"Noise Damage" Goes Behind the Rock 'n' Roll Dream
James Kennedy
James Kennedy dealt with the collapse of his band by telling its story.
No one knows a musician’s life but another musician. Because they live their lives in public, we think we know, but the hours offstage are rarely what we believe them to be. On the rare occasions when we see them at home, they appear to have this epic lifestyle with endless money and fame. But it doesn’t always work that way, and it certainly doesn’t for indie rockers that more likely spend their lives offstage scrounging for extra cash by working extra jobs to support their musical careers. They may also be working endless hours on their own band by having to do all the extra work that mainstream artists hire people to do.
In his memoir Noise Damage: My Life as a Rock ‘n’ Roll Underdog, British musician James Kennedy invites his readers into his world as an indie artist. His band Kyshera never locked in on a steady set of musicians, and It didn’t get him as far as he hoped. His experience with Kyshera showed him the truths and lies of the music industry, including how unstable and unpredictable the career of a musician can be. Kennedy and his band had high hopes for achieving fame and becoming the next big rock stars, but after years of pursuing that goal, Kennedy realized that the dream he and his band were sold years earlier was not achievable. In Noise Damage: My Life as a Rock ‘n’ Roll Underdog, Kennedy exposes the downsides of the rock ‘n’ roll dream, but the book does more than just air his grievances.
He learned the hard way that rock ‘n’ roll isn’t a meritocracy. “I’m sorry to break the bad news to you, but your favourite artists aren’t necessarily successful because they’re good,” Kennedy wrote. “They’re successful because someone somewhere pumped a ton of money up them and wangled some dodgy fuckery behind the scenes. That’s not to say that any of the artists in question weren’t talented, hardworking, and deserving of their success, but that their talent and hard work had nothing to do with their success. It’s an industry just like any other. And, to the guys in the boardroom, your favourite artist is nothing more than a product.”
Musicians never see themselves that way, of course, and that’s part of the challenge. They think of themselves as artists, but the larger labels see each new album as a product that is capable of selling many units. In many cases, labels allocate marketing money and energy based on the sales they expect and not the quality of the project..
For the musician though, the album is the culmination of a year or two of living—of playing gigs, having relationships, discovering influences, and finding musical ways to present them. “I listen to a lot of different styles of music and I make a conscious point of upgrading my inspiration tank regularly,” Kennedy wrote. “I don’t chase the inspiration, I feed it until it comes to me. But once a strong idea has landed, I quickly get a complete mental picture of the entire record that will form around it, including the production, instrumentation, and overall vibe.”
The popular image of rock stars is of people with entourages and people that do the rest of the work for them. At a rarified level, that happens, but all those helpers have to be paid. For young bands and indie labels strapped for cash, the artist has to do all those things. Kennedy writes in Noise Damage about having to also be Kyshera’s graphic designer, fundraiser, webmaster, manager, promoter, and driver. That gave him control over his music and image and how it entered the world, but things that don’t cost money cost time.
“For me, it was that 24/7, all-encompassing one-dimensional life that took its toll on me the most,” Kennedy wrote.
Noise Damage tells the story of Kyshera making enough progress to give Kennedy hope, but not enough to realize his goals. They could write, record, and perform songs he believed in, but if they couldn’t get fans, bookers, programmers, and labels to buy in, the songs didn’t mean anything. And if these investors didn’t buy in, the hours spent in the studio and at the computer didn’t mean anything either.
That made the questions more existential. If musicians can’t make it in the music world, what are they? In Kennedy’s case, the answer was ‘miserable and imploding.’ He internalized the pain and frustration of running in professional circles offstage and experiencing the con of the rock ‘n’ roll dream, but he put on a brave face in concert for the audiences.
“I tried so hard to keep it all together, but the last scraps of my human faculties had completely burnt out,” he wrote. “I was less than nine stone in weight, an insomniac; I’d been pissed every night for over a decade, I’d cut off my family, ruined a long-term relationship, was being a dick to my band mates, being even worse to myself; I was broke, I hated my life, and I regretted the day I ever picked up that fucking guitar. I was angry, bitter, frustrated, and saw my life as one consistently, pointless cringe-able fuck up. This was not the dream I had been sold. And yet only a few days ago I was the front man of a kick-ass rock ‘n’ roll band, jumping around a giant outdoor stage. On a beach. In the peak of summer. By the sea. In Italy!”
That kind of quick, detail-oriented writing makes Noise Damage an engaging read and makes it easy to imagine his band being interesting. And there’s an intriguing underlying drama in book as Kennedy tried to navigate the lies of the industry without truly understanding the big picture. He said in our interview, “The biggest mistake we made was not having enough faith in ourselves,” and maybe that’s true. Then again, the person buying lottery tickets doesn’t improve the odds of winning by having more faith in their numbers.
Kennedy is in a better place now because of Noise Damage. It started as a way of processing his experiences, and writing it turned out to be therapeutic but productive. In the process, he learned how to appreciate the successes he overlooked in his pursuit of something more.
“The industry will relentlessly drain your morale and faith in humanity—the antidote to that is spending time with your fans,” he wrote. “Knowing that songs you wrote in a dark little room while penniless have been played at people’s first dances and funerals, seeing people singing your words through tears, seeing your lyrics tattooed on people’s hearts, seeing the same faces at venues all over the country and seeing just how happy you can make someone by spending just a little time with them – all of that, there is absolutely nothing like it in the world and it makes all the pain, failure, doubt and struggle disappear in a flash.”
