April 2026

New song, obnoxious audiences, and Nessun Dorma

At the start of this month a heckler climbed onto the stage when I was performing at The Egerton Arms. He stumbled off again, but he could have been carrying a knife.

Sadly, in the entertainment industry there is not much space between performing in pubs and performing in sold-out arenas, and there is no prospect of me experiencing the latter. So I have to make the best of what I have.

It has been a quiet month professionally but a luminous one creatively.

Output

At the start of the month, I released a completely new song on YouTube titled ‘Wishes in the Whispering Leaves’. It is about childhood dreams and how growing up and shedding them is a good thing. It finishes with an allusion to RS Thomas and one of my all-time favourite poems: “Live large…dream small.”

I also re-recorded ‘Shut up and Sing’, one of my highest-tempo songs, but one with which I wasn’t happy with any earlier recordings:

You can find it on every major streaming platform.

On the Kevin McGeary Guitar YouTube channel, I uploaded a rendition of ‘Nessun Dorma’ to get people in the mood for this summer’s World Cup, and a cover of ‘The Green and Red of Mayo’ by The Saw Doctors.

And I had more writing published. This time it was a book review of ‘The Colonel and the Eunuch’ by Mai Jia.

Activities

As part of my job at Salford University, I got to hear Theatre Studies students perform comedy sketches they had written together over several weeks. I was blown away by the quality and variety of their writing and acting.

And those people are just kids. It goes to show the extent to which I will have to hustle to get noticed at this summer’s Fringe festivals and even if all does go well, how hard it will be to build on it and how badly I will need a normal job.

One of the best things I have heard in this campus job is: “If you keep doing what you’ve always done, you will keep getting what you’ve always got.” In other words, when applying for jobs, I need to keep trying new things. Applying on LinkedIn seldom leads to anything, because it has faded into AI-irrelevance. Going to workplaces in person and handing over business cards or CVs might have worked for my parents’ generation, now it would probably get you pepper-sprayed. So I am looking for a new approach.

I tried taking an online test for the Civil Service, but my personality traits were not the right fit for the job that was being advertised.

Despite a sub-standard employment situation, I filled each day with exercise, language study, reading, new writing, and more. You can hear my submission to the What Are You Reading section on Radio North Manchester here.

Wider World

In recent weeks, we have seen the fallout from Meta and YouTube being found liable for harming a 20 year-old’s mental health by making their products deliberately addictive. This could have a similar effect to the 1964 Surgeon General’s report which reached damning conclusions about the health impact of smoking, and caused the percentage of Americans who smoked to drop from 42 percent in 1964 to18 percent in 2014.

Social media has helped make the world a smaller place in many positive ways. And it has also helped me and millions of other grassroots musicians hawk our wares in ways that were unimaginable thirty years ago.

As much as I would love to multiply the readership of this Substack, and my following on Instagram and YouTube. Becoming famous on social media is in and of itself pointless and perishable.

Compare social media to silent movies, another new technology that took the world by storm in the early twentieth century. Silent movies made millions of people happy, created a level of worldwide fame that had not existed before, and included works of art that are still admired a hundred years later – masterpieces like FW Murnau’s ‘Sunrise’, Buster Keaton’s ‘The General’, and Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis’.

At the same time, at least 75 percent of silent movies have been lost. And these movies took the form of physical reels, so were easier to preserve than YouTube videos or Instagram posts.

Even though the names of most silent movie superstars would draw blank stares today, there are systems in place to save the films that have been deemed worth preserving. The Library of Congress’ National Film Registry selects 25 “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” American films annually for preservation.

Will there ever be an equivalent for social media posts? Probably not. Why would there be?