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The Pogues- “Streams of Whiskey”
“I am going, I am going, any which way the wind may be blowing
I am going, I am going, where streams of whiskey are flowing!”
The end
Well I’ll be off to Bristol tomorrow and the gap year has at last come to an end. I can safely say it’s been the best year of my life, filled with horses, Jews, wasters and Irish music.
While a lot of people travelled to far off continents, I’d like to think this last year has been a expedition into my own mind and I’m glad I kept this blog to map out this journey inwards. After two years of filling my head with biology, chemistry, maths, this year’s been a chance to quench the creative drought and illuminate the right hand side of my brain with song, painting and poetry.
Now that autumn’s rolling in and the summers light has begun to die away, I’m reminiscing about the past 19 years of the journey my family and I took from the villages of Burma to here in England as we sprawled across the globe, hopping from Pontefract to London to Reading. All the face’s that’s come and gone, friends that’s come and gone, friends I intend to hold on to… they’ve all coloured my life to what it is now and for that I’m thankful.
I remember being so distraught when I got rejected from studying medicine but as Mick Jager once said, “You can’t always get what you want, but sometimes you get what you need.”…
There’s an underground network of musicians out there, busking on streets, playing in night clubs, rambling in pubs, painting the canvas of society with song… and I want to join them. The lifeblood of the music circuits which electrify the hearts of towns and cities across the land can be found in the dreams swirling in the heads of people like Declan, Joe, Jared and Johnny. I think all the band members are beginning to awaken to the potential their dreams can take them…
The FMC is amassing an army of local artists, musicians and poets, our EP will be on spotify soon and there is rumoured talks about a Smokey Bastard-Burning Idols-Will Tun and the Wasters tour next summer. I’ve learnt to dream big this gap year and I’ll keep dreaming my life away if I have to, after all Jared says the gap year is just a state of mind. These wandering ways are changing me and I’ve learnt lessons school could have never taught me.
Now that I’m closing the chapter on the gap year chronicles, I’m sure as hell glad I wrote this blog to chronicle it. I’ll always keep these cherished memories close to my heart and I wonder what the future me will think of when he reads it many years down the line? The revolution punk rock promised was a revolution of the mind and I feel my conciousness buzzing more than ever with music… and though this is the end of the gap year, it’s just the beginning of the rest of my life… and as Joe Strummer once said, “The future’s unwritten”.
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Gaslight Anthem- Great Expectations
“Great expectations, we had the greatest expectations.”
29th Sep- Now the gap year is coming to an end and I’ve begun packing these memories of heroes and pioneers into the back of my mind and there’s little else to do now except get another round in at the bar, or in todays case have a drink with members of Smokey Bastard and Johnny at Nagshead! We had a good laugh and I gave them the Wasters new EP as a goodbye present.
Me and Johnny stayed in Reading and since it was Wednesday we thought we’d go to our final Deja Vu open mic night. After a whole year of Mark Barnes songs about skeleton keys and “excuse me mate, got any marrows? I’ve goooot ten marroooows”, today’s Deja Vu was a breath of fresh air with people covering Frank Turners “Reasons not to be an Idiot” and Gaslight Anthems “Great Expectations”, two hugely influential musicians in the past year.
