The Michael Foot Songbook

Hello Dear Reader

I’ve always wondered about the term ‘gentleman doctor’. It baffled me as a child, it being so close to ‘gentleman caller’. Was it a doctor who took payment from ladies in something other than money? Were they pretend doctors, like those nutritionists who get their qualifications off the internet and are unnaturally obsessed with what your bowels have been up to? It was only as an adult that I learned it wasn’t actually a euphemism for something rude; rather, it was a doctor who didn’t do his job because he needed the money, but who did it for fun because he had pots of the stuff to begin with.

For a long time, I despised the way old school toffs looked down on anybody who had to work for a living, because that meant they were looking down on almost all of us. I have learnt from experience that it’s best not to ask these people what they do, and that half the time, when someone describes themselves as a philanthropist it’s because they are a trust fund kid who needs to justify their position to the tax man and it gives them something to talk about. Not averse to collecting creative types to bring a bit of colour to their lives, one time, I received an invitation from someone acting as a kind of middle man for a bored rich family keen to establish some form of provincial salon by inviting people they didn’t know to gatherings on the basis that they were arty, intellectual sorts. I realised that this was a personal crossroads and that I didn’t want to go to strangers’ soirées or, God forbid, think of myself as arty and intellectual. I’ve no idea what happened to that salon, but I’m not convinced you can do that sort of thing in Shropshire.

Why am I telling you all this? I suppose it’s because I’m trying to work out why I feel so ambivalent about the interface between the creator and their audience. I dislike the interface; the fact that it even exists. The other day, I was listening to a podcast I really like with a well respected interviewer and a young actor. I wanted to like the actor; I enjoy his work, he strikes me as someone grounded. But in the course of the interview, it became obvious that he took not taking himself seriously so very, very seriously that it cancelled out any good intention.

The same day, I happened upon a snippet of Rick Rubin talking about creativity. I’ve really enjoyed his book The Creative Act and it’s been helping me a lot this past year. As in the book, he says in this interview that artists should make work for themselves first and for their audience second, and I think, overall, I agree. Otherwise how can anyone be authentic? Like truly authentic, not the kind of performative authenticity you see on social media. For example, I’ve spent an hour debating whether to cull the second paragraph of this newsletter because I am worried I sound chippy and catty and some of you will like me less. But I can be chippy and catty - and that’s my own bag of neuroses I must work through - but maybe some of you can relate. So if I really mean what I say about authenticity then I have to risk some of you thinking I can be a right old cow, because you would be right. Sorry about that.

Dave Grohl tells this beautiful story about a note he received from Bruce Springsteen (as an aside, I love that these two are penpals). Springsteen said the following: ‘When you look out into the audience, you should see yourself in them, just as they should see themselves in you.’

I’ve been doing this a long time. When I started out, I was shy and scared and spent a lot of time telling jokes on stage because I didn’t feel my music was enough. I was also quite arrogant, for someone who hadn’t really honed their craft at that point. And I also liked the attention; I’d been a very unfortunate looking kid and a bit of a late bloomer. It took me decades before I could forget that time the school photographer took my individual portrait and said to his assistant, in front of me, ‘Jesus mate, it’s Michael Foot if he was a nine year old girl!’ while they pissed themselves laughing. Unfortunately for them, and for me, I may have only been nine but I knew exactly who Michael Foot was.

I don’t know if any of you have been compared to Michael Foot at some point in your life, but I’m pretty certain you can imagine how I felt in that moment. And yet, when someone takes the piss out of the way you look, and you don’t die on the spot but just decide not to look in the mirror too much, it’s a bit of a gift. You place your focus on something else. You decide: you will look at me not for what I look like, but for what I can do.

So, we all handle our hurts in our own ways, and shape ourselves accordingly. But we shape each other too. You - and here I’m talking to you, the reader of this newsletter, who doesn’t consign it to the junk but graces me with your time and attention, the person who may have enjoyed my music and listened to what I have to say - you by your very presence allow another human being to express themselves. You allow them to work through whatever it is they are working through, to  re-build themselves in the process and maybe help you in your own ongoing process of existing. At the risk of going all pseud’s corner on yo’ ass, it’s symbiotic.

Back to the gentleman doctor, though. Maybe it’s my burgeoning ITV3 addiction and an unhealthy fascination with anything Downtown Abbey, but it pains me that as I am not in receipt of a trust fund and my highest charting hit was only a #14, I have to work for a living. It’s not the work I mind - I love the work, the work is my play - it’s that I require monetary exchange in order to keep doing it. It’s all a bit embarrassing. A lot of artists feel like this, I think. Whether it’s guilt, imposter syndrome or an inability to fully inhabit the practical world - some of us just hate thinking about it.

I didn’t used to feel this way, by the way. I’m not gonna pretend I didn’t daydream as a teenager about being rich and famous: of course I did, everybody should at some point in their life; daydreams are how we sketch out the life we really want. But really this is a calling. It is about connection. I will go to places so you don’t have to, and I will be of service.

I don’t know what you call it; I don’t even know that I am an artist anymore because that word is so wanky. I just want to make you things, help you feel things, I guess.

I’m saying all of this because the next few weeks are going to involve me telling you pretty frequently, I’m afraid, about all sorts of lovely things that involve you opening your wallet. I have to tell you about these things because a) I am contractually obliged, b) I am contractually obliged because that it is the way I continue to live and make work, and c) some amazing and talented people have been hard at work making these lovely things come into being. They are also lovely things that a lot of you have been mithering me to make for a few years now.

So yes. You have been warned. I do, however, think you’re going to love a lot of what I will be telling you about.

Perhaps it’s a forthcoming milestone birthday; perhaps it is the sun poking through the clouds after what has been a few years of heaviness; perhaps weaning myself off rolling news and social media is paying dividends - maybe it’s all these things, but I am in the midst of a creative purple patch and it feels good. Half a century on this earth and I’ve never felt so acutely aware that time’s wingèd chariot is hurrying near, and there is so much I’d like to do.

You know what I mean, I’m sure.

Until next time, and with love as ever,

Nerina xxx