Interestingly I often feel slightly better at the weekends especially on Saturday. I’m more likely to have new creative thoughts on that day than any other. These thoughts are usually of the lateral, intellectual type and have a certain force to them. They feel insightful and have clarity. This compares to weekdays when I am considerably more dumb. Then I am a bit of a drone, a product of working culture, cast from people who worked with their hands, who by and large didn’t analyse or think much, and didn’t ever change anything. In this mode I am something of a worker-bee where the emphasis is getting the job done. Sleeves up, get stuck in. The more physical, the more credible and therefore the more legitimate one feels when knocking the shit out of something with a hammer. Doing otherwise: writing, reading, thinking, composing makes one feel less like a real man. All that stupid idiocy from working mentality blows these finer pursuits away. An ethic that elevates physical labour is upheld. All very well for a purpose I suppose but utterly hopeless for mapping out ones direction as an artist.

Needless to say this kind of thing is more present during my stints in Kilmarnock away from Edinburgh. It is something I have wanted to shake but it is particularly hard to do as it is so deeply ingrained. It takes an external stimulus, the influence of others from alternative backgrounds, for me to cut loose from these chains.

What makes the situation more complex is that music-making requires something of that working attitude to get it going. But then I wonder if music created under these conditions is too hack-like. My work is well enough crafted but does it lack something essential? It has no politics or principle, no creed or belief, no authenticity. As such it is artifice, insincere at heart. It’s the work of a journeyman. Like this, I am mere hack, high on form, low on integrity.

Yet it’s not as if I don’t have the passion. But it’s being able to find expression for it that is the mark of good work. Having a developed sense of form, being able to find a voice and injecting it into the form, should in theory produce the goods. And if it doesn’t what’s to blame again? Oh yes, Kilmarnock and its work ethic and my inability to transcend that to the status of integrity, to being someone who has something to say and who has the means at his disposal with which to say it.

Bullshit or what!!