I smile in my cuf, part twelve A

MY EARLY HISTORY IN FILK

I thought I could get away without going into this, and I would have done if it hadn't been for you meddling kids. Ah well.

My early history in filk was one of feeling decidedly inferior. I could write words. Sometimes I could write tunes. I'd been doing it for a while by then. Big deal. Suddenly I was among people who could not only write (better) words, not only write (more) tunes, but could sing them, well, to an accompaniment they could play at the same time, on an instrument that did not require either six men to lift it or a socket. I could not do that. At all.

You who casually grab a guitar and pick out an accompaniment in 12/8 on capo four, or tear off a steaming lead solo for the middle eight of the theme from Captain Pugwash, have no idea how that feels. Writing's a solitary business a lot of the time; I disappear and I come back with a song, or maybe two or more if I'm left alone for long enough. I can't perform them, not right then. Maybe never. But I saw people far shyer than I was stand up in front of a crowd and play their own songs, on their own, and sing them. Never mind how tentatively, how shakily. They could do it. I couldn't.

Pianos are sessile objects. If there happens to be one around, and it's not locked and it's in tune and I'm allowed to play it, then yes, I can shine (as long as there isn't a real pianist around like Mich or Chris Conway or someone). If there's a synth and it's plugged in and so on and so forth, I can play something. Nowadays there's much more likely to be one than there was in those far-off days, and I have friends who will play with me, and it's all better...but back then, when I was starting off, it was a salutary corrective to my overinflated ego.

For a while, when I had acquired a decent synth (a Roland U220) and a sequencer (second-hand from Mike Whitaker) and a four-track, I used to make tapes to sing to. I still sequence accompaniments whenever I can get away with it, because I have a bigger palette then, and I can have fun on my own adding bells and whistles. But the best way (in the sense of the most fun, the most stimulating, and the most pleasing to an audience) to play music, as Mike Oldfield rediscovered, is with hands and feet and teeth, or if your hands and feet and teeth won't do it, with other people's (still attached to their bodies, I hasten to add). I'm lucky to have had the experience of being in a band, and I hope to have it for many more years to come.

I learned, as I grew in filk, that filkers are friendly and helpful and encouraging to the neo or otherwise hapless boob, and will go above and beyond to help other people to look good. I learned that (on the whole) people like having their songs filked, as long as it's done well, and will even accompany the filker in a performance of a parody of their song. And I learned that what I could do did have value.

I have flashes of memories of those first few cons; Marion driving me to Newbury for the first one; being walked around rather like a giant redwood by Meg Davis on stage at the second; Bill Sutton's face as I did (I believe) several filks of his and Brenda's songs at Treble, where I was quite undeservedly the British guest. Flashes. I wish I could recapture more from the blur. But I know I felt at home, and I felt loved, and I heard some magical, magnificent music.

When we moved to Wiltshire in 1991 (just after that third con) I knew it would cut me off to a degree from filkdom; we couldn't attend the monthly meetings in the Tun any more, and Singing WiGGLes weren't the regular occurrence they are now, for want of an available venue. But we had to find a place to put down some roots, out of the war zone that London, or at least our part of it, was becoming. I have often thought since then that it was a mistake, and maybe it was; but what happens, happens, and you deal with it.

But because of that, and because of the treacherousness of my memory, I am not the man to talk about the history of British filk in general; for that you would need someone closer to the heart. And since it's been pointed out to me that this whole series of pages is a colossal self-indulgence, I really think I should yield to whomever that someone turns out to be.