Feb 20•2 min read
melophonic - Entertainment
15 years ago Jim wrote an album.
A record label told him to turn the production into a live show with a band. So he did. He had never performed live and was immediately struck with performance anxiety.
His response was to devise increasingly technical challenges for the show usually reserved for big budget productions.
In 6 weeks he had several musicians, two lighting engineers, two sound men, two visual artists and a backline tech. The visual artists created videos for each song, the lighting engineers linked the keyboards to the lighting desk so the music could control the lights, no mean feat with MIDI in 2007, then the day of the show I lost a hard drive we needed for the lights.
He searched the mile or so between my studio and the venue, without success, and ended up crumpled in a heap outside the venue with a stranger patting him on the back, reassuring him that everything would be ok.
He returned for the soundcheck and found the lost drive on the stage, and, after only a handful of rehearsals, never with a full band, the show went on.
He has little memory of the performance but he remembers coming off stage and telling his girlfriend that he didn’t want to go to the afterparty they had planned, he wanted to go home and he didn’t want to talk about the show. He cancelled the next two shows and determined then and there that he would never try to perform live again.
The label said he wasn’t ready and the music he had spent years producing was never released. Watching back now, 15 years on, and he feels very different, the unhappy memories he tried to forget, have transformed into a sense of accomplishment and pride.
The film of the 2007 live performance of this song is being hosted on a new music NFT Discord server called Cicada. Holders of any melophonic NFT will be able to access the melophonic channel in Cicada and watch the live performance that almost broke him! Just make sure to play it nice and LOUD ok? melophonic aka jim.btc x
