The journey post-remission for a cancer survivor is a really odd one. Firstly, it can take a long, long time to realise just how big the impact on your mental health might be. In my case, about a year after remission, I started to see the cracks, and realise that I had some shit I needed to think about, talk about, and deal with.
And one of the weirdest branches of that mental journey is the one that deals with what happens when you become normal again. When your trauma and pain and potentially truncated existence stop being a topic that everyone wants to talk about, respond to and offer not just kindness but attention to. How does it feel to return to just being you and doing what you do?
As an artist, this takes on a few different layers of impact and meaning. I spent a lot of time during my cancer treatment and the immediate aftermath using music to reflect on what was going on in my world. For a good 18 months, almost everything I released was in some way a reflection on this new view of mortality gifted to me by a diagnosis that at one point told me I might not make it to Christmas 2022. And that music had power, and weight. I promoted very little of it beyond the Bandcamp subscription, but because the locus of the discussion around my health was the subscription, people who cared signed up. They did so for myriad reasons. Many because they wanted to financially support me at a time when work options were limited by chemotherapy and recovery. Some because they also wanted to read the updates and hear the music that was being created. And a much smaller number because the seriousness of my situation had prompted them to investigate my music, or been the catalyst for them becoming aware of me in the first place, and finding a treasure trove of music that they then got to dig into.
So it stands to reason that once the modus operandi had returned to making music about literally anything other than my own mortality, those whose primary motivation was a response to my ill-health took their leave. They maintained ownership of the music, so may also have felt that north of 100 albums by any one artist was enough to be going on with, and the unfolding journey that for me is the main rationale for the existence of the subscription was of less interest.
Which places me in a bit of a conundrum. Having my brand identity transform into ‘that guy who plays ambient music about cancer’ was not a role I wanted to box myself into. It was an incredibly powerful experience to make that music, and a privilege to get to share it with a community who were listening and caring and in no small way making my life financially viable, but making it the only thing that I do would have felt deeply inauthentic. Authenticity is a very difficult commodity to quantify – as I once commented in relation to a conversation about Justin Beiber’s social media support for someone else reaching Christmas Number 1 ahead of him, ‘authenticity is a luxury of the unknown’. Everything that artists do is gestural, semiotic, loaded with multiple meanings, encoded with messages to be decoded by intended audiences and misunderstood by those stumbling on it as Internet flotsam and jetsam. There is good and bad faith, but assuming that everyone can tell the difference is a fools errand.
So I find myself ignoring numbers, interpreting the waxing and waning interest in my work from that wider community of cancer-watching well-wishers in line with my sympathies for their emotional journeys rather than my artistic one. To be making the best music of my life is its own form of reward. The occasional comment from one of the subscription core audience – which has, significantly, come to rest as a larger community than it was pre-cancer, but nowhere near its chemo-peak – pointing out their perception of the work as groundbreaking in a wider context but also autointertexually significant as new additions to this vast catalogue of 25 years of music making, helps me see it in that context.
It reminds me that success is never in a 1:1 relationship with artistic merit, or ones development as an artist, or certainly not the cumulative value of the body of work. Because that’s an incredibly hard thing to communicate in a world where the ‘average watch time’ of a video on Instagram rarely reaches 10 seconds, so telling long form stories about the value of several days worth of music is always going to be for an extremely select audience and the journey from peripheral knowledge of my work to subscriber-contributor is one that often requires multiple levels of exposure to music, to performance video, to narrative context, to music gear exposition, to political framing, to art activist performativity and finally to ‘wow, that’s a very small amount of money for that vast quantity of really rather special music!’
But that social media story telling process is where it is most perilous to be normal, unless being normal is your superpower. For years, my journey was the journey. I expounded on the mundane nature of my practice, I uncloaked all of the equipment and technique and process, making as much of it sharable and usable by others as possible. I set about fulfilling my mission statement of working out ‘how to make music that really matters without pretending that I’m special’. That’s a tough thing to maintain after a tricky cancer diagnosis and the skill of documenting that journey presents you and your words and the music that soundtracks them as anything other than normal. You momentarily become an avatar of hope for the vast number of people who are encountering cancer in their own lives or those of their loved ones daily. You become a beacon, the poet laureate of lymphoma. Writing about my experiences of the illness, of care in the NHS, of recovery, of mortality, was extremely – immeasurably – important for me. I made sure to focus on writing what I needed to write, not what people needed to hear. I knew – and publicly acknowledged – that parts of what I wrote would be really, really difficult reading for those whose cancer journeys were nowhere near so hopeful, for those who following a diagnosis as complex as mine or more, wouldn’t get the ‘best case scenario’ response, but instead found their tumours to be stubborn and unresponsive to treatment. I’ve watched a number of friends die since I went into remission. Friends I was able to help and comfort to varying degrees, but for some my recovery as presented on social media was actually more painful than helpful. So those conversations took a very different direction to the Facebook-as-therapy journey of my own documentation.
But the specialness was inevitable. I’m consistently a fairly good writer and on occasion a great one. And I’ve got two decades of experience at channeling my view of the world into music that soundtracks it. So carrying on doing that wasn’t a business move, it wasn’t a flex, it was just how I’d dealt with everything from the death of my uncle in 2000 onwards. Music that just tried to make sense of it all.
So I have to let go of the big significance of cancer. It’s a media scale story attached to a human scale practice. A Facebook post with 900 comments has an asymmetry that stifles any conversational substance, but the much smaller and more focused conversations that periodically unfold with my subscribers are richer, less public Q&A and more ongoing dialogue with a group of people who demonstrate enduring care not just for my health and ongoing viability as a human, but also, crucially, for the music. Because the music is the social object. It is the music, not cancer, that exists at the heart of the enduring Space of the Talkaboutable, the place where the soundtrack catalyses a conversation. And it is into that conversation that my music is released. Some of it engenders little or no conversation or commentary. Sometimes it seems that’s because it’s impact is personal, and sometimes because it’s impact is negligible. But the freedom to write and record and not apologise or proselytise is a luxury very, very few artists with financially sustainable practices can attest to. And for that I feel immense gratitude.
If you’ve got this far and want to join in with the very normal conversation about some really lovely music, please head over to my Bandcamp subscription to find out more.