Damian Cowell - My Shitness Terrifies Me. But it Could Be Worse.

I’m fucken useless. I’m a bit of curlicue filigree on the swinging front gate of a disused steel mill. I’m the deeply intricate workings of a giant pre-digital TV slumped at 180 degrees in a five-storey pile at the local tip. I’m Sartre’s Collected Works, on Brendan Fevola’s bookshelf. If you wind up on a desert island, post-apocalypse, you’d better hope I’m not your only companion. I’ve spent a lifetime polishing my otiose caboose while the train’s well and truly left the station. People make communities, build cities, cure illness, raise tomorrow’s leaders, machete a path through the jungle of modern living and, meanwhile, I spend all my time on a rhyme for ‘lugubrious’. I blame music. It had a paralysing effect on me from the moment my parents bought the All My Loving EP for my fifth birthday. Since then, it’s all I know. Don’t ask me about China’s Gang of Four, but I can tell you all about the rock group. I’m no good with a drill, but I can name the Blur song that features one. As life’s great widescreen drama unfolds, I’m there with my eyes closed, listening to the soundtrack. But don’t worry. I’m not that bad. There’s a happy ending. A lifetime spent on music has only made me a talent of mediocre proportion – in fact, by the seat of me strides, I’ve only just managed to claw enough ability to MAKE music. And thank Christ for that. Because if I was REALLY good, if had real music taste, brains, coolness, perspicacity, I’d be fucked: I’d be writing for Pitchfork.

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