Issue 158

10 Steps From Student to Rock Superstar!

22nd October 2007

1. Start with the steady maintenance of a pallid, washed out complexion. Remain inside at all times. Then get someone you know intimately, maybe your mum, to sew you into a pair of skin tight jeans.

2. Skulk around with headphones fixed to your head, deaf to the goings on of the real world, save for the intensely poignant din emitted by said audio equipment.

3. Pick a location or venue where you are likely to be surrounded by other such antisocial radicals shunned by society's embrace. There, may you frolic in typically lethargic fashion, together, across that concrete meadow may you bound in reassured isolation.

4. Accidentally drop a particularly trendy CD at a desired someone's feet, then remark about how you "liked them way before they got big" and how "they're just big corporate sell outs now." Take a drag on the cigarette you despise smoking and ask them if they play an instrument.

5. Go to JC's with them, maybe a pub in Brynmill, or your converted bedroom/studio/inspiration station, to discuss your artistic vision, all the while emphasising tremulously, how you should be the face of the musical revolution, not because your are better than them, but because you are so often told how aesthetically pleasing you are, and hey, you have 'the vision'. Quietly add that the chicks really dig the hushed bassist anyway. They will sip their lukewarm pint, curiously blissful, safe in your pledge that an abundance of weird sex will appease their yearning for musical celebrity.

6. Set up a MySpace, as a necessity it must include a lengthy and explicitly vainglorious, band biography section, clearly written by you but constructed in the third person. Also pepper the page with pseudo intellectual quips and one-liners, devoid of all meaning, such as "freedom isn't for the free." Along with these gems, add visual splendour to your page with black and white pictures of you, your cronies in the back shrouded in soft focus, so as not to detract from your image, the mouth piece of a generation. Add plenty of people you don't know and pester them everyday with minute and insignificant news of you and the band. E.g. I had bacon for breakfast...more band news soon.

7. While you sweat, cry and bleed away at the body of work that will undoubtedly make you a celestial rock poet around campus, get the others to carry out the menial tasks of recruiting other members, getting you a gig at Live and Wired or Sin City, maybe some air play on Xtreme Radio?

8. Collect together all of your friends, who, if you implemented the above steps correctly, will probably be pretty thin on the ground by now, and get them to attend your first gig. Before doing this you should have bored them and everyone you know about being "ferociously avant-garde and ahead of your time"

9. Practice at this stage is optional, the flurry of hype and enthrallment that surround the band now will be insatiable, nothing can go wrong, your fans will be begging you to play for them. Arrange an after show piss-up at your house, now known formally as 'The Inspiration Station.' Invite the girl/boy of your dreams, who will definitely want to sleep with you after your preposterously eminent performance.

10. Take the stage. The jeans may be loosening up by now, maybe sew yourself into a fresh pair. Drink plentifully to calm the nerves and prepare for your life to change forever. Super stardom awaits you, her supple creamy arms are parted ready to carry you into a drug soaked world, that will se you swamped with cash and supercilious majesty.

Jake Elliot