Learn to love the word NO
This is perhaps one of the most important things I learned in the creative 'industries'
I was sorting out stuff in the attic at the weekend, trying to find an electrical lead for a piece of sound kit that was safely stored in a labelled box, or so I thought. The kit was there, but the lead to power it, a very particular type and style of cord with a connector that simply can’t or won’t plug into anything else, had gone absent without leave.
Pic: Nick Fewings
I tipped the box out eventually, a deep storage box, sifted through it, twice, but to no avail.
You’ll recognise that moment, I’m sure, when logic departs the building, and you start looking in the oddest and most unlikely of places for something that should really just be in one particular, well-labelled box.
“I’m sure I left it in this one,” I said, frustrated. “It was right next to the Oojamafumple, I just know it.”
I haven’t used the Oojamafumple for nigh on a decade, but that’s in the box, so why wasn’t the Oojamafumple’s bespoke-designed lead?
“It don’t make no sense,” I kept repeating in West Country meets Devon meets Norfolk accented confusion.
So out came the other boxes, in a hopeful yet hopeless attempt to find the stupid wire I needed.
Old hard drives that have probably long since lost any ability to reboot or reconnect. A box of A5 presentation cards and other paraphernalia that I used when attending wedding fairs to hawk my services as a photographer. The old monitor box, which contained two small broken Fostex intercom speakers and five pairs of cans, as they call headphones in the radio business. The ear cushions had rotted or done that sticky-plastic thing in time, but I hold on to them for sentimental reasons.
And then there was a box of paperwork from my radio days, holding a set of A4 lever-arch files, which raised a nostalgic smile. A blue one was labelled ‘audition applications’ also with the words ‘useful criticism’, although the c word was incorrectly spelt C R I T I C Y S M.
Next to it sat a file in the Union Flag pattern and colours, produced long before you might have simply been accused of having particular political views. It started on the 31st January 1983, when I was fifteen years old. This was the year I started learning to be a radio presenter.
There followed in date order, letter after letter after letter after letter of rejections. The entire file was crammed full of them, so much so, they pushed the front and back covers out, if only just slightly. Interestingly, it did not feature the word ‘Rejections,’ and I wonder if that’s because my mentor, a man I have spoken of before in an earlier incarnation of this podcast, had suggested to me the following.
“Keep every letter where someone says no. Although learn to love the word no.
I did exactly as asked.
It’s difficult to pinpoint the very moment I decided to become a radio presenter for the formative work years of my life, but before these tentative steps and actually receiving my first pound note for working professionally, I was a volunteer presenter at a radio station which piped programmes into small Bakelite headsets belonging to patients in hospital.
I’m not sure hospital radio exists as a worldwide thing, but certainly in the UK it did, and still does, though when I was a volunteer, the array of entertainment was somewhat limited.
This was 1983. Owning a Sony Walkman was considered posh, there wasn’t such a thing, of course, as mp3, and the Internet wasn’t going to be available for ordinary folk for another six years.
So if you were in hospital, you might have a radio that matron constantly turned down, a TV with three channels, possibly four if someone had actually worked out how to tune in the newly launched Channel Four, and this Bakelite pair of headphones, like the ones telephone operators wore. Uncomfortable, hard plastic phone-like receivers, not always with padded ear bits, that offered private listening to a range of ten services on a rotary switch that didn’t always work well, and certainly didn’t provide the number of stations it purported to offer.
You had Radio 2, Radio 1 on the children’s ward, Radio 3 for classical music, Radio 4 for the intellectuals and then, hospital radio, which usually came on at something like 6pm and finished at 11pm, with extra hours at the weekend, very useful for patients who don’t exactly plan their lives around volunteer opening hours.
Our job was simply to visit patients on the ward, say hello, call matron if they didn’t look particularly well, which given they were in hospital, was reasonably often, panic slightly if at first they didn’t wake when you said, “Hello Ken,” and collect requests, so that we might play their favourite songs. It was a great idea, but when Ken had finally come round and asked for three in a row from Doris Day for the fifth time that week, you can understand why many patients pretended to be asleep when we popped round.
The station was staffed by people with good intentions, I am sure, but nearly all of whom harboured a not-so-secret desire to one day be on a ‘proper’ radio station that could be picked up in a car.
But the work they did, the work we did, was, we thought, reasonably important, certainly community-facing, supportive, empathic, caring and even though some of our listeners were quite literally in pain while they listened, and not always from their medical issues, it was a lot of fun.
For me, it was all of the above, and a springboard.
Schooling had been a disaster, in my mind at least. I just didn’t seem to excel at anything in particular, and I’d quite by accident happened across an organisation I could volunteer at which, overnight, seemed to offer me a way to be someone who was noticed, albeit through small unwieldy and uncomfortable Bakelite headphones between the hours of 6pm and 11pm, with a few more hours at the weekend.
But if this was exciting, can you imagine my joy when my earliest radio mentor, a man called Robbie Owen, who had worked professionally on pirate radio, suggested that with my enthusiasm, I could probably do this for a living.
Note he said enthusiasm. I don’t think he initially mentioned skill.
I’d only just started my volunteer role, and now here I was, aged only fifteen, thinking I was the next, ‘insert big radio star from your neck of the woods’ here. My paper round money went into cassettes, padded envelopes, A4 sheets of paper, and stamps, and I started sending demo tapes off with complete belief that someone would very quickly hear potential.
This was noted by Robbie at the hospital radio station, and so it was he who suggested it might not happen briskly, and that I should learn to love the word no, to start with, initially.
Let me share some of the sentences from letters returned, and this by the way is just one lever-arch file. The most colourful in the colours of our national flag, followed by those two more, sombre-toned dark grey versions.
Most began with the sentence “I hope you will excuse a stereotype letter,” or a variant of, which clearly meant, no. Radio London sent me a good half dozen of the same letter through the years, the spelling mistakes within it never changed.
From Southern Sound, “We hope you find what you are looking for.”
No.
Devon Air sent possibly the smallest letters, not in text, though that had scant ink on a page, but in terms of the size of paper. It wasn’t even A5.
No.
LBC, a news station, though it was way too early, aged sixteen by now. John Perkins, the then controller, did at least write me a more personalised letter ending with, “I think you should approach one of the smaller stations, right now.”
No.
I did what was suggested and approached the tiddlers in the pond. Most answered with copied responses that were sometimes addressed to the wrong person by name. Plymouth Sound, being a smaller station, pointed out, “We have limited requirements, and you’re not local,” a recurring theme. It felt like the kind of pub you walk into in a backwater neighbourhood where all heads turn and the place goes silent.
No.
BRMB in Birmingham; “You’re not suitable.”
Radio Kent; “You do not talk with a Kentish base.”
Thames TV: “In applying to us, you are starting at the top of the tree. I do not need to train people.”
No.
Radio Hallam; “I think for you, it is unlikely in the foreseeable future.”
There were, here and there, more personal observations, which are of course useful, though they weren’t very promising.
“Your voice is not particularly special. You have a rather breathy style. You sound too nervous. You need to tighten up your presentation. You need to learn how to read scripts. What about working behind the scenes? You lack distinctive style. I don’t think what I’ve heard separates you from anyone else, so accordingly I am returning your tape to you.”
Whilst it was useful to be able to reuse tapes that were returned to me, that ‘return to sender’ approach stung a little.
Capital Radio sent me a letter dated 22nd October 1984 just to tell me they’d lost my demo. That heralded a new approach that felt to me like, “Stop sending this rubbish in!”
A pattern was emerging with the sign offs; “rest assured, your details have been kept on file.”
I wondered where this big filing cabinet might be kept, and even in my wondrous youthful naivety of expectation and belief, I could smell Farmer Brown’s field of freshly laid manure on an early Spring morning within the growing stack of such responses.
Plough on I did, in all respects.
Having said that, an early letter in 1985 surfaced when I thumbed through these papers, from BBC Radio Cambridgeshire, which contained four paragraphs of the word no, essentially. But four paragraphs were one of my longest responses, and it had taken two years of no after no after no to get to something quite this verbose. Park that one for a moment.
I wrote to every single radio station, both BBC and commercial, local, regional and national, and even international. American stations, outfits as far away as New Zealand, and stations in countries whose language I couldn’t even speak, hoping that somehow an English afternoon spot might magically appear.
Many of these stations received up to half a dozen letters across five years, in what I suppose could be referred to as my “heroically unsuccessful correspondence era,” culminating in exasperation, from me, and from them, with one of the final letters in the third file from an chap called Philip Bacon, the editor at LBC Crown, who said, “You do not meet any of our requirements. I am sorry, but really we are unable to offer you any prospect of working here.”
What struck me, sitting cross-legged on the attic floor surrounded by decades of old paper, was how even when someone was effectively saying, “Absolutely not. Never. Please stop writing to us,” I never really gave up.
Perhaps instead of referring to this as my “heroically unsuccessful correspondence era,” I could rephrase it, for it to become my fingers in ears “la la la la la la not listening” period.
This, I think, is the hardest part about being in the business of trying to create things, be that sound, pictures or whatever. Not the criticism, not even failure. It’s the feeling of standing outside rooms where conversations are happening without you. You send off the tape, the manuscript, the photographs, the proposal, the demo, the script, and somewhere in your mind, there’s a small fantasy that somebody important will instantly understand you.
They’ll hear what you hear in yourself. Mostly though, they don’t. Or they can’t. Or perhaps more truthfully, they’re too busy working in their own day-to-day, to spend much energy worrying about your dream.
The arts are full of people carrying invisible lever-arch files. Actors who were told they weren’t believable, writers informed they lacked a voice, photographers accused of being too commercial by artists and too artistic by commercial clients. Musicians advised to sound more like somebody else, right before the industry suddenly changes direction and starts searching for originality again.
Entire careers are often built one inch to the side of rejection.
And yet, oddly, being told ‘no’ leaves fingerprints on the work itself. I think you can often hear it. The broadcasters who survive years of it usually end up sounding more human than the polished prodigies who sailed through untouched. The photographers who struggle for recognition often notice people differently. The comedians who bomb repeatedly either disappear or become astonishingly good.
What I’m saying is, if you stay long enough, you stop trying to sound or be like what they want and accidentally become yourself instead.
Some of the stations that rejected me would eventually employ me. Some would ask me back years later, as indeed BBC Radio Cambridgeshire did when, finally aged 21, having worked for a wonderful tin-pot, totally illegal radio station in Lanzarote for a year, a letter arrived from a Programme Organiser called Roland Myers, with the words, “I think I may well have something that could interest you.”
That was my first, if you like, ‘proper’ radio station gig. And, it had only taken eight years.
It’s a useful reminder that in the arts, rejection is not always the final judgement. Often it’s timing, yes, sometimes geography, and politics.
And every now and then, if I’m being honest with myself, I simply wasn’t good enough.
Yet.
That’s the bit that’s hard to hear, or read.
Not yet.
But not yet is very different from never.
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