How To Soar Like An Eagle

Between 2010 and 2020, I was a full-time professional musician in the South of Spain. One of the biggest problems with working in the performing arts anywhere is that almost everybody thinks they can do it. Some can, some can’t. But let me tell you, the ones who can have spent a very significant part of their lives learning and practising. They have put in long hours of dedication, usually four hours a day minimum. Over my lifetime, I put in something like 73,000 hours!

At the same time, they have invested a great deal of money not only in classes but also in buying expensive instruments and amplification often running into thousands of pounds. Over those ten years in Spain, I must have spent over five grand. In my lifetime, including the recording of three albums, plus another two or three albums worth of singles, I have spent over thirty thousand pounds!

Of course, I fully expected a financial return on all that investment of time and money. I did not just do it for the fun of it, even though I did get an enormous amount of do as well as hoped for. However, I didn’t do too badly from it. It would be impossible to put an exact figure on it, but I reckon I just about broke even at $35k.

I have to say, one of the biggest, very irritating problems was rank amateurs who were quite prepared to perform for nothing. And there is no end of venues who will take them up on that offer, very much to the cost of the professionals.

Allow me to go back to about 1978. After a lost childhood education (1959–1969) leading to one dead-end job after another, working my balls off for peanuts, I decided to get myself a higher education. I spent three years studying at night school, after a hard day at work, to gain qualifications in English Language and literature. In 1981, I finally managed to get myself to university to do a degree in English. I graduated with a 2.1, which was not too shabby. Resulting from that came a very successful professional career as a copywriter. Within a year I was commanding up to $300 an hour! Obviously, going to uni paid off big time, until it didn’t.

What brought the axe down on my career was an unexpected economic recession in 1989/90. I lost my last client to a man called Bernard Mendoza, an unemployed ex-creative director who visited my one remaining ad agency client to offer to work for them for nothing for a whole year. Bernard had been made redundant and received a very healthy redundancy payment, which allowed him the luxury of being able to work for free, in the hope of getting a full-time job at the end of his Buckshee tenure.

Following that devastating blow, I lost everything, my job, career, house, car, family, children…It was a truly awful experience. So between 1992–94, I took myself back to uni to do a PGCE/FAHE (Post Graduate Certificate in Education/ Further, Adult and Higher Education). That new qualification helped me to forge a very successful thirty-year career in teaching. Again, uni paid off, though didn’t pay me anywhere near my salary as a copywriter.

Towards the end of my teaching career, that too ran foul of others. Suddenly everybody was calling themselves English teachers. Even foreigners who hardly spoke a word of English began to offer cut-price EFL classes to Spanish people who knew no better.

So, here I am, a retired man of some 70 years trying to make a go of it as a writer on platforms like Medium and Substack. Again, I am seeing Johny and Janet Come Lately suddenly calling themselves experts, offering all manner of courses in writing for a tidy price. For people like me, it is trying to teach grandma to suck eggs. I try to ignore it as best as I can, but it sometimes needles me. I did consider following suit, offering my professional learning to newbies, and then decided that it was not really what I was all about.

On Substack, some writers chastise those of us who want (need) to monetise our writing. There was one writer in particular, who shall remain nameless, who constantly posted notes about how hard up he was, and yet steadfastly refused to monetise his posts, only to muscle into one of my threads where I was trying to get paying subscribers in need of mentoring. The cheeky swine offered what I was offering free of charge.

Well, everything is up in the air at the moment. Medium is failing to deliver, Substack is slow to grow, and I have given up completely on Vocal Media for a distinct lack of anything like a fair financial return.

However, despite Medium underperforming I am hanging on in there and have recently launched a new pub of my own, Love Companions. Likewise, Beehive is underperforming, so much so that even Substack is a beacon of light in comparison, with only three paying subscribers.

Hopefully, 2025 will turn itself around and make it all worthwhile. I am ever an optimist, which has served me very well indeed in the past. No matter how hard I fall, I simply get back up, dust myself down and rise like the proverbial phoenix.