…and it was batshit brilliant

It’s the Saturday night of Halloween weekend, and the pavements are clogged with clusters of shifty figures in dark hoodies, trackies and masks. I’m driving in circles around a Salford industrial estate in a cold fuzz of rain, the sat nav telling me to turn through a locked gate into an abandoned scrapyard. There’s another week to go ‘til Bonfire Night, but red sparks are detonating across the darkening sky. After navigating a labyrinth of missed turns and dead ends in the shadow of Strangeways prison, I slink down the back of a building, past locked metal shutters with pounding, sinister music coming from behind them, finally finding my destination.

There’s a full moon rising, there’s a lunar eclipse coming, and Samhain is only days away. And I’m in a venue the size of a garage, its walls and ceiling hung with tinsel curtains, fairylights, branches from my friend’s garden, creepily beautiful artwork and an assortment of other strange objects. At one end of the room is a makeshift stage: a spaghetti tangle of cables and musical instruments and my mates midway through their soundcheck.

backofthebrain formed earlier this year, a self-proclaimed ‘experimental witchcraft sound art band’, ‘sonic formation of four’ and ‘holistic collaborative movement’, and last week was their first live performance. For their debut event, they invited some of their closest kin to share the stage, and I was honoured to be among them. But…

When they asked if I wanted to perform, I wasn’t sure what my answer would be. I’ve been itching at the edges of my creative practice lately; chafing at the rejections from publishers who’ve told me what I’ve been working on since Dear Neighbour is too risky for them to take a chance on. I’ve been explicitly told to make my writing less weird and more palatable. And… it’s a nah from me. The cornerstone of my creative process has been about cultivating the permission to be and express my weird, authentic self. Without dilution. Without apologies. I want to take risks, be bold, be brave. I’ve been clawing towards that possibility my entire life. I want my voice to get stronger, more distinctive and more ferocious with every piece I write. And I want performing to be an extension of that: a way to share and strengthen my trust in myself, my voice and my writing.

That tension between what I feel most drawn towards and what’s been asked and expected of me has been a performance boner-killer. But because backofthebrain’s members are all dear friends and gorgeous, supportive souls, when I shared this, the encouragement was clear. You don’t have to do anything we’ve seen from you before. Do whatever you want. Make it as out-there as you want. We’ll help however we can.

This was an incredible luxury and freedom: the kindness and generosity of being held, encouraged, and championed by trusted, understanding family was the permission slip I needed to go back to my journal, pore through its pages, and start to stitch together the fragments I found there into a new performance piece exploring sex, shame, recovery from religious trauma, embodiment and kink. Intuition and bibliomancy gave me several pages of raw, real, gross, strange scorching words, which I took along to a backofthebrain rehearsal having never read them aloud, not even to myself.

With the band’s encouragement, I whispered, spoke and screamed into a mic set up in my friend’s living room, while they listened and improvised a real-time sound performance based on what they heard. And let me tell you… in that ten minutes or so, something transformative happened for me.

I’ve never experienced that sort of collaboration: a real, truthful, relentless blending of skill, courage, care and empathy. The band truly listened to me, and responded in their gloriously unique ways — from a vocal backdrop of unhinged animal moans to a pulsing bassline to pounding drums to a symphony of found sound samples being layered into a real-time aural collage of chanted prayers, synths and beats — co-creating something gloriously chaotic and skin-sizzingly magical.

Doing it live, to a real audience of friends and strangers, still seemed out of reach. I was in limbo: that space between seeing a path unfold and being afraid to commit to it. We made plans to practice together again, to build my confidence in the weeks before the gig.

And then various things interfered with those intentions, and by the time last Saturday came, we’d still only had that initial first experience of experimenting together. Fuck it, right? Queer failure, let’s go. And if that sounds flip, let me restate it for real: I am so grateful for the courage and generosity of my chosen creative family in their willingness to risk imperfection. It’s something I massively respect and admire, and a permission I’m trying to cultivate for myself too.

So we did it. Before backofthebrain started their set, they let me take a mic and claim a corner at the front of their space, starting to spit and sing and howl words I’d lifted and remixed from the most vulnerable parts of pages I’d initially written only for myself, while the four band members behind me yet again built a real-time bridge of sonic force and strength, all of us amplifying each other in an ephemeral, improvised performance that we could never replicate the same way again even if we wanted to.

Turns out it’s so much more satisfying to howl at the moon when you have the backing of a pack. Who knew, right? And backofthebrain’s own set was incredible. If you get the chance to see them live, I promise you won’t regret it. But I can’t promise I won’t be there, crawling around on the floor and screaming. Because the taste of that freedom was truly intoxicating, and I already want more.

You can watch a video of that performance here