#haven’t done digital art in months but this moment made me unwell

[pawthorn]

“What do you want me to do with your friend?”

[olispleen]

So undoubtedly 2020 was for many of us the worst year in living memory. Tragically I lost some friends and acquaintances to suicide and it was the first year of my entire life where I haven’t seen my mother. Plus the best run of live shows of my life had to be cancelled. All in all it’s been a terrible year but I’m very grateful to have had the support of my sister and her family throughout this time so I’m going to try to focus on the positives with my rundown of the last twelve months.

2020 started for me with great anxiety; fires were raging throughout Australia and the political landscape was horrific with most governments of the world having voted in narcissistic sociopaths as their leaders; people who have no regard to the environment or human decency whatsoever. In the UK, despite my best efforts we were stuck with four more years under a conservative government. With Brexit looming and more austerity ahead, my last vestiges of hope were crushed by the general opinion that the greatest sociopath of them all Donald Trump would be sure to secure a second term as President of the USA. As a climate change denier (on top of a long list of other atrocities), four more years of Trump was sure to have a negative impact on the whole planet. To take my mind off all this I focused on the work I had started in 2019.

In January my main collaborator of the moment Nick Hudson and I were wrapping up the albums “Flowers for Foot Foot” and “Night Sweats and Fever Dreams” and we embarked on what was my first trip to Ireland as Nick had composed some music for the Derek Jarman exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. It was a fantastic few days soaking up the culture of Joyce, Bacon, Wilde and Beckett and soaking up a lot of whisky and Guinness too.

In February we released the covers album “Flowers for Foot Foot” digitally and made plans with Straydog Pictures for a music video for the opening track “Funeral Dirge” in which I was to play a corpse who jumps out of his coffin to conduct his own funeral. We booked a stunning church, St Mary’s on St James Street Brighton for the shoot in March and made plans organising costumes, props and extras.

Then on March 1st my band SPLEEN joined with Nick’s band The Academy of Sun and our friends in Idle Bones to release SPLEEN’s self titled debut album at Brighton’s Hope & Ruin. Though there was talk of coronavirus hitting Brighton then, no measures had yet been put in place and little did any of us know that our plans for the year were about to drastically change.

SPLEEN had some of our best gigs ever lined up with our first proper shows in London and beyond to look forward to. However, one day when out on my daily shop I couldn’t move for people panic-buying, the supermarket had four times the usual customers and no one was wearing a mask. I couldn’t get my usual food and toilet roll and I soon started to feel very unwell and decided that it would be unwise for us to go ahead with the video shoot as planned.

Talk of a lockdown became common news and the thought of being stuck in my tiny Brighton flat with no supplies and possible contagion all around was so horrifying that my sister made plans for me to be brought to her place just outside of Hastings where she converted a shed with everything I might need to get by in isolation. My friend Amelia had felt sure her family had also been in contact with the virus so we took the precautions necessary with PPE and disinfectants and she gave me a lift to St Leonards where my sister lives.

For the first few weeks while I still exhibited symptoms I stayed in the shed with my sister posting me meals through the window. I was also able to walk down the garden, into the adjoining field and commune with nature. At this time the main road at the front of the house was so quiet that I was able to capture the dawn chorus uninterrupted which I planned to use on the recording of the song "Nature Boy" which Birdeatsbaby and I had already started recording for the EP “The Eagle & The Dove”. I also started making daily vlogs which Jake of StrayDog Pictures asked me to send over as he thought it could make an interesting documentary.

I guessed then that the great run of gigs we had planned would have to be cancelled but I didn’t expect that first lockdown to last for four months. After a couple of weeks my symptoms disappeared and I got to spend more time with my family and the other animals who live with them. Additions to the family included a new puppy Daphne who I bonded with greatly, also Doris the sheep surprised us all by getting over the neighbours fence and becoming pregnant with twin lambs.

I realised how lucky I was to be among nature and with family throughout these terrible times; it was springtime, the sun was shining and life and beauty was bursting all around me. On top of this no airplanes in the sky meant that my usual anxiety around climate change and the environment was temporarily calmed. The world was living a nightmare but there was nothing I could do. It was as if the whole world was panicking (as I had been for years) so perhaps for once I could give myself a break and focus on just being there for my family.

I halved and eventually came off my antidepressants for the summer and made plans to release the AIDS themed album “Night Sweats & Fever Dreams” whilst working on a charity single “The Western Pier” with Mishkin and friends to raise money to keep venues running after the pandemic. Also fortnightly Zoom chats with the band meant we were able to outline plans for new songs as well.

With the music video and gigs cancelled and the new album scheduled for release twenty years on from the events that inspired it; (my hospitalisation at the hands of AIDS defining complications in the summer of 2000) - I decided to learn video editing myself to make my own promotional music videos for the album. The first of these “Just a Dream” echoed thematically with the anxieties of the current day. With no budget and only myself to shoot I found a green antique glass that my grandmother had owned and shot the whole thing through the glass, interspersing the selfie footage with clips of old horror and German expressionist films. Later I did videos for “Destroyer of Worlds”, “Kamikaze”, and “The Bedroom” among others.

When the first lockdown was relaxed I had a couple of friends visit my sister's for socially distanced outdoor gatherings and soon we tentatively made plans for my return to Brighton and to resume band practice. SPLEEN developed our new song “Beast” and we performed a live stream from our rehearsal studios at Brighton Electric for Coastal Currents. This performance was watched live by a few thousand people and a small clip of it was aired on local BBC TV. We also performed our first (and only to date) socially distanced gig at Bar 42 in Worthing.

Jake released his documentary of my lockdown from the footage I had sent under the title "At Risk: Surviving a Pandemic with HIV", the film won the audience favourite award at Brighton Rocks film festival.

When the second lockdown looked to be nearing I returned to my sisters in the country and made plans to release the covers EP which I’d recorded with Birdeatsbaby and Catherine T, called “The Eagle & The Dove”. Sadly, due to problems around getting clearance for my translation of Barbara’s French classic “L’Aigle Noir”, the EP was postponed and instead I released an edit of the opening track, Eden Ahbez's “Nature Boy”, to which I edited a video using footage from James Bidgood’s queer classic “Pink Narcissus”. The amazing artist John Lee Bird continued his “Is a Doll” series with a doll of me which got to hang out with my dear friend and mentor Salena Godden’s doll, as we couldn’t in real life.

As autumn turned to winter I could see how hard hitting this year had been for those of my friends who weren’t as fortunate as I in having family and loved ones for support. I did what I could to keep contact with friends online, when I discovered a couple of these friends had taken their own lives I felt devastated and wished I could have done more to help them.

This year has been a year of upheavals and altered plans for all of us and though it’s not been easy I’m hoping that all these upheavals in the world can be a catalyst for positive change.

I had become dismayed and utterly frustrated at the political landscape here and abroad. I loved being a part of Europe and hated to witness the ugliness and xenophobia that Brexit had unleashed amongst my fellow inhabitants of this doomed plague island which I now find myself stranded on. However, to witness the downfall of Donald Trump was for me a real ray of hope amongst the chaos, confusion and despair. Hopefully his brand of dishonest, hateful, scapegoating and gaslighting politics will be a thing of the past and we can all look forward to a far brighter 2021.

A Happy New Year as is possible to you all wherever you may be. Here’s to a far better 2021. 🥂