Just under 10 years ago, my life changed. I can look back on it now, from the vantage point of a 38 year old married man, considering the end of a relationship that's the one (or so) before the one before this one and see it differently. I was sort of a different person back then, and I'm glad to be me now. The point is that the seeds for some of me now were sown back then when I was me then. If you see what I mean.

I hadn't written a song before May 2002.

Well, I had... ish... I seem to recall being in a shed with some friends in the middle of the night working out a song which might only ever exist in the form of a computer. I just Googled it...

Oh good grief. If you were the sort of person who wanted to visit an old Acorn Electron disk site, and then download a BBC Emulator to play the discs, you would actually be able to hear the song. I just did. It's scary. I discovered by looking at the program, that it was written in 1989, when I was probably fifteen, and that my coding has improved a long way since then!

For fact fans, the song was called "Floating Away With The Clouds" and, like some of the other nonsense you can find in my name on there, it was a bit Pet Shop Boys-esque in sound, because that's how all music sounded at the end of the 80's. I was only co-author on the music and not the lyrics. In fact, there's a god-awful instrumental called "Dance of the Ice Cubes" which was also published on there, and I don't recall getting any royalties for its subsequent putting on a disk and spreading around the universe. Given that such royalties might probably more fairly be negative, I don't think I could afford to pay, so I'm glad.

Excepting a few musical forays as I was finding myself in my teenage years, I really hadn't classed myself as a songwriter, yet in the last 10 years, I've written a lot of songs. I put some of it down to my friend Chris, who inspired me to at least have a go, and with whom I've written two musicals (I just threw that in, didn't I) including the self-titled The Musical! that did exactly what it said on the tin, really. That too is also available online, and I'm starting to worry that I'll be immortal at this rate. You shouldn't be able to Google your past so easily, even if you did put some of it up online yourself.

I've been writing comedy songs for the last 9 years and I'm about to embark on another songwriting adventure. I hope to write more about the art of songwriting soon, but for now I'll share one last link. It's my article about things to avoid doing as a musical comedian.