Diatonic Diary

Truth be told, I'm a bit long in the tooth to be trying to make a name for myself in the music world. If I tell you that I started my career as a programmer in pre-Google times you'll see what I mean. In it's absence I tended to post my difficult technical problems to Usenet , a kind of pre-cursor of Reddit though Usenet has never gone away. As often as not, the answer to my query would be 'RTFM'. The polite translation for this abbreviation is 'read the fine manual' . I'm the sort of person who gives up after reading half a page of flat-pack furniture instructions and just has a stab at it. I mean, you don't read a dictionary before you try to speak do you? Having said that, I quite often find myself having to dismantle my work to correct a mistake that I wouldn't have made if I'd followed the instructions. There is no manual for getting your music heard though musician, 6 Music presenter and founder of

The 90s baseball film Field of Dreams includes a memorable scene where the main character played by Kevin Costner is walking through a field of corn (as you do) when he hears a ghostly, disembodied voice call to him: Build it and he will come. I say it's memorable but I've never seen the film as I have no interest in baseball and Kevin Costner sends me to sleep. The scene works well as an allegory for the aspiration that if you are determined enough to follow your dream, anything is possible though. As such, its been borrowed and spoofed so often that it has become larger than the film it came from. Being a bit of a philistine, I first became aware of it when Jim Morrison paraphrased it in Wayne's World 2. When I started uploading my tunes to SoundCloud, I think I had a naive belief that eventually it would reach the ears of someone who liked it via Google, YouTube or whatever and that person would mention it to their friends and, before you know it