Before I proceed, I'd like to open with a video.

This video was taken on Friday 23 January 2026, while my spouse and I were in Christoph Jakob's neck of the woods. One of the nearby small towns has a monthly karaoke night that is hyped up among the locals, and from day one of our visit Chris made sure to let us know that we were going to this. For days I racked my brain thinking about what I was going to sing… then on the night, it hit me.

I could sing Whitney Houston. Specifically, the one song that my schoolmates and I sang every Children's Day when we were in secondary education, when it was celebrated between us as “Everybody's Day.” That song, you know. Greatest Love of All.

And so I did.

The venue was packed that night and the crowds erupted in applause when I hit that initial D5. The praise for my performance was effusive. Notably, many people repeatedly said one thing, in German and in English: “your voice is extraordinary.”

I'd like to talk about that word, “extraordinary.”

For years we were all sold the tale that for someone to be successful in music, they had to be that word, “extraordinary.” Another term for that is that someone is meant to have the “X-factor.”

And to that end, many of us, myself included, were told by our parents, teachers, peers, and even industry figures, that if we didn't make it, we didn't have anything extraordinary. Even the Home Office declared, overtly and otherwise, while I was an asylum seeker, that I had nothing to give to this country. By definition, no skills, nothing “extraordinary.”

In that small town's karaoke night, I was told the opposite for the first time in a long, long while.

See, it's not fact that is believed or taken for truth: it is repetition. We see it in people when conspiracy theories and disinformation are repeated to them on a daily basis by figures small and great who are given a platform. We all can run the risk of believing lies when they are repeated to us and no alternative is presented. We can even believe lies about ourselves.

After I had received this massive effusion of praise, a slew of questions started to run through my head, and they would not leave me. I want to give voice to them now.

These are questions that demand answers, regardless of whether we can answer them.

Do I have the extraordinary to give, yes or no?

If yes, then why the FUCK has my work been slept on for so incredibly long?

I can only imagine that anyone in a similar situation to myself would ask the same questions (as they should). I will go even further, and say that if we can't answer these questions, then maybe we've been lying to ourselves and to each other about “extraordinary.”

This is a tale as old as time, too. I can think of many composers from centuries past whose names we know, who did orchestral versions of popular dance tunes. But they weren't the ones who composed those dances, for all we know. Nor were they the ones who came up with those dances. Gavottes, waltzes, mazurkas, the list goes on. In all likelihood, these dances were dreamed up by peasants whose names we wish we knew. Their names and their extraordinary musicianship, that touched the likes of Bach and Chopin for example, are lost to history. And that is a massive travesty. We have effectively signalled that their contributions are not extraordinary, and that they don't matter (when, in fact, they do).

Today is no different. We don't need to complain about lacking the extraordinary in music when there really are extraordinary musicians all around us. I can name a few, but my list would be woefully inadequate – Christoph Jakob, Psamathes, Fogheart, BLKY, FMA+12Gage, SnugglyBun, all extraordinary in their own various subgenres and niches of music – and I say that my list would be woefully inadequate because I know for a fact that I have only barely scratched the surface with criminally underrated musicians and their individual brand of “extraordinary.”

Music is expression; where singing or stage performance or playing an instrument is involved, music is also athleticism. We push our bodies to the limits to bring forth entire worlds of experience, to communicate with people who need to hear a given emotion or message. And if none of the athletic side of music is involved, we go to some really dark places sometimes to write music. I'd argue that that's fucking extraordinary, and that it's sorely needed in this day and age.

We're at the cusp of recognising entire peoples' musical contributions; we're at the cusp of something better. We're living in a time when the current systems propping us up seem to be failing left and right. Spotify and TikTok, the two platforms used by venues over the last decade to determine whether an artist should ever be played in a venue, have sold their souls for various reasons, the latest being the enablement of ICE and their cruelty through ads, or the provision of users' data to ICE.

Music, as we've seen over the decades, is a reflection of the social situation. Billy Joel did Goodnight Saigon when the Vietnam War was raging. Bruce Springsteen's Streets of Minneapolis, the most recent number 1 hit, touches on the ongoing brutality committed by ICE against the people of Minneapolis. But let's not stop there. Music and social change need not be limited to those whose names we know.

At the end of this we can all emerge better, lamenting that those voices that should have been heard were not, and trying to redress that balance. We can all emerge better, making pipelines for new creatives at any age and at any stage to advance. We can recognise the musicians around us, especially the small ones, and give them whatever leg up we can.

We can recognise that the recognition of talent happens when we return to a stronger sense of inclusive community. Many of the old names we recognise were picked out from everyday community settings: singing in bars, singing in churches, singing in karaoke nights (when, in this day and age, none of these seem to be ways forward for so many musicians). We can reject the brickwalling of smaller musicians and say, enough is enough.

Extraordinary happens now, and in our everyday. 

A lot has happened in the last two weeks, and I've been taking a while to process them all. I think I'll write about them all here in this one post.

Rebellion Festival

First of all, the punk band in which I play drums, Those Fucking Snowflakes, opened Rebellion Festival in Blackpool!

For those of you unaware, Rebellion Festival is the punk festival in Britain. A selection of acts across various stages of their career, from the new and undiscovered to the absolute stalwarts, perform in different stages at the Winter Gardens in Blackpool, and it typically spans four days in the start of August, from a Thursday to a Sunday. (Just before that, you have Rebellion Fringe, where various venues across Blackpool host punk bands and people party through the night.)

This was us when we were done with our set. We were on a high of emotions and we felt this was our best gig yet.

As we were the opening band altogether and we were playing on the Introducing Stage at the Pavilion, we were surrounded by merch shops on the outer perimeter. We were expecting to have numbers not far different to what we were used to playing to by this point. What we weren't expecting was a 200-, 300-strong crowd and people from outside looking in. This was our biggest audience yet.

The audience was wonderful. Some were singing our lyrics, people who previously weren't familiar with us even. Some were dancing. The atmosphere was very electric. The crew – the crew were absolutely wonderful. The help they gave us was invaluable, and a number of them rooted for us individually and as a band. They kept a well-oiled machine from start to finish, with so many bands performing and so many moving parts to worry about, and they gave us a great sound. I have nothing but massive respect for them and just how tight they were.

The food was great, too. We had a selection of vegan meals: nachos, butter “chicken,” a burrito whose fillings I don't remember… I don't even remember the full extent of the menu but I went for the burrito. There was also a cake on the side, with the lightest whipped cream I'd ever tasted. Once we'd eaten and hauled gear away, we could enjoy the rest of the festival, hopping from stage to stage to enjoy the music of a good few other bands.

I can only speak for myself in these situations; I will cherish this experience forever.

Inkfinity Festival / SATUR-8

For the last several months, a bunch of us creatives banded together to make a modded Splatfest (for the uninitiated: a Splatfest is an event in the Splatoon games, typically structured like a festival with lights, in-game music performances, two straight days of matches, where people get into teams and battle each other.) We called it Inkfinity Fest.

This team had the likes of Caitlin Koi, riji monogatari, tacoyaki, other people who knew what they were doing – 3D modellers like LegendofLonk Studios and Nami so 95, scriptwriters and lyricists like Sally Strings, modders who knew the battle mechanics like Alessio798, composers and arrangers like Lumiflag and Xion … and two meeps, Christoph Jakob and myself. I don't think I've cited everyone in this team – it's an extensive team, to be sure.

Christoph mixed a few tracks, notably our crown jewel, Three Wishes, which is due to release on 13 September.

As for me, I composed a number of the SATUR-8 songs, first drafting them on piano. I'll provide the current strongest example, a battle track called Deepsea Rainbow Trihards, which is based on three songs from Caitlin's, riji's, and tacoyaki's bands – Rainbow Rumble, Deepsea Graffiti, and Triumphant Trihards.

The whole thing includes all the team shouts – ordinarily, if a particular team is winning and there is only one minute left to go, their specific fragment plays at the end of the battle in-game. For illustration purposes, here is Trench's:

The themes were all arranged by Xion, but to demonstrate how they began, below is the behind-the-scenes video that shows the piano sketch that began it all. All themes that I composed for Inkfinity Fest follow this process: I open FL Studio, make sure the piano is connected, and then chordbash until I'm happy with what I hear, then I send the MIDI over to either Xion or Lumiflag for arrangement.

The above video premiered last night to a small audience – my YouTube channel has been small for a long time – but Caitlin hopped on, which made my day, and riji watched it soon after the premiere had ended.

Footage for Inkfinity Fest is hard to come by, especially footage featuring SATUR-8 songs specifically, as the songs are typically played randomly. However, if you want a taste of what Inkfinity Fest looked like, a stream or two of it exists.

My sincere hope, from all of this, is that everyone in this team gets hired for games industry work. There are a good few people who specialise in narrative here and they've all but smashed it. Christoph's mixing takes several leaves from the bands he loves, notably Red Hot Chili Peppers and Bear's Den. Lumiflag and Xion are powerhouse arrangers. Lonk and Nami so do wonderful 3D work, and they, riji, and Caitlin have done excellent work compositing their videos. WiglahWoo has a sexy voice (they are Mito from Trench). Caitlin, riji, tacoyaki, and Sally Strings are great wordsmiths. tacoyaki is a great organiser, for the project wouldn't have come together or the ship wouldn't have been nearly as tight without them. I am the least of these, but I daresay I composed and I composed and I composed.

Games industry people? If you're reading, you've got a pool of people here to hire!

A renewed vigour for solo stuff and Two Meeps

Things are cooking in the background. Watch this space!

We've come to part 2 of this series of posts and today, I'm going to be talking about my experiences as a person on the ground in the music industry.

The sorry state of live music

Several weeks ago(? I don't even remember how long ago now) I attended the very first Lancashire Music Summit in my city of Preston. It was held in the former music venue 53 Degrees, itself a testament to how forlorn and bleak it is for music and musicians. A quick Google Search of “53 Degrees” still lists the venue as a music venue, but there hasn't been a gig in there for a good few years. So forlorn was it that the sound system for the day actually had to be rented; the sound system that previously existed there was completely gutted, and it was just not cost effective to have one permanently installed.

The second major roundtable of the Lancs Music Summit described why rather succinctly. The spending power of the everyperson had been decreasing sharply due to the rising cost of living, Covid exacerbating matters, and people not being paid just wages for their work. How would this translate to people going out? Even in pub gigs, the price of a pint averages £6. I remember many of my friends telling me that when the lockdowns happened, they found out how much cheaper it was to order in cans and drink at home, rather than drink socially. Pub attendance sharply decreased. Venues closed left and right in Preston (and elsewhere). The whole ecosystem is based on people being able to spend and socialise, and if people are disempowered from doing precisely that, well, what are we even doing here anymore?

And as for the price of a ticket for a live gig, it's dire. There were people from Skiddle who were present to talk about this. Say someone charges £10 per ticket for a live show. Most of that £10 goes to pay the cost of overheads, any sound system hire, instrument hire, venue costs, any middlemen involved in the entire equation, and then FINALLY the musicians and performers. Paraphrasing what I'd heard said in that summit, we'd be lucky if we earned a few pence out of that £10 ticket.

And that's not even getting into the subject of venues not offering a way forward. The current ecosystem demands that a band cover the cost of their gig with merch sales – merch that they may very well not be able to provide for themselves, merch that people may not be willing to spend money on if they are tightening their purse strings. There is no “play a few gigs here and we'll see if we can't let you support another more established band in the months to come.” Good luck ever getting a way forward if you're a person on the ground in a provincial place.

This is exacerbated by venues' reliance on numbers on platforms like Spotify and TikTok, which is a good time for me to segue into the next section:

Venues' overreliance on Spotify and TikTok

I am writing this at the start of December 2024. It is usually the season of Spotify Wrapped, where people post their listening stats and the amount of listeners they've had. However, I've noticed an increasing disenchantment towards Spotify Wrapped.

It totally has nothing to do with Spotify's layoffs and the absolute turmoil it caused, or the fact that Spotify's CEO Daniel Ek has posted record profits far outstripping Taylor Swift's and Drake's despite the hardship he has caused many former employees and many musicians on the ground. Nope, nothing at all.

It used to be that many people were taken in by streaming as a convenient way to listen to lots of different kinds of music without actually being able to purchase the CDs. In some cases, it was a great way to listen to indies whose physical media might not be available at all, let alone in a different country. But every signup and every bit of ad revenue has gone into enriching the pockets of the person at the top, and not the artists who are reliant on it for even the hope of discoverability. Artists with less than 1,000 listens don't earn a penny from streaming at all, either, and an artist trying to get off the ground is going to suffer – not just online, but offline too, when venues look solely at the numbers of listens to determine how they can treat this artist.

TikTok is like this too. In the past decade and a half there has been much focus on content going viral, and while it does sometimes come as a pleasant surprise to the person who made that content, it is about as probable as someone on the ground ever becoming a billionaire. When these are the stats we're dealing with, then we've gotta present venues with the hard truth: they've made advancement in music performance only accessible to 1%.

However we try to skew that, that's never a good look.

Levelling the playing field

On Friday 6 December 2024 I went to Factory International (Aviva Studios) in Manchester to see an Untold Orchestra production, titled “Movement.”

It was a stellar show if ever I'd seen one, putting previous concerts I'd been in to shame. Full of Black creative talent and songs about identity, historical injustice, and generational trauma, it was a concert full of heart. The venue was packed out. It was a sight to behold.

You see, Factory International is one of a select few music venues and creative spaces in the country that actively looks to feature talent from marginalised backgrounds. Many of these are in bigger cities. Many of us can't exactly travel there. For me, a Prestonian, it is a 45-minute-long drive on a good day; I typically expect the journey to be longer than that, and that is if I can make it. Smaller cities need these spaces.

I went to the summit at the start of WOMEX some weeks ago and there were many younger musicians who expressed similar concerns.

See, for us to level the playing field, we need a culture shift. Music, for the longest time, has been a field mired in individualism, in the belief that success is individual and therefore cutthroat competition needs to exist in order for some people to progress at the expense of others. Venues small and great, labels, record stores, media all promoted this. Sure, there were some places where records of all kinds could be bought and people could discover music of any kind. There was even an elder figure at the Lancashire Music Summit who tried to dismiss people on the ground as (and I'm paraphrasing) “having no passion” when they couldn't even see their own survivorship bias: “I made it, why couldn't you?”

But as the young people at WOMEX said: “support, not competition, is how this industry thrives.” They were aware that the reasons for people not “making it” are diverse, and a lot of them boil down to prejudice and a lack of connections, connections that may be harder to make due to poverty, the need to work several jobs, other commitments, and intersectionality.

And building the kind of city, or even country, where the general public's relationship with music is that of an active listener base rather than a transactional relationship, is not an overnight effort. It's one that feasibly takes decades.

Where I factor in all of this

Right now, I have some connections because I take up space in multiple circles: punk, folk, rock, and indie. My being a drummer means that I am inevitably part of several bands, as drummers are not very common.

It's hard to say where the future will take me, but at present, I am one of many whose songs get lost in the aether. It's said that there are something like 100,000 songs released per day?

To escape this current situation and have better stats means that I'll be luckier than a lot of people, whose songs continue to get lost in the aether. That already is a situation I can't bear. I want all this talk about levelling the playing field to mean something. Whether it's a chorus club where we gather an attentive listener base for indie musicians in our area while they perform and explain the background behind their songs, or a venue that says “fuck the social and streaming stats, let's advance them for their music,” these sorts of efforts matter and would mean a lot not just to me, but to a lot of other people as well. We'd be all the richer for it.

I have long volunteered at, and am currently part of the board of, Soundskills, a creative charity in Preston that caters to musicians (among others). Some time back I spoke with Chris Davis, Soundskills' founder, who remarked that mental health among musicians was quite abysmal. I told him straight up that a lot of this is due to lack of opportunity, and if we are to boost musicians' mental health, we need to not just do sociables to talk about things. We need actual ways forward for them. We need venues in Preston to know that these people are ready to take on their stages, as headliners, with their own brand of musicianship. We need to tell people that there is a burgeoning scene happening right under their noses. I told him about what I had heard in the Lancashire Music Summit and at WOMEX, and he took all of it on board.

Soundskills has recently remodelled its building and is now a green space, and is due to soft-relaunch in the middle of this month, and hard-relaunch in January. I can only presume that then, we would start to look at hosting events again. It falls to places like ours, places like this across the country, to absolutely shake things up, to remind people that the talent that the country is looking for is right fucking here.

WARNING: Due to the name of one of my bands, censors will not be applied. Read at your own discretion.

So, a lot has happened for me this last weekend. I got my (new) website up and running, had a bunch of rehearsals with three different bands, and played Hockley Hustle in Nottingham for the first time with the lefty punk band I'm a part of, Those Fucking Snowflakes. I even mentioned it on my Live page.

The band's legacy predates me, with early support from Tom Robinson of BBC 6music from when their debut song, Stop Being Dickheads To Each Other, was released in early October of 2019. I chanced upon them in a Facebook group for musicians in Northwest England in February of this year (2024), when a post had been put out by the band seeking a drummer. I made the cut, and my drumming improved by leaps and bounds since I became part of their number. No recordings with me exist yet, but this'll soon be rectified with a studio day in November. We have, however, played at least five times together, and Hockley Hustle in Nottingham was our most recent.

I wish I could show you how we were playing that day, but setting up was an organisational nightmare for all involved. That said, everyone, from the stage manager to the sound engineer to the band all pulled it off with a great deal of aplomb. The sound was fantastic. The atmosphere was simply electrifying, on and off stage. The audience were singing along with us to one of our newer, soon-to-be-released songs, No Sky for Rishi. Billy Bootleggers, the venue where we played on Sunday, had such a small stage that there was no room for anyone to put up a tripod with a camera to film us.

But who knows? Perhaps there's merit in our performance being the stuff of spoken legend /j

All I can say is, in the world of live music I'm a “baby performer," but this baby has played her first music festival, and it was a great one.