CONFESSIONS AND DEEDS

 

Graham Greene was right. When I first came across that quotation on the title page, I could have cried. I had been writing for years, very unsuccessfully, it has to be said, but relentlessly nonetheless, but Greene’s words caught the essence of my obsession. Somehow I needed to see, to feel, to make sense of this world. The alternative was the dark abyss, that place of madness, the precipice upon which many have stood and from which many have longed to leap; indeed, into which countless have been dragged. ‘One mustn't look at the abyss,’ said Flaubert, ‘because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us’. It is a great Deceiver that promises peace but in the end merely leaves us scrabbling in the darkness, fumbling for the light which it assured us was there.

I did not know why I wrote, I only knew that I had to, that somewhere inside me lived a worm that needed to be fed, a parasite which, if not nourished, would begin to devour me in body and mind and, yes, in soul. I somehow had to keep it at bay and the only way I could do that was to sustain it with my words and thoughts; only then would I be able to keep this many-toothed, barbed, acidic creature inside the dark cave where it belonged.

It wasn’t just prose either. I tried my hand at poetry and lyrics and, although the poetry often allowed me to articulate those emotions and moods and sentiments that I longed to express, I found that they were in the end little more than a foundation to something else; of what, I wasn’t sure. I wrote them though and, satisfied that I had done my best, published them. I remain proud of them but, like an errant child, I lose patience with them and only appreciate them after some time apart.

Alongside this lay a passion for music. It didn’t really matter what kind of music; I would listen to anything from Beethoven to Vangelis to Deep Purple; it was all manna for the soul, but I did find myself attracted to rock music, to the sound of John Lord’s Hammond organ and Blackmore’s Strat guitar and Cozy Powell hammering out his heavy morse on a set of Paiste symbols and Premier drums. There were Deep Purple and Queen and Uriah Heep and, above all, Pink Floyd. Then Pete Frame and his wonderful family trees led me out to the roots and branches of these musical oaks and I lapped it all up like cream.

I can still remember the exact moment I first heard some of these bands:

 

Pink Floyd and Queen - sent to me at boarding school on a tape by my Aunty Maureen (Gawd bless ‘er). Animals and A Night at the Opera.

Black Sabbath and Uriah Heep and The Rolling Stones - played to me by one Gordon McCrae. It was Black Sabbath’s Greatest Hits, Innocent Victim and Some Girls.

Bruce Springsteen - Introduced to me by a lass named Shiela in Leicester. Tunnel of Love.

Deep Purple  -  Made in Japan, played to me by Duncan Richardson, in his room at boarding school.

Gary Moore - Ammar Al Chalabi played me Corridors of Power. Never looked back.

 

Pink Floyd - David Gilmore, Nick Mason, Roger Waters and Rick Wright - represented to me all that I loved about music and all that I found to be frustrating, disturbing and vexing about this world. The first album I ever heard of theirs was Animals and I understood it from the moment I heard it and, more importantly, it seemed to understand me. The lyrics were poetry, occasionally vitriolic, often beautiful, often heart-rending but always a scalpel. I have loved them since that day and love them now. They bring me down and they lift me up. They make me fall to anger and rise to reason. They make me complete but only after they have dismantled me and commenced the work of healing my wounds.

Some years later, along came Bruce Springsteen, who did the same, only differently, with a different kind of passion, a different kind of heat, a different slant on the world to my educated Cambridge darlings. If Dylan speaks of the world, Springsteen speaks of us, of that direct daily drudgery and fear with which we live, of the velvet claw of love and the survival of dignity and honesty in a harsh and unforgiving world.  And he does it like a poet.

One particular set of words I had written had lain in a drawer (and then a hard drive) for years. Like that errant child, I had tried to ignore its calls, its need to thrive, but it never left me and, some years later, I bought a guitar and a midi keyboard and set about putting music to words. It was a painful process, often one note at a time, a chord at a time, with the help of samples obtained from discs that came with music magazines.

The reason for this struggle is simple; I am untalented. No matter how I tried to play that guitar and master that keyboard, I have and have always had the coordination of a new-born. I am the same with DIY - anything that requires any manual dexterity is anathema to me. If you saw me typing now, you would stone me for my keyboard abuse - once you had stopped laughing.

Anyway, that album turned out alright. The production was not as good as it should have been but when you only have Magix Music Maker 7, a keyboard loaded with (some fairly good) sounds that could mimic a saxophone or a Hammond organ etc and a Line 6 amp simulator for the guitar, you couldn’t expect too much. What mattered to me though was bringing those lyrics to life, passing electricity through them like the corpse of Frankenstein’s monster, gasping as they twitched and convulsed and finally took their first breath of air.

The track-listing went:

 

I WANT TO BE ALONE: PART ONE

(instrumental)

KNOW ME

KEEP YOUR DISTANCE

LIES AND ALIBIS

THE TROUBLE WITH SLEEP

(instrumental)

UNDERDOWN

I WANT TO BE ALONE - PART TWO

 

I called it NIMBY - which stood for Not In My Back Yard, in the days when social acronyms were all the rage - and it vomited all my dissatisfaction, my sense of isolation, my sense of injustice, my loathing of political manipulation and my own failure to achieve. That, I admit, sounds more like teenage angst, a passing phase, but it wasn’t; it was me searching for a sense of self in a world which I frankly did not understand.

That is the essence of art - a search, a need to express, to share, to interpret, but to do it through a medium in which the artist may hide.

I was and still am very proud of that small achievement. I still listen to it and occasionally cringe at the, shall we say, inexperienced, mixing that went on, but I do not shrink away from what it has to say. I will stand by every word and every emotion that seeped through it. I have regurgitated its lyrics in other ways now, because I still find them relevant and reliable. In all, it still staggers me that I was able to put together something so meaningful - to me at least - and so almost very good, with the equivalent of horse glue and string.

That then, was that. I went back to poetry and prose and my guitars gathered dust until I was forced to sell them for a paltry sum because I had no money.

So, how did I get from there to here? Actually, I’m not really anywhere, still living in the same house and in the same slowly decaying body, still sitting at the laptop keyboard pumping out word after word in some form or other, still jotting down lines as they occur to me in my little black book in the hope that they will leap to my rescue on the days when my mind becomes little more than a weed-strewn, wind-blown vacant lot.

What I mean is, what possessed me to put these thoughts down on virtual paper? What makes me want to share with you something that has changed my life, spiritually if not financially, and allowed me to achieve the little that I have? What has allowed me to at last take my words and form them into something that fills the pot-hole in my heart?

AI.

At this point I can imagine the stampede from the bookshop or the slamming of the laptop as people huff and puff in disgust at the very idea that anybody in this world should use AI in their art. Those of you who stay with me though, might actually find something worth hearing.

Let’s be honest, at the moment there is more A than I in AI. It is in its infancy, but it is growing quickly and I suspect that within a short time it will be as impactful upon us as the day that the internet first stretched its wires into the air and sparked into life.

I was lucky enough to have one of my albums, The Very Act of Breathing, reviewed by Paul Gregory in Fireworks Magazine.

When I approached the magazine, there was of course a wariness on their part, but Paul was kind enough to contact me and ask me to put forward my story on the process.

 

Hi Chris,

Sorry I haven’t been back to you sooner.

I have been waiting on the decision by my editor whether to proceed with the review.

Thank goodness he has now said yes, as long as I mention in the review that it is AI created.

 

So as I said before, I always mention something about  the artist in the first paragraph of the review, so I will mention you, etc

However, can you give me some more info on how the album was made as I am a newbie to AI, so I haven’t a clue how the tracks were created, and in fact any other [?info] that you would like included with the review

 

Thanks

Paul

 

 

This was my reply:

 

Hi Paul,

 

I understand completely the delay and your editor's needs. It really is a major point of contention now and justifiably so. I have just been listening (again!) to Rumours (the Mac) and am in awe of it and of most of the other albums I own (2000 or so).

 

As I said originally, I can only present the words and let my 'Elton John'* (I’m sure you know the rest of the long list of co-writers) do the rest, along with a tremendous amount of editing with the occasional sample thrown in. Someone like me, who has a single talent, words, and a single desire, to impart those words, can only be grateful to something such as AI and the thousands of samples I have collected over the years; it has enabled me to do something that I have longed to do since I first heard Pink Floyd and Queen back in the boarding school years. 

 

I have tried to play the guitar but have the coordination of a foetus. I did complete one 'album' with it and a synth - and a computer, in about 2012ish but it was not, musically, up to scratch. I sold my guitars when we were a bit hard-up (along with most of my vinyl) and I regret it, but these are all lessons learned.

 

I suppose the big question is how to justify what I do.

 

Firstly, I must be honest. That's difficult when you want to do well, when you want to achieve, but integrity is so important and to be duplicitous is never a good starting point.

 

Secondly, there is so much manufactured music 'out there' today, much of it with vocal enhancement software, which has been used for years, and much of it edited and enhanced 'at home', that the use of AI seems to be an inevitable step. However, when it comes to groups like When Rivers Meet or Bob Mould or Samantha Fish or Wolf Alice et al, there is no substitute for raw talent or for looking wide-eyed at them when they are on stage. I can never offer that, regretfully. It would be great to find someone to play the role of Gil, but...

 

Thirdly, I've never seen Beethoven live or Tommy Bolin or John Lennon, but they are still in my player every day. The fact that I will not see Bonham smack the hell out of his skins does not mean that I don't appreciate him or all that those many others have done.

 

Finally, we all have a right to a voice; we all have the right to create and if AI can allow this to happen, then I think that, as a learning process and an enablement tool, it is very valuable. We cannot all be Eddie Van Halen or Ian Paice or Danny Bowes, but we can strive. If it helps people to create, I'm all for it.

 

However, none of this is relevant to you as far as a review goes. I use Magix Music Maker, the wonderful FREE Audacity, Sound Forge and samples collected over many years. The AI is from Suno. Now, despite what Suno claims, it is far from perfect and I have spent many hours and much money trying to flush away some of the turds it comes up with; but it is constantly improving and credit to them; my investment is my faith. However, with patience and a lot of editing, I can usually manage to put together the music that I think encapsulates my words. I have several personas created and saved on Suno which I use for different singers. 

 

As I have said, I am a writer and have written many books and have always been addicted to words. Let's face it, it's fun. There really is very little as satisfying as a well-earned full-stop.

 

As a person, the attachment that I previously sent you about me probably says enough.

 

This is new ground for Fireworks I should think, as well as all the other music mags should they consider the idea. I hope that people can see that art is what the artist says it is and that they may reject it or embrace it in full awareness of its creation.

 

Thank you to you for your support, genuinely - it means a lot, and thanks to your editor for taking the risk.

 

I have also sent you the other two Gil Laine albums. This is not punishment, but might give you an insight into Gil/me and, if you will allow me, as a thank you.

 

Kindest regards,

 

Chris B

 

*in my previous email I had said, ‘I am Bernie Taupin (I wish!) to my computer's Elton John.’

 

I might also add that we have been fooled by the movies for a century now. All that we have considered real on screen is very often little more than a deception, all the way from Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin to ILM and Marvel. We have had blue screens, green screens, animation and CGI and, so long as they have been well done, we have accepted them. Their credibility fails when we see through the veil but, until that point, we are immersed and we believe. If I stopped watching movies or TV series because they weren’t real, I’d have to chuck the television out the window.

Now, to contradict myself a little, I have this year been to see Luke Morley and FM live. I have seen Thunder, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Uriah Heep, The Black Crowes and countless others on stage and it is a thrill every time. To achieve what they do leaves me astounded, not to mention envious and dissatisfied with my own shortcomings and, as Paul stated in his review, there really is no substitute for live.

On the other hand, Enya never put a tour together and sold eight million albums. Go figure.

Here is Paul’s review from Fireworks Magazine:

 

Gil Laine combines evocative lyrics with soulful melodies that captivate audiences. With a voice that seemingly blends raw emotion and polished technique, Laine crafts songs that resonate deeply, drawing inspiration from personal experiences, storytelling, and a wide array of musical influences. Okay that was the PR blurb. The reality is that his real name is Chris B, who is a poet and a book writer. The music on this album was created by him using Magix Music Maker, Audacity, Sound Forge, music samples and Suno AI software. However, he did write all the lyrics. As he explains it, ‘I am Bernie Taupin and the computer is Elton John’. He has been upfront about all of this, and I have had several interesting email exchanges with him. So, why are we bothering to review an AI produced album? As he put it, ‘We all have a right to a voice; we all have the right to create and if AI can allow this to happen, then I think that, as a learning process and an enablement tool, it is very valuable’. Wow, the first track on the album ‘The Landscape Of Your Heart’ is fantastic. The tune has a superb groove and it is a song that stays in your head. There are a few slower tracks; ‘The Preacher Man’, ‘Fallen Man’, ‘Lucky’ and ‘We Just Do’. They are all very atmospheric tunes, with vocals sung over an acoustic guitar or piano, and interspersed with other instruments. Up-tempo songs are ‘Footsteps’, ‘Haunted’, ‘He Has, She Has’, ‘The Difference You Make and ‘My Diamond Life’. They all have excellent guitar breaks and guitar solos. There are slow-burner tunes; ‘Those Were the days’, ‘The Scene Of The Crime’,  and ‘The Very Act Of Breathing’. Same format for each tune, they start slow and then build up into very good tunes. All the songs on the album have very clever lyrics. Examples are ‘My Diamond Life’, a song comparing life to being a vinyl record, ‘Those Were The Days’, which is about living in the past and wishing it could be like that again, and ‘Lucky’, which has the lyrics based around familiar superstitions. There is a huge debate on AI and its place in society. I was not expecting to like this album, but I was shocked as to how good it is. However, it has still not changed my mind that music is best experienced live and must be performed by human musicians.

 

 

I expected the worst; after all, Paul was doing a job and Fireworks Magazine was willing to put itself, its credibility, on the line to actually do the review. It takes a certain amount of courage by the reviews editor and the reviewer to set foot in such a controversial minefield. I never thought that what I would receive from Paul and the magazine would be something so complimentary, so unbiased, so balanced, but there it was before my watery eyes. I thanked Paul, not simply because he did the review, but for his honesty.

The points he makes are valid, especially in a world that feels so threatened by AI as it does at this time, but coming back to the live performance point, I have thousands of albums by bands that I have never seen live and I love those albums for what they are.

We pay to see bands that use backing tracks and vocal enhancers and rarely do we walk away complaining; possibly because we have been fooled into believing that it was all real. Do I think that they should do this? No. That’s not what people pay to see. Who cares if their voice has gone a little and that the keyboardist is riddled with arthritis in their fingers; I accept that we all get older and must therefore adapt and I go to the show knowing what I’m paying for. There comes a time when every performer should take a step back; ticket sales are usually a clue, but if they go into the studio and give me what I have always wanted from them, then I’m happy.

AI is a double-edged sword. It can create beauty, it can save lives, it can enable the disabled, it can make life easier, more convenient, it can enhance an experience for the observer to the nth degree, but it can also be used for immoral, unethical financial gain, for political manipulation, for journalistic manipulation, for scams and individual harm. You could say this about every new invention, right back to the printing press, which brought education to the masses and propaganda to a level previously unimagined. It is down to the integrity of the individual. It is down to human nature. It is down to our weakness and our foibles, our greed and our generosity. The problem is that humanity has rarely invented anything that has not somehow been skewed or misused. We will be the only species to have ever caused its own extinction, make no bones about that. We are crass and stupid, when we are capable of unlimited beauty and kindness, in all the arts and architecture and all those little everyday gestures that make the world a better place. But we are not capable of putting something solely to good use. As was seen at the beginning of the superb 2001: A Space Odyssey, we will turn a tool into a weapon at the earliest opportunity. Perhaps AI is the next monolith we must face.

I choose to use AI to do good, to do no harm; to enhance my world, my abilities and maybe the lives of a few others willing to share my music.

So where did Gil Laine come from? What is he? Why is he?

Well, Gil is my Jiminy Cricket, the personifications of the emotions in Inside Out, my loud hailer, my release, my representative, but mostly his own person. Is that possible? Is it possible to split myself so much into two so as to create a living other? Like Dame Edna Everage or Sir Les Patterson to Barry Humphries? And yet retain the essential Barry? I don’t know, ask a psychiatrist. All I know is that Gil isn’t me and that I am not Gil, that we live in different worlds with different outlooks and different upbringings, but that he is a part of me that could not exist without permission. AI gives me that permission. I’m not saying that Gil does not say what I think, he does, but he comes at it from an oblique angle, possibly from a more world-weary stance, from a more street-wise outlook, a more world-aware perspective. Maybe he is what I want to be. Yes, maybe that’s it. Maybe he has the courage to think and say what I do not dare to in my cossetted, narrow world. There is no doubt that he is a part of all the music I have heard - it all seeps into him. All those bands, their music and lyrics, that have tattooed themselves into my subconscious, spill out in my words, as do all the people I have met, the things I have done and seen, the experiences I have had, the movies I have seen, the jobs I have done, the broken heart and the abundant love. It all gets thrown into the cauldron to produce a potion as mysterious and invigorating as any drug or any fevered hallucination or any dream.

So, I have the lyrics, written by myself as Gil, using our headspace, but what of the music? What of the AI?

Firstly, I apologise wholeheartedly to Bernie and Elton. That was an unwittingly arrogant comparison. I intended no slight, only utter admiration. If I had one-eighth of their talent I would indeed have lived. I just needed a hook to hang my hat on.

AI is a tool. That’s it. As I said earlier, there is often little I and a lot of A and it needs to be moulded, cajoled, manipulated to the needs of the user. I cannot simply stuff words into the machine and hope that it can interpret my - or Gil’s - thoughts and words. AI has no emotions, no real thought process. You have to be quite precise in how you want the AI to interpret your words, otherwise it is a case of garbage in, garbage out. GIGO. I have tried to put my books onto audio using AI (Amazon’s AI, among others. I have tried to use my own voice, but I hate the sound of it) and it is hopeless at taking breaths, creating pauses, lending the emphatic to a flat phrase. It cannot interpret. It can read words (just about), but it cannot read my mind. It is hopeless at humanity, at being anything but a robot. It will improve, of that there is no doubt, but not today.

What I must do is write and then put those words into the machine. Then do it again. And again. Ad infinitum. The music must comply with the lyrics. You don’t put rags on a supermodel. There is no point having a concept for the lyrics in your head, only for the AI to say, ‘Nope. I’m doing it my way.’ And it will do that. It will do that until you want to throw the laptop across the room, stamp on it and curse the day you bought it. It is bloody frustrating because, as I said, it cannot read your mind and cannot know your heart. It is stupid and will remain so until you give it permission not to be, by careful instructions.

Let’s not forget either, that every single thing that I do in the AI program costs me money. You pay a certain amount a month and get allocated a certain amount of credits. Everything you do costs credits and those credits are your money. That is particularly annoying when it decides that it wants to change words or skip out entire verses or not follow the requested style or stick in a female vocalist when you specifically asked for a male vocalist. You can complain until you are blue in the face to the company, but little attention is paid to your whining. The money is gone.

Rarely do I strike gold immediately. Most of the time I have to take many versions and edit them so that they come together as one. There’s nothing wrong with that; David Gilmour has diced, sliced and spliced for years; all the greats have. That’s what recording studios are for. That’s what computers do for music now, whether in the studio or in the bedroom. The things that might once have taken hours or days now take only minutes and, in the end, that saves time and money. Unless, like me, you have no talent and need AI’s help.

If I’m very lucky I will hit gold fairly early on, but that precious metal then needs forging, refining, on my laptop. This is where other programs come in useful and I have to say that the best of them is Audacity - and it’s free; it is regularly updated - and it’s free. You can edit minutely, you can add effects, fade, change the speed, apply echo, reverb, reverse a section and add track upon track upon track if you want to break the process down further - which I often do. Then you can save it in practically any form you want. Audacity is a piece of genius and I’m very, very grateful for it.

Now, AI does not compare with the time and expense that a band has to put in at a studio. They can prepare, go in with lyrics ready and songs sketched out, but they still have a greater process to go through to reach the desired end result. And musically, they have to know their stuff. I would love to be able to do that. I have a cousin who does that in a fabulous prog rock group called Ruby Dawn. It is fantastic and when you see them in the studio, they are so happy and so involved and to produce what they do with the patience that they do is mind-boggling.

This brings up another point. I’m not a people person. I’m not a social animal. I should never, ever, ever, have to work with other people. All my jobs, all approximately fifteen or so of them, have pretty much been disastrous with regards to human relationships. I have been fired more often than a Waterloo cannon. I like my own company and the idea of working with others, to quote a friend, ‘makes my piss boil’. If you see me in a crowded room, call the AA, because I will break down. I love my time on my laptop writing and then creating and then editing and then finally publishing. My language is blue, my temper is often foul, my patience (especially with the bloody AI) wears thin, but I know that when all is done, I will feel warm and content. Never totally happy. Never. But that feeling of triumph never goes away.

I also have the pleasure of creating, again by AI, my own artwork. Once again, the AI can be monstrously stupid. I cannot count the times a person has had three arms and an extra foot or an eye instead of a nose. The most basic of instructions are often interpreted in a completely nonsensical way. This is why I use Photoshop Elements, which is more than adequate, to put things right. I also use Luminar Neo as support but, as ever, the AI in that is on occasion at about the same level as a foetus.

So when all that is done and I have listened to my new work, alone, in my car, which has a great sound, and I am satisfied, I send the kit and caboodle off to a very nice chap in Leeds who takes my artwork and my music and sends it back to me as Gil’s new album. That also costs money.

As far as marketing goes, I am hopeless. I put everything on Instagram and Facebook, as much as I can, then stand back and hope. It is more miss than hit, but at least it’s out there, somewhere and I do occasionally get some kind feedback.

Ultimately though, I do all this for me, because I can’t help it. I must somehow create, even as I am now writing this, though with low expectations of success and a warm feeling inside. Maybe I did this successfully in a previous life and there is some sort of spiritual overflow that has left me with this unfulfilled obsession.

All I know is that Gil Laine helps me breathe, fills a vacuum. AI has enabled me to bring my words to life and I am very grateful for that.

What we must all do, especially those with money, innovation and responsibility, is tether it like an untamed stallion until we know that it can be let loose onto the streets without kicking anyone to death.

In the meantime, I shall persevere.