. Am I alone in feeling like Salieri to all my favourites’ Mozarts? Isn’t everybody just Salieri for the most part? Comparison is indeed the thief of joy, but it is also a roadmap to brilliance. Sometimes, though, it is just easier to bury oneself in the dull routine of the everyday - the bliss of the unexamined life and all that - and I had managed to do that for most of this winter.

Whether the audience in Bristol realised it or not, I was in the middle of an out of body experience. My brain was still at home in my studio painting but my body was onstage ninety miles down the road with a guitar in her hand wondering what the fuck she was doing there and that at any moment she was about to get found out once and for all.

Make this stop, make this stop, please MAKE THIS STOP! my brain was saying for the first ten minutes.

Dear God, never let this end!, it was saying for the last ten.

Thank you, again, for letting me and the band and crew do what it is we do whether we know why we do it or not. Thank you for letting us play for you in beautiful venues across (a bit of) the UK. Thank you for letting me eat Haribo and KitKats every day because junk food doesn’t count when you’re on the road and off the booze.

Thank you for queuing up at the end of each show to share your stories and show me the tattoos of my words on your body that humble me over, and over, and over again.

I suppose I shall just have to make another record then.

In the meantime, I have been living in my box of paints. I put up a little clip of me painting on Instagram because I actually felt that I hadn’t posted much this year and it was something to feed the insatiable Gods of Social Media, and ended up with loads of DMs asking if and when they were for sale. The originals are now for sale via a sealed bid auction on my Bigcartel store. Also available on the store are high quality giclée art prints.

If you don’t hear from me beforehand, I look forward to seeing some of you at my shows in Scotland and the North East next month.

Until then, with love as ever,

Nerina xxxx

Photographs from Manchester RNCM courtesy of Didymus Holmes