It feels a little daunting to be honest.
Here I am, one day over my 50th birthday, planning to share my personal little world from 30+ years ago.
I wrote in these “schoolboy dairies” completely unaware – at the time – that my life would take me from working in the music biz and being involved in the “punk era”, to being a ‘medium sized cheese’ in the early burgeoning video industry, then later running my own business (in what was – initially – a cutting edge music format) and eventually emigrating to the USA.
If we write diaries when we are young we know nothing of the future. Nothing of what lays ahead to usurp our teenage dreams and desires, nothing of whom we might meet and/or fall madly in love with.
I’m pretty much reading these diaries of mine as I am writing about the entries, refusing to “cheat” by reading too far forward, less the action of that undermines the subject I am writing about and commenting on. I feel that if I did that, the content could feel “affected” and maybe not sound so honest.
By way of an early disclaimer – that I may repeat occasionally – names may be changed to “protect the innocent” (or the “easily embarrassed”) and for my own sake I reserve the right to leave out certain portions of the diaries for whatever personal reasons I see fit. If it is a dead horse, there’s no reason to keep flogging it.
That’s not to say I won’t spill some beans about myself, some of which may – or may not – come as various shades of “shock” to those reading these words who are closest to me. I realise already – from ‘dark buried memories’ – there’s handful of things I might feel shameful about when I get to them. My mood – upon reaching those points in the diaries – will determine if I write about them or not.
Excerpts from a 70's Teenage Rock Opera 