Greetings, mes amis.
If you’re joining the Ornaments shelf for the first time, welcome. If you were here already, I’m sorry to have kept you waiting.
The last few weeks have been a sharp lesson in my ability to hold true to commitments when something new and overwhelming arrives on the scene - namely taking my show to VAULT festival in London. This involuntary putting-everything-on-pause compulsion is something I want to write about in more detail when I’ve had more time to process - but it also means it’s almost a month (!) since I wrote you all a proper letter. A regular little St Paul, I am not.
I’ve been working on a piece about mystery and the value of being misunderstood, based on a review - but again, I think a little distance between Things Happening and Writing About Things Happening is advisable, to avoid complete mental breakdown.
Instead, since it was International Women’s Day last week, and apparently the whole of March is International Women’s History month (*insert eye roll*) I wanted to turn to something that’s both less immediate, and yet ever-bloody immanent.
Today we visit the tale of The Girl Who Was Told To Smile More.
Man in a Band
I’ve been lucky enough to be in more than one band with Men Who Are FeministsTM. I know they are feminists because they tell me. Often they also tell me what feminism is, too, and explain the various ways in which women are still held back or treated differently in an industry that values women mostly cast in a certain mould: namely, small, attractive, and self-possessed but not actively disruptive.
I’ve always been grateful for these expositions. How else would I be fully aware of the insidious reach of sexism’s tendrils into every nook of our lives - much less my own experience of it?
I have noticed, however, that words do not always marry with actions. In fact, for all their wise counsel, sometimes these enlightened men were - dare I say - slight hypocrites.
I could list a litany of examples, but I like to keep these pieces moderately short and I need to keep some copy for when I finally publish my 1000 page opus on Everyone Who Has Wronged Me On My Path To Greatness. So I’ll just stick to the one for now.
(PS if you think this is you, for legal reasons it’s not. Although if you do think it’s you, for ethical reasons maybe think about that.)
The Man Who Knew
I was once in a band with a guy (Proud Feminist™) who was always involved in lots of things and not shy of weighing up out loud the various merits or losses of him continuing to invest effort in each. So, if something was deemed no longer to be viable, it would be discarded.
He came in complaining about one of his other bands with increasing regularity. They were pulling in smaller crowds than they wanted and it didn’t feel worth the effort anymore. The lead singer (hint: a lady) was getting frustrated.
Now, small audiences are the bane of almost every band at some point. We all put in more than we get back, at least at first, sometimes forever. Whatever the slick promotional how-to short courses on social media promise, there is no magic formula for securing a devoted fanbase. You can do everything right, and it could still go wrong.
Au contraire. Man With All the Answers knew the real cause.
“The problem is, she does herself no favours. You know, she’s not friendly, she doesn’t smile. She’s not what you expect in a female singer.”
He laughed like the sheer unreasonability of it was absurd.
“I mean, you’ve got to give the audience something. You can’t complain about people not coming if you’re not approachable.”
It was a punk band. I had seen only a bit of their music but I don’t think approachability was high on the agenda.
Soon afterwards he quit that project. It simply wasn’t viable anymore.
Smile, love
When I first began performing my own material, already late in my 20s, I was painfully aware of how I came across. I made sure my hair was perfect, I worried about being too fat. And I always, always smiled.
One early piece of feedback was that it was a bit disorientating, because I was quite chirpy and funny when talking, but the songs themselves were often sad (even the funny ones - perhaps most of all the funny ones). I felt like I had to manage the mood, offset the appalling crime of being asked to be taken seriously with a winning smile in between.
I was anxious to be liked. Or rather - I had always been taught that being liked was the only reasonable way to show up, onstage or otherwise. I already felt like I was being outrageous by taking up space; I had better make myself palatable.
I don’t recall ever being told specifically to smile onstage. But I had it enough in every other aspect of my life - at work, from parents, boyfriends, friends, and of course strangers in the street - those most discerning and indispensable of social critics - that I carried this indelible coding into any environment. I knew the world welcomed me when I smiled and took issue when I did not. Why would I show up any differently when put under a spotlight in front of a microphone and a room full of strangers, actively putting myself on display?
Performing did not come naturally. I dreamt about it almost 24/7 but actually stepping onto a stage still filled me with dread. I was hardly going to choose these moments of agonising self-exposure as the time to deviate from a lifetime of learned safety techniques. And so I smiled.
To put yourself out there is scary. To risk being disliked is sheer insanity.
Mardy Bum
In my current show, the only smile I wear is a rictus grin when I do an animatronic mannequin sequence along to a recording of pro-Brexit vox pops.
I love it.
When I had the idea for Gone to the Dogs, it was intended as a concept album, a slightly demented collection of songs about England fronted by me as the manic embodiment of a lost Britannia. In many ways that is what it is - but, well, let’s say I didn’t anticipate the existential theatricality and the mime interludes.
At the first show last year I asked people to write reviews and someone said
“I wasn’t expecting something so dark, confrontational and intense.”
Me neither, mate.
This show was born in lockdown and what that offered was space away from gigs - space away from an audience and from expectation. As the parts started to come together, I realised I didn’t want to talk to the audience because I didn’t want to explain myself or detract from the music. I wanted space to be weird and a way to bring together the pastiche of songs and arias and sound art without wrapping it up neatly with a smile and a bit of patter. I realised I had always hated patter - because that’s when the smiles came out, like a rash. A rash that said: please like me and sorry for taking up your time.
My glum, unsmiling and unapologetic Britannia came alive and I found a new way to take up space - and it is one that does not give a f**k how anyone else in that room is doing.
I cannot tell you how liberating it is not to smile onstage.
To divest yourself of the need to get people to like you. To remove from your shoulders the burden of making sure people have a good time.
After the initial terror, the fear of pelted vegetables, the dread that you will be reprimanded for not putting people at ease, that people might walk out in disgust at not being immediately catered for (quel horreur!) - after that immediate discomfort, what you find is: the show goes on. People do not walk out. They let you perform - because they came to see you, so why wouldn’t they?
Lighten Up
I have not become Morrisey. Gone to the Dogs is more like gig theatre or performance art in any case, so the rules may be relaxed a little when I play more traditional shows. And not all smiles are bad, or false (and I can be funny sometimes, I promise).
But what taking up space as a mardy arse character onstage has shown me is how viscerally discombobulating I found it, and how much that knee jerk reaction comes from a sense of disobedience, of not doing what I am supposed to.
For all the technical complexity of the music and the movement, the thing I find hardest to overcome is the moment I first step onstage and the room is quiet and the air is tense with expectation and I turn to the audience in silence and I don’t smile. Because everything in my life up to this point has assured me that it is my job to monitor the emotional temperature of the room, like some sort of performing thermostat. That the comfort of everyone else is your priority, and cost is a smile, however incongruous it feels - and how little it serves the art itself.
Well, DUH
You may be reading this screaming. It might seem incredibly trite, maybe blindingly obvious. Perhaps you gave up getting people to like you years ago, or perhaps the notion that someone might be chronically disposed to scanning their environment for approval seems absurd, even faintly embarrassing (if so, I would suggest this might be the wrong newsletter for you).
Or perhaps you are a Man™ (disclaimer: not all men) to whom it has never occurred that people might not be delighted to hear what you have to say, sing, or present a Powerpoint on - much less that their discomfort is at any point anything to do with you.
Often the lessons that take the longest sound the most obvious in retrospect.
The Artist’s Path
Learning to hold your own onstage is one of the necessary paths of any artist. And in many ways the real frustration of the path is not that the obstacles exist, or that some of us are hindered more than others - it’s that when you get to where you’re supposed to be, or you make the next level, you look back and it seems so easy. You can see what the obstacles are. You can see what you could have avoided.
Of course it’s not my job to smile. Of course I’m allowed to hold that space however I see fit. I’m the one with the guts (or stupidity) to get up onstage - I get to call the shots.
But in the shadow of International Women’s Day, when so much of the online space is taken up with either celebration of outstanding women or dismal statistics about low representation otherwise, I always find myself a bit despondent. I know that brilliant women exist and I also know there is also still so much disparity. Celebration of extraordinary achievements or complaints about a broken system are both valid, but I find myself checking out. I don’t think the problem is that we can’t appreciate brilliant exceptions or that we aren’t aware of the dismal statistics of the day to day. I think we can celebrate the trailblazers and have all the bursaries and quotas in place to try and drive up numbers, but it is everyday experience that determines the ways in which we show up, and the strength we have to proceed, and keep on proceeding.
Instead, I found myself thinking back to this encounter many years ago. A casual exchange that passed with a raised eyebrow from the rest of us but not much else. The guy was one to vocalise whatever was eating him that day, and you learnt to let it slide.
But it rankled then and it rankles now - and I think it came back to me now precisely because these shows in London have been so hard but so much more than anything I could have achieved back then; and when we get to higher ground at last, we not only cast our eyes over the next horizon, but we also look back on how much crap we put up with before, the things we took for unquestionable truths before we learnt to forge ahead regardless.
For years, I thought the price of admission was a smile.
I was already old by industry standards when I started writing songs and performing, and fretful of anything that would push me further beyond the pale. I hated, but relied on, my need to be liked.
And it was comments like this - oblivious, contrary to what he probably thought he stood for - that helped set the limitations of the space I felt I could occupy. Sometimes it is as much what people say about others as what they say to you directly. This was someone who was not un-encouraging, sometimes - but I found I couldn’t believe it entirely. I learnt in those rehearsal sessions that not smiling was a choice, and one that had a knock on effect.
Low audience? Why don’t you smile more?
You can choose not to, of course - but if you don’t, can you really complain about the repercussions?
People have certain expectations of a female singer. If you don’t fulfil that requirement, are you really doing everything you can?
And so to where we were…
It’s many years since I was in that band, and I am much more comfortable telling people where to get off now. But each year as IWD rolls round, the hagiography and despair comes out, and I am a little closer to being an artist who I recognise as myself, in my full capacity, I think back to all these little snippets that form the backdrop of where I am now. I think it is our small biases that derail us the most, the discrepancies between what we say we believe and the offhand remarks we make.
Because everyone can stick to a script, or at least acknowledge it, or set themselves in opposition to it - but what we hear in the wings is as important, if not more; and I think it’s this that sets the tone for how we step out onstage, or if we choose to bow out altogether.
What do you think? Have you encountered tedious opinions around the need to smile? Are you worried about how you’ll be perceived? ARE YOU THIS MAN?? Drop a comment below or reply to this email, I’d love to hear your thoughts x
NEWS CORNER
My next gig is in Sheffield supporting folk artist Non Canon & apocalypse space poet Suzannah Evans on 15th April. If you’re in Sheffield/Yorkshire please do come along and say hi.
I have a new loop station and I’m not afraid to use it - in fact, I’m very excited.
I’m currently making plans to take Gone to the Dogs to Edinburgh Fringe and book in more dates across the country, but for now I’m really happy to settle back into some gigs closer to home and try out some new songs.
And if you can’t come along, why not check out my first album in the meantime, or tell a friend about this smashing newsletter? It’s all part of my slow-grow world domination plan, and I’m grateful for every share and endorsement.