My Oldest Friend.

The oldest friend I still know intimately is my guitar. Not the same one but a procession like a long multiple train journey, nine of which I still have. They follow my sixty-year procession through skiffle, classical and jazz, through gentle and more recently upbeat. But this is about how rather than what. I wasn’t a natural performer, not your born front man, I didn’t know that connection. Like many introvert folk singers I hid somewhere between the song and the audience not really connecting with either. It was a quite lonely place with only myself for company, up there exposed yet hidden in some protective cloak of invisibility. I got a clap and that helped but I knew it was a consolation prize. Slowly through mastering the technicals I found space to play the song, to let it flow through without obstruction. But churning covers out to order wasn’t enough. I found songs I wanted to connect to and began affairs with them. I began to build the confidence to be their lover, to build a mutuality, to sing them in the moment as lovers do. That connection was made. Then the greater challenge, to be exposed; to perform this love making in public. Performance and acting are often mistaken to be forms of duplicity. Some are but true performance is real. Only true feeling will illicit true feeling. Through clowning I began to venture into the innocence of the moment that connects us all. There are countless elsewheres to get lost in but only one moment that we are all in together, this one. That’s the power of it. So finally I’m beginning to glimpse a way of being, a way of showing heart through music. It’s taken a long time and is easier for some but this has been my process. I suspect Robert Downey Junior knows it well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1crxmBTxRlM