From ‘You’re Doing It Wrong — My Life As A Failed International Rock Star (In The Best Band You’ve Never Heard)
I saw myself reflected in the lenses of her thick glasses. My twelve-year old gawky and wiry body, uncomfortably writhing as a mirror image. I was desperate to say it. I knew I shouldn’t say it. But I had to say it. Please don’t say it.
I said it.
“Listen,” I said, my reflection judging me, “If you ever want to know about dinosaurs, I’m your guy.”
I shouldn’t have said it.
Her eyes scrunched behind her glasses, causing my reflection to warp, my face now elongated and more peculiar than adolescence had already rendered it.
“What?” she said, with a hint of venom in the discharge.
I unfurled my sinewy arm down to my school bag, which was resting between my legs on the floor, and reached in to pull out a folder: an A4 binder with a drawing of a brontosaurus on the front. Reams of scribbled, ripped, and crumbled paper bled from its insides back into the bag.
“I’ve got my dossier,” I said.
Immediately, I heard the words bounce back into my ears and I retreated into myself as she turned her head away and ignored it completely.
I shrunk deeper into my plastic school chair, into my shirt, the knot of my Catholic school striped tie now entering my mouth as if to gag me from saying anything further. I simply no longer existed in human form, my name was changed on the school register from Michael to Mortified.
I peered over my starchy shirt collar at the object of my ill-advised affections, Leanne, as she slowly swivelled her brown bob back towards the front of the class. Not mocking me, not drawing attention to the weird thing I just said, but in complete dismissive silence. Ignoring it entirely. Wishing it away, pressing delete on the moment, sending it to the recycle bin. And my burning cheeks were not just embarrassment, but jealousy that I’d never be able to wash clean my brain from this encounter. On the edge of sleep for the next twenty years, the moment would simply manifest in my mind, replaying over and over, amplifying the beaming, crippling embarrassment that would sometimes cause an audible and unstoppable groan of cringe, exhaling from my body forcibly, before slowly fading away until the next terrible night.
I don’t know how the conversation, if you could call it that, had even broached the topic of dinosaurs, but in a wildly unfocused attempt to insert myself and simply be seen by her, I’d brought up this fucking thing. My Jurassic Park Dossier.
I looked down in agonising shame as I tentatively lowered it back into my bag where it must and should remain forever.
Shame got me into everything. Shame was my primary driver. Shame got me into music, and my life as a failed international rock star. Shame was consistently more a motivator to me than anything else. A self-flagellating sense of shame that I shouldn’t like the things I liked, and that under no circumstances should other people be aware of the real me.
I won’t tell you I always wanted to be a musician, because I didn’t. It would make a convenient narrative theme, and have a more satisfying resolution, if I were to instil this story with a triumphant arch, that I had always dreamt of being a musician, and then it came true. But being a musician simply wasn’t a childhood dream that came true. It was an unlikely, and seemingly unattainable ambition that grew on me like the hair on previously barren parts of skin as I moved through adolescence. But when I was young, what I really wanted to be was a police officer.
I had absolutely no interest in actually upholding the law, probably the primary aspect of being a police officer. And even less the older I got. I thought that training to be a police officer would be like the ‘Police Academy’ movie series, which my maw had recorded off the telly for me thinking that it was a harmless comedic farce, rather than the hyper-sexualised and questionable caricature-laden mess it was. But I thought maybe police work would be like that, a series of pranks among mismatched characters, thrown together in unusual circumstances, often at odds with each other and the world, finding themselves underestimated while undermining their own success until they prevailed and proved everyone wrong.
I never went on to be a police officer, thank fuck. That dream quickly faded. But, I did start a band, getting pretty much the same thing by mistake. And just like the police, most people hated us and the fun stopped whenever we turned up.
I was always interested in music though, I was surrounded by it, echoing through the air in the east end of Glasgow, from passing cars, from the distant shows, from the roaring chants of the nearby Celtic Park at Parkhead, and the tense flutes and ominous bass drum from the frequent and incendiary Orange Walks down Alexandra Parade and Duke Street.
Music was always on the telly, it was always on the radio, it was always on my da’s record player, dustily skipping and jumping through his ancient vinyl collection. My brother had a distinctly dark-tinged collection of music like The Cure and The Jesus and Mary Chain, and my sister would spend hours in the kitchen making me sing ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ by The Special AKA into a tiny tape recorder.
But I never really thought about doing music. Nobody I knew did music, other than my da angrily strumming an acoustic guitar in the living room, or our neighbour Joe who had an old banjo with one string and would frenziedly hammer at it while yelping notes indiscriminately.
Nobody around us did music seriously, not like the way people on ‘Top of the Pops’ did music. Music wasn’t for us to do, just to consume. We were from the povvy-stricken outskirts. We grew up, we worked, we bred, and we died.
Of all creative pursuits that seemed feasible for someone born into the top flat of a Dennistoun tenement, what I thought I wanted to do was write, because that’s what my brother did. I’d hear him tapping away at an old typewriter constantly, so writing seemed like the easiest creative avenue for me. And it was something I could do, which might be a bold statement to make near the start of a story you may never finish reading. But, I could string a sentence together, I could make it relatively interesting.
I would write hundreds of wee stories in pencil and crayon while kneeling on the jagged carpet of our living room floor, then bring them into school where the teachers would applaud my efforts, and place the stories in the class library so that my peers could read them. It immediately made me uncomfortable, because I wasn’t sure I wanted anyone else to see them. And then as soon the rest of my class registered the arrogance of these stories being made available, I’d find remnants of them strewn across the playground, crushed by feet and footballs. And, to be honest, it was what they deserved after being presented to them by such a precocious little fuck like myself. I quickly realised, though, it was better not to be celebrated, and not to be noticed.
By the time Steven Spielberg’s ‘Jurassic Park’ was a hit in the 90s, telling the story of a dinosaur theme park gone horrifically awry, I was already so lost in my own literary fantasy world that I created something that became known as my ‘dossier’. This was a huge folder, decorated in dinosaur stickers and ‘Jurassic Park’ photos I’d cut out of newspapers and magazines. Inside, I’d constructed a completely fabricated and imaginary file of details, findings, and letters that documented an imaginary job I’d created for myself in which I was an admin assistant at Jurassic Park.
Not a dinosaur handler, not a Tyrannosaurus Rex paddock security guard, not some science-bending analyst extracting DNA from preserved mosquitos. From all the fantastical roles I could pluck from my imagination, I chose admin.
Admin.
There were hundreds of pages of administrative notes, employee files, data sheets, and breakdowns of completely made up hardware and software. In short, I assigned myself a fictional, dull office job at ‘Jurassic Park’.
But worse still, I roped a couple of my real life friends into this delusion, employing them within my mind as scientists and gamekeepers, and we’d write physical letters to each other detailing tasks and mundane box-ticking that needed daily completion to ensure the park could operate. I’d genuinely harangue them if they didn’t follow up in time by writing them stern letters that I’d post to them in real life. And I had the weird audacity to back up this bullying by fabricating letters in different handwriting that I implied were from an imaginary boss. This, in turn, let me off the hook since the requests were obviously coming from above, and the company needed those documents stat, not me. I was simply the messenger.
My job doing admin also seemingly extended to computer programming and marketing, which included a five-page detailed description of a hot air balloon ride, sponsored by Trebor Extra Strong Mints, and illustrated by a yellow deflated balloon which I’d drawn on with felt tip pen before gluing to the page.
The dossier was a ridiculously detailed project that painstakingly probed the minutiae of admin work at a theme park that never existed. While it may have overwhelmingly illustrated the extent of my lonely fantasy world as a child, it also proved that I could finish a story. The dossier ended with correspondence between myself and ‘my boss’ (me with different handwriting), both of whom didn’t really exist, dated the day before the dinosaur-laden theme park opened its doors. We were both filled with excitement about showcasing the work we’d been doing. This being the last entry into the dossier implied that both of us had died when the park security was sabotaged and the dinosaurs ran amok. Very tragic. RIP to me and my friends.
So, truly, I was set to make writing a lot of shit and making up wee stories something I did forever until something else happened: shame.
As a kid, I’d always enjoyed playing with action figures. These were basically dolls that a marketing team would imbue with a sense of grotesquely gendered machismo to ensure boys and their dads wouldn’t feel pathetically emasculated by playing with them. I would create dramatic wee scenarios, acting them out like a movie. Traditionally, we’d put our Christmas decorations up on 1st December every year, and my maw would painstakingly pull down the same plastic Christmas tree from the loft. That night, we’d sit for hours humming Christmas tunes and placing the baubles and tinsel and lights on the withering pliable limbs that would grow thinner every year. When decorating was over and the tree was suitably sparkling, I’d excitedly dig out my collection of action figures and play with them in the tree, creating storylines in which they’d have to climb from the bottom to the top as if it was part of some dangerous military exercise that would inevitably go wrong, causing their tiny plastic bodies to plummet from the branches. It was truly cinematic stuff.
And that was part of the Christmas tradition of it all; I’d look forward to it. But it curses my heart to recall the time I simply couldn’t do it anymore. Nobody told me I shouldn’t or I couldn’t but, when the tree was up, glowing in the corner as a festive beacon, and I had my action figures lined up ready to go, I just paused. I was filled, overwhelmingly, with a sense of shame and stupidity. I looked at those little army guys with their half-bitten arms and legs, scarred from years of falling from Christmas trees, and felt too old. What would people at school think if they saw this? What would my da think if he caught me? I slowly and quietly packed them away into an old school bag, and never played with them again. As far as I know, they’re still in there, rotting away in the loft through shame.
Adolescence had arrived. I started noticing girls. I started noticing myself in the mirror. I started noticing I wasn’t very cool. I started noticing that things I thought were cool were unattainable to me. I knew that I couldn’t be invested in these childhood delusions anymore. I knew that the person I was wasn’t the person I wanted to be. And then I suddenly heard music. Music I’d been hearing throughout my life was unexpectedly injected with a sense of urgent poignancy.
Immediately, all of my da’s 60s records that existed as faded ornaments became treasure. I was never permitted to touch them, but when he’d go out, I’d blow away the years from the vinyl and listen to Roy Orbison, Beatles, Elvis, Buddy Holly, The Everly Brothers, The Who, The Shadows. His taste was essentially old-fashioned, even for then, and though I’d heard all of these records countless times before, now I was listening.
And from then on, it was the limitless mix of old and new. It was Nirvana, it was Garbage, it was the NME every week; it was the spray-paint and Sartre frenzy of Manic Street Preachers, the gender non-conformity of Placebo and Rachel Stamp. It was ‘Top of the Pops’, it was ‘The Chart Show’, it was ‘The Word’, it was ‘CD:UK’, it was re-runs of ‘The Old Grey Whistle Test’ and ‘Ready Steady Go’. It was 80s new wave punk, it was Devo, it was Adam & The Ants, Ramones, Rezillos. It was Asian Dub Foundation, Ash, The Undertones, Bad Brains, The Prodigy, Joy Division, Brainiac, Skids, Pixies, A Flock of Seagulls. It was the good stalwarts of Britpop like Sleeper and Pulp and Elastica. It was At The Drive-In throwing a chair into the rafters on Jools Holland. It was Dexy’s Midnight Runners playing in front of the projected image of Kirkcaldy darts legend Jocky Wilson. It was the Windows 95 nerd rock of Weezer, Nada Surf and Nerf Herder, the lo-fi garage finesse of The Sonics, the lo-fi garage chaos of The Mummies and The Gories alongside the straight-edge hardcore punk of early AFI and Descendents. It was anything on the ‘Tony Hawk Pro Skater’ soundtrack. It was the breakthrough bands, some of whom came from my own town, like Bis, Urusei Yatsura, and The Yummy Fur, or from nearby, like Idlewild. It was the uncomfortable cultural equality of bands like Slipknot sitting on the same ‘TRL’ couch as Destiny’s Child. It was the aurally exhausting explosions of Atari Teenage Riot, and the down-tuned bleakness of Korn, the politically-charged confrontation of Public Enemy, and the wired speed of anything over 120 BPM. An entire world opened up for me, and all of it was written in biro on my school bag.
Music became a rush. I wasn’t sure who else felt it, but when a song clicked for me, new or old, it was like someone injecting sugar into my veins. I could feel it in me, I could see it in me, like the lights on the Christmas tree turning on after hours of assembly. When notes hit together in unexpected and expected ways, it would unlock some cerebral code that triggered serotonin, making sense in my confused adolescent brain. I wasn’t keen on slow songs, I wasn’t keen on anything particularly introspective. It was all about speed, excitement, confrontation, volume, unpredictability, and chaos. Basically, everything I wasn’t. So, naturally, I felt like I had to be part of it.
But I had no idea how to do that. I didn’t have a band. I didn’t know any bands. My only friends were imaginary scientists and gamekeepers who hated me because I kept harassing them to do work for a theme park that didn’t exist. Instead, I would just pretend to be in a band. I would grab an old tennis racquet and hold it like a guitar, just like the way fucking idiots would do it in films. I was/am that fucking idiot. They based that character on me.
It wasn’t until I caught myself in the mirror, holding a tennis racquet, playing along to ‘Lava’ by Silver Sun that I felt embarrassed. The same way I’d felt embarrassed playing with those toys in the Christmas tree. The same wave of shame that made me slip the Jurassic Park Dossier back into my bag rather than unveil the positively delusional world I’d built for myself. Like part of my childhood just died, it was time to stop playing tennis in the mirror, and pick up a real guitar. Time to let shame move me on again.
Years later, as my band We Are The Physics were riding high-ish, our name on the cover of the NME, the magazine I’d religiously devoured growing up, we played a packed club night in Glasgow.
As I flounced around the stage, swinging my bass, yelping and showboating with that pretend confidence I used to mask how I actually felt, and buzzing off the crowd’s reactions, I stopped. At the front, leaning against the barrier, I saw her.
She’d barely changed.
Leanne.
From school.
When our glasses met each other’s, I felt twelve years old again. An unexpected embarrassment gripped me, and that shame I’d felt back in school tapped me on the shoulder. But there she was, at the front, peering up at the stage, right at me. She finally saw me.
After our set finished, I lurched out to the venue floor trying to be both fast and nonchalant simultaneously. The room was packed with drunk students, pressed together less with sticky intimacy and more necessity. My eyes flitted around like a budgie, trying to spot her among them. I thought I’d lost her.
But in the corner of the room, I recognised her hair, basically unchanged since school, hanging in a short brown bob. I exhaled as much shame from my body as existentially possible, before adopting an unusually purposeful stride. As I approached, chest puffed, head back, I saw her turn to look at me, so instinctively I threw my glance to the side and laughed as if someone nearby had told me a joke. The problem being everyone was so tightly pressed together, facing in the opposite direction, it just looked like I was sharing laughs with the rears of other people’s shirts.
When I turned back to Leanne, her eyes were still on me, so I started to smile and raise my eyebrows as if ‘oh my god, what a surprise, I didn’t even see you there’. When I opened my mouth to administer those ugly lies, she turned away casually to her friends, so I was now destined to speak to the back of her head, by this point on an unstoppable and meteoric approach.
I slammed the breaks, lowered my hand, and gently tapped her shoulder.
Her swinging bob turned first, then her head, eyes devoid of recognition, amplified by the thickness of her glasses.
“Leanne?” I said.
“What?” she shot back, with the same venom-tinted spike as all those years ago.
Oh God. Did it look like I was one of those entitled guys, drifting about in nightclubs, demanding the attention of women? Was that essentially what I was, but doing it over the course of years rather than one night? Before I could respond, her finger drummed her ear, indicating that the music booming from the nearby PA was too loud.
“Leanne,” I said, with a little less gusto, but my mouth closer to her lugs, “It’s… Leanne isn’t it?”
She nodded, and shouted “Yeah,” and there was a brief moment of nothing between us that lasted forever, before she said, “You Paula’s pal?”
Paula? Who’s Paula?
“I’m… it’s me,” I said, and pointed to the stage behind her.
Her eyes followed my finger, and then back to my glasses, with absolutely no recognition.
“Who?” she said.
“I’m… I’m Michael,” I said, “I was in the band. I’m not just a sweaty guy.”
She looked down at the cloud of wet patches on my shirt that I imagine she hadn’t noticed until I usefully pointed them out.
“It’s… It’s from the stage, I’m not just sweating, this is official sweat. Not like actual sweat, but sweat because I was sweating, not because I’m sweaty.”
But I was starting to secrete additional sweat regardless of the fact I’d been on stage.
She then nodded, the bob joining her in polite acquiesce, but both seemed to not remember there had even been a band on the stage at all.
“We went to school together?” I offered, trying to smile, but realising I was doing so completely with my teeth and not my mouth. Nothing. No inkling of recollection.
“In Cumbernauld?” I said.
She nodded at that. She remembered Cumbernauld existed. Of course she did, Cumbernauld left a scar.
“I was in your class for six years?” I said, “My name’s Michael. Big glasses, bad hair.”
I looked exactly the same.
She went, “Ohh!” politely feigning recognition, but it was like watching a computer reboot, “I don’t know if I…”
“You probably don’t remember me,” I interjected, laughing, “I’m not very memorable.”
I could see her brain working behind her eyes, desperately scouring years of files trying to yank out breadcrumbs she could follow. Oh Christ, this was going on too long — I had to stop this, I was basically just accosting a stranger.
Quick, say something nice.
“You always had really good style!” I said, “A really cool black school bag.”
This was a fucking nightmare. I was floundering, embarrassed and terrified that I was basically now just a sweaty guy far too close to her, getting sweatier, and casually listing items from her past like I’d been surveilling her.
I shouldn’t say it.
Please don’t say it.
I said it.
“I once said if you wanted to know about dinosaurs,” my mouth so close to her ear, I could feel the words dropping off my lips into her aural cavity, “I was your guy.”
I was your guy.
I was your guy.
Dinosaurs.
Cool school bag.
Our Lady strike me down, just lightning bolt through the roof and reduce me to the puddle of useless ooze my brain already was.
Quietly frustrated, she looked back and nodded, but then a band came on the stage behind her and she turned away. No idea who I was. Not a clue. My whole life was guided by that shame I’d felt, and she had absolutely no recollection of it.
Leanne hadn’t made me feel ashamed about the dossier. She hadn’t ever even acknowledged the dossier, like she wasn’t acknowledging me again. The shame I’d felt had come from within, the assumption of shame, the knowledge that I felt slightly out of place in a world where shame wasn’t projected on to me, but burned up from within like indigestion. I’d hung on to that shame, I’d used it as a motivator, I’d let it guide all my decisions, that shame of being me, and the shame of being exposed for trying not to be me.
Why did I feel ashamed about my Jurassic Park Dossier? Based on what critique? I’d kept it relatively quiet, only me and some of my poor, roped-in school friends knew it existed. Each of us knew that if it got out, we’d be socially crucified for living this role-played existence. But Leanne hadn’t crucified us. And the shame had come from the assumption she would. It literally didn’t matter to Leanne, it didn’t even register. I’d based my entire motivation on the fact I was ashamed of myself.
And there was a sincere beauty in that. I couldn’t stop laughing afterwards.
Years later, I found the Jurassic Park Dossier stuffed at the bottom of a huge box of other shameful artefacts from my childhood. I flicked through the A4 binder and, in retrospect, instead of finding shame, I found a kind of endearing time capsule of a world before the internet in which kids could have these creative little secrets that weren’t for validation, they were simply to scratch a creative itch, an urge to do.
In it I saw that unique weirdness reserved for childhood, the one that erodes and dies when puberty hits and can never be rekindled, not really. So, I digitally scanned the dossier, and shared it online. The internet responded to it, not overwhelmingly positively, but more with a kind of heartfelt kinship. It resonated with people rather than repelled them. They saw themselves in these hundreds of pages of detailed maps and drawings and DNA charts that I’d just made up out of nowhere. They saw their own obsessive and innocent reflections in those pages like I’d saw myself in Leanne’s glasses. And maybe they saw that shame they’d felt doing similar projects, a shame that nobody else imposed on them but themselves, because they felt weird for what they enjoyed. Projects that meant nothing to anyone except themselves, because we lived in an era that didn’t require external validation in the same way it perhaps does now.
Either way, my Jurassic Park Dossier went viral.
Through a friend of a friend, I eventually found out that Leanne had shared it on social media. With no recollection that I’d ever tried to show her it. No recollection I brought it up to her in a night club years later. No recollection I even existed.
I fucking love that.
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