- Marion Michell, ‘Subnival, or: Sister, Teach Me About Time!’

I don’t remember living without pain and I can’t imagine a future without it. That’s not to be dramatic or neurotic… although I realise I apologise for my pain on a regular basis which is something I’m trying to do less of. I was born with Hip Dysplasia and have referred chronic pain often known as fibromyalgia. It’s been with me all along. The red thread shaping every experience and life choice.

It has many colours. It heaves, it sings, it distracts; a constant dancer. It’s also a burglar of time. I watch her leap out the bedroom window clutching a hold-all of plans, friendships, thoughts, ideas, jokes, personality.

It goes without saying that music in many ways has been a preserver and friend. My faithful rickety drawbridge from in here to out there. Singing soothes that massive nerve and writing soothes pain’s accompanying destructive pair: anguish and guilt.

After my last surgery, it was very hard to feel like myself rather than a body in crisis (3). I now correlate this to spending weeks submitted to tubes, to cannulas, to morphine, to machines and months beached on a memory foam mattress on a tv-prop hospital bed my dad brought home from work. My mind fully vacated. I became divided from my body as though it was exploring its own changed personality (3). Everything became disjointed. Even after regaining the use of my legs I found it difficult to chemically and socially re-adjust. I turned to my faithful friends: writing and music in an attempt to make sense of, or at least fill, this gaping void between my mind and body.

In the music I created around the time of my recovery I noticed that the writing mirrored my physicality - fractured lyrics, stumbling drums, dissonance. This in turn helped me to better understand how my body was communicating. It became evident that when I was in less pain, more present, I found things made more sense and the way I wrote was more linear and formulaic - my thoughts that way inclined. In Devotion, on her creative process, Patti Smith writes, “most often the alchemy that produces a poem or a work of fiction is hidden within the work itself”. So through music I am potentially learning about my condition? Wild and cool. She continues, “Why do we write?… Because we cannot simply live”.

Beyond my “inner feud of frantic searching” (1), I do believe artistic representations of pain can help healthcare systems and patients alike better understand chronic pain. Instead of a number between 1-10, instead of the traffic light system, instead of circling a lot at the bottom of a grey form. It’s promising to learn that Frida Kahlo’s chronic pain and trauma imbued self-portraits have already begun to be studied within modern pain sciences. Art, music and metaphor speak volumes where the literal can not. Please note this is said with a vicious side-eye to the disturbing lack of research in to women’s pain specifically. A holistic appreciation of pain is critical for an empathetic and skilled approach to care.

Obviously, where I find inspiration and empowerment within my experiences of infirmity, navigating this as a working musician is to learn that desire and capacity grow at wildly disproportionate rates (1). Here, I am writing about creating and discovery through pain but it would be remiss of me to not caveat this with the truth that there are often times where creating is also completely off the cards, and often those with illness or disability are only revered once they have turned their pain in to art, in to a perceived strength, which in itself is deeply problematic. This quote from Johanna Hedva rings around my head, “We count among our strengths our strength, and among our weaknesses, our weakness, and the only radicality we can yield to this binary is to invert it, to count what is usually considered weak as maybe some other kind of strength” (4). Sometimes, I am just unable. Within an ableist industry, and society at large, we are marked on how we pulse with life, drive, and self-image. Failure to perform, to work, to earn, is largely magnified and debilitating conditions are judged as deficiencies. Collected resentment shapes its thin, green lips to mouth you are just not good enough.

In those moments, a turn to Joni, to Marina, to Frida, to Sevdaliza, to Twigs, to Gaga, to artists who fearlessly permeate their art and platform with their most honest experiences of pain, furore and self-love, helps to feel seen, understood and re-centred. Echoing Patti again, they remind me: we write because and when we have to. It’s self-care. I contain multitudes and I’m still learning.

The red thread will continue to weave through my writing like an untoward companion. Not always the main character, but an earthy bed from which all other experiences are borne and appreciated.

Through music her jagged edges are rounded, her razor point teeth filed, her thorny hands softened. In these moments of relief I’m grateful, and each time a little stronger. As Marion Michell puts, “In artistry I find the last unlittered chamber in the house [pain] built, where it can holler… but cannot rule”.

Funny Girl (Imogen and the Knife REWORK) - thredd

thank you to the below authors and texts for allowing me to see myself in words and encouraging a directness in these topics I had been afraid of approaching in my own work, and to Rodeo Mag for commissioning this essay in the first place xxx

1. Marion Michell, ‘Subnival, or: Sister, Teach Me About Time!’

2. Patti Smith, ‘Devotion’

3. Boudicca Press, Ed. Nici West, ‘Disturbing the Body’

4. Johanna Hedva, ‘How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability and Doom’

Share

‘you should journal’ a friend kindly offers as I’ve clearly just said something a bit whacky.

Hm, journalinggggg. As a chronic writer (lol) you’d think I’d be on this. I have tried, but performance ego glares back at me from the pages. Writing as if someone is going to read it one day, as if my handwriting needs to be good, as if I need to explain everything, or even blur details, just in case someone finds it and I get found out. For what, who knows. I should journal! Maybe I’ll find out. And then they will. God, the cycle.

Point is, I do journal, but it’s impulsive, messy, short, noncommittal. I write when I’m moved to write, and I think it’s important for me I don’t see this as a duty, but as faithful friend - helping to eject whatever static is rattling around inside. In a way that is quick, raw and most of the time not literal at all. Quickly scribbled ‘poems’ become a neutraliser, especially when I realise they give an actual shape to the anxieties, fixations, and perplexing, jagged, messy thoughts, and in doing so, strips them of their heat and sometimes even exposes the very root.

I always think of this Patti Smith quote, “most often the alchemy that produces a poem or a work of fiction is hidden within the work itself”. So, if you’re like me and the idea of journaling feels overwhelming, like you’re demanding revelation or insight in perfectly formed contemplations, try dealing in colour, imagery, metaphor, spaces, edges, texture, stories. One word at a time. You might just watch your inner psyche revealed before you in all its wild, weird and wonderful glory !!!

So, that said, what brain mulch made its way in to my phone this month? It’s Notes App Roulette time, baby:

Thinking about my school ‘jotter’. A small yellow notebook with my name in my best joined-up hand writing in the little rectangle on the front. Just a spare exercise book for notes and whatever. It was mainly used to play MASHED or tear pages out for secret notes and fortune tellers or any other game that told you how many boyfriends you had. But it would also house the occasional half formed poem, lyric, letter, some plot outline for the new Pirates of the Caribbean that I was gonna cast myself in, just whatever thought I could snatch between being flung from maths to P.E. I do still obviously have notebooks and sketchpads that I scribble my brain in to, but there’s something about the unadulterated chaos of a JOTTA that I’m remembering fondly.

Then I thought, ah yeah, kinda like my NOTES APP. Last week a mate who is also a songwriter suggested playing ‘notes app roulette’ over a pint and I had to decline. It’s a hellscape in there. Who knows what you’re gonna get. I wanted him to still like me after our pint. But it did encourage me to sift through and see what’s up in my own brain. Amongst the reams of to do lists that include eat and shower (yikes), and music musings like, snare crunchier in outro no flams no fuckin around, there’s a lot of quick little poems, usually hastily jabbed in to my phone in transit, between places, or just before bed, in attempt to get that final thought out. They weren’t ever meant to have another destination other than my phone, but in the spirit of keeping this substack rough, unedited and all about *process*, I thought I’d share a few.

What follows are some true roughcuts from my skull during an extremely busy and intense time. Enjoy !! Send me yours back. I guess that is Notes App Roulette (with choice) xxx

Share imogen and the knife - rough cuts

A year on, a question I still get frequently asked is about the choice to incorporate ‘the knife’, something so personal, into my name. So as a birthday present, here’s the context. My relationship with my body and pain is something that underpins all the work, as it does my life, even if just subliminally. It’s so intrinsic to the way I experience the world that it only made sense to incorporate it, boldly, into my artist name. It’s an empowering reclamation of the surgical knife for sure, but it’s also a joining together of my identity. I feel whole now (it’s kinda weird).

It was my bff James (the inimitable artist Saint Torrente btw) that first suggested the addition of the knife on one of our regular everything calls and I dismissed it quite abruptly (sorry James). Then one morning I woke up and immediately said it out loud. Something had shifted in the night that made me wake up with it ringing around my skull. I sat with it for a while, spoke to friends, my sister, my parents, floated it as an idea with people whose minds and eyes I really value and adore. I then googled ‘Imogen’ as a last ditch attempt to see if anything else sparked imagination or if ‘the knife’ was it. The first image to come up was a painting of the character Imogen from the Shakespeare play ‘Cymbeline’. She was beautiful, enrobed in blue, and… she was carrying a knife. It was over. Done. It all felt bigger than me then and unquestionably right. To be honest, that kind of thing has been happening ever since. Points meeting, perfect convergence, a joining together of my identity in a way that makes me feel whole… and as someone who has always felt fractured - be it between cities, between accents, within my body, on and off stage - I’m still getting used to it.

Building this world has been an ongoing, living process. Every decision - visual, sonic, performance - has been part of an evolving language, one that I’m still learning how to speak fluently. But the connection between artist and audience, between Imogen and the Knife and those who resonate with it, has been the most powerful discovery of all.

So here I am, a year in. The Knife is still sharp (ha), still shifting in my hands. The journey has only just begun. But if the first year has taught me anything, it’s that meaning is not something you impose - it’s something you uncover, something revealed in the space between the music and you legends who choose to engage. Thank you thank you thank you.

I’ve just announced a string of festivals that are gonna bring the knife to corners of the UK I’ve never played before. Hopefully there’s one near you…

Hey, so, thanks for being here. I wanted to kick off these roughcuts with something amazing, something insatiable, something so well written I’d fancy myself a new career a novelist. Then I realised I was granting myself yet another creative pressure, and I had to remind myself I’d not entitled this series ‘roughcuts’ for nowt. It did make it glaringly obvious, though, I am constantly in the pursuit of pressure, or ‘a glutton for punishment’ as a close friend recently remarked. I’m not sure if this is a chase for meaning, for validation, or for the sharp edge of urgency. But I am afraid I’ve defined pressure as proof of purpose and that my discomfort means progress. That if I’m overwhelmed, I must be getting somewhere. Where, exactly? The finish line moves the moment it’s reached. So we’re back. This is why I created this space in the first place - a messy, unfinished journal, scrap book, sketch pad, chat room.

So, finally starting as I mean to go on - here’s a poem/idea I wrote at home entitled speedway racer. I’m writing a lot at the moment, and themes of racing - through life, away from and towards childhood, relationships, home, career - have started to become prevalent in every song, poem and thought. Newcastle Diamonds were a speedway racing troupe that my dad and his dad used to watch on the weekends in Byker (apt). There’s something about the theatre of it, the costume, the drama, the danger, the font!! that I have become obsessed with. There’s also something exhilarating about inserting myself or my female friends, as Geordie women, in to this image of masculine combat and thrill and nostalgia. I’m letting it ruminate.

I’m a speedway racer, tattooing tracks in your Earth

Digging in my heels and wheels, a spirograph of dirt

Men live by their boots, I learned to lead with my feet

If you’re gonna love me, you can kneel and kiss the peat

Cos I’m a speed racer

Diamond chaser

I’m getting quite old now but I’m reliant on the burn

The dirt how it has missed me, it’s gonna kiss me when I return

I belong in gods arms, he protects me at all costs

Every time I mount my steed I kiss my dirty cross

Cos I’m a speed racer

Diamond chaser

My hair is flowing like a dress

Heart pounding in my leather chest

I’ll crash in to your world again

The boys and I have made amends

The dirty world we all come from

No thinking skills - we all just run

You other me, I’ll other you

This bike was never made for two

I’m the speed racer

The diamond chaser

I’m speed racing

Diamond chasing

Share imogen and the knife - rough cuts

I’ll also be sharing musings, reflections and the ideas that shape the work—whether they make it into a song or not. From creative tensions to unexpected inspirations, from ancestral callings to chronic pain, from books to albums that I want to sleep inside, I wanted to create a place for exploration, honesty, and conversation. Really happy you’re here x

.

imogen and the knife - rough cuts.

Subscribe now