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Like me, were you a struggling creative (writer, musician, artist, designer) etc in or around 1988 - when a competition called "A question of style" was put to you. It had 4 options - you could either write an essay (the cool manifesto), enter some Photography, make a video, or design some clothes. Were you on a government training scheme at the time (like me), or perhaps you were a student, or simply on the dole - and wanted to change your life. How did you find out about the comp? (I had the entry form given to me by my training programme sponsor). Did you win - or just sent off your entry and that was the end of it ?(perhaps - perhaps not )

More importantly - how has life been ever since? On and off, mines been pretty lousy, with a lot of negative stuff happening from mega corporate creative land. Do you feel like someone's simultaneously reaping the benefits of your labour while giving you a hard time? Yeah - that's how I feel sometimes. If any of this seems familiar, PM me or something. Going through this on your own is horrible - isn't it! Maybe it doesn't have to be!!!

I would have been about 24 when I sent my entry and application form off, which means most of us would be in the 35 to 40/41 age group now. I'd be more than interested to meet or hear from anyone else who entered, and had similar experiences to mine. One thing I remember about that entry form was the clause which said "All entries belong to the promoter" Does that mean the content on the bits of paper, and/or - in some way the person who sends it also? Do you sometimes wish now that you hadn't entered it at all - looking at the last 16 or so years of your life - yep, me too!!! Maybe we could all get together and form a creative community of our own, and begin to have a little bit of the fun that all those others had. Perhaps have something more to show for our lives at 60 (girls) 65 (boys) than memories of feeling harrassed and jumped on from a great height.

Tell me about any other input you might have had with the 'Biz' - and were there any repurcussions?

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The net result of this on me is that alarm bells go off if I'm with someone who has anything to do with the biz........... simply because I'm understandably wary of them.

In a way, I hope the creative people of Moscow, Prague, Warsaw, Kiev etc are reading some of my postings because they're written by a guy who was totally slaughtered (almost) by showbiz politics. Found himself in a country where there was no recourse to anything and just had to put up with it. Your music/free arts scene is comparitively new in relation to ours, and you fought for many freedoms we in the west took for granted for decades before.

I was subjected to a psychological fear that made me look to another time and set of images for the inspiration to carry on. It was like having a metaphorical corporate Luftwaffe coming at you day in day out, and I'm not sure whether I was an analogous 1941 Londoner, or a worker in their 1942 apartment by the Volga, but it was like an unprovoked attack had been launched on a guy who wasn't out to hassle anyone in his life....just try to improve it by doing what he could! Just do what you can to ensure that a similar thing doesn't happen to you, and that you're allowed to enjoy the results of your labours, rather than be made to feel like an isolated person in an alleyway somewhere being metaphorically kicked to death in some infernal Kesselschlacht. No one tells you anything in the UK, and then you find yourself being put through purgatory for not knowing either. I'm not really sure I like what the UK is turning into as a result. We're becoming an ugly, violent society, steeped in injurious untruth, and it's a culture that's encouraged not discouraged by the people/places that you'd least expect it. Please study our excesses and guard against them in your own societies. It's like they steal, lie, and then play corporate/political hex games to kill off the victims. We have our own Stalinist purge with all the same MOs that were employed then in your part of the world - except that it's done implicitly and not explicitly here. (literal tortures replaced by abstract ones, like the wife beater who doesn't punch his womans face because the bruises show in public)........... And we're supposed to know better.

Anyway, I'll live in the hope that maybe some of your bands play in our country some time. If you do you can be assured that here's one guy who'd welcome you with huge amounts of enthusiasm.

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One peice of advice I'd give to anyone given a similar 'opportunity'? Don't enter it unless you've got a management company/agent working for you......and that you have a solid reliable network of contacts and buddies who tell you stuff as and when. So when do we get a Polish, Czech, Russian, Ukrainian etc rock tour over here then? Certainly make for a better night out than some of the shysters we have for a music scene.

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Re: The Brits tonite. Yawn, Here we go again, the usual celeb drenched snort/drinkathon with loads of hype and all that post 90s bull****. I'd rather have an Ivor Novello award any day. It's much more credible, and nowhere near as bombastic/naff.

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"......and that you have a solid reliable network of contacts and buddies"

This is very important because I'm not totally sure about some of mine. One useful test is to put something contraversial into the conversation and see what happens. I won't say what mine was, but suffice to say that some close friends failed quite spectacularly. So much so that you ask whether they'd be any good at all - y'know confiding in about ideas etc................Probably not.

All of which is why I'm concidering doing what probably should have happened about 21 years ago - go to college, but NOT in the UK. Probably not much point in a UK H.E course, it certainly wouldn't make for a particularly enjoyable time, and what would you do with the resulting skills here anyway? There's not very much left here really.

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As someone who entered that competition years ago, I'm not sure that what resuted out of mine (and probably the thousands of other entries) was really what was intended looking at how we have developed culturally as a result. Seeing all those yuppies in their yuppie cars listening to their yuppified interpretations of erstwhile cool sounds - and with that nasty yuppy attitude that preveailed over the last 10 years or so. It's a bit like the film Gremlins where (was it Mogwai?) is really likeable, friendly and cute, but all those other ones most certainly weren't.

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I suppose there's a certain wry irony in knowing why a lot of trendy people look the way they do and listen to some of the music they've been hearing in recent years! LOL

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Oh - and if you're making radio, don't give any tapes of your work to ANYONE without a cast iron guarentee that that person will communicate any feedback to you and tell you who they might have forwarded them to. I did, in the belief that the person I was 'befriended' by was honest and genuine. On retrospect I don't think they were particularly, and I wouldn't mind knowing - 12 years after - what happened to a certain radio series I did. The results of not knowing, or finding out that the person was less than scrupulous about their motives can be rather devastating!

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How do you know if your band works?

If you're in a band you'll know whether there's substance to the show when you play a gig in front of a crowd you've never met before. I was in a group in 1995 who had been gigging for two years before I got involved with the music part of it, but they were usually playing to friends or acquaintances of the band or management. These shows would be fairly well attended and received, but they're playing to a crowd with loyalty to the band on social terms not musical or aesthetic ones. When we did a 1995 gig to an audience we'd never seen in our lives they totally loved it - doing all those rock gig things (crowd surfing, stage diving, jumping around and having a great time), so we were obviously doing something right, and playing to the right audience...and, you know - we weren't even the headline band! Cool huh!

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Y'know, the thing that is a constant source of agony and irritation is how - after this has happened to you - and there's a regime of mis or no information afterwards - you begin to feel like you've been culturally mugged. The entertainment or creative economy is notoriously full of people who won't tell you anything anyway so while your input might be making a big difference to someone somewhere you're just going through life trying to cope with the meagre stuff you have at your disposal. You're relentlessly criticised by people who might even be party to the gainful side of your input anyway........which makes it even worse. And you're supposed to base a lifetimes worth of decisions on a situation like this. If anyone else entered that comp and the same thing is happening to you you only have my condolences. It's one thing to pinch or appropriate an idea, it's another entirely to effectively assasinate those who might have helped originate it.

I was 24 years old when I entered that - It seems like a very very long time ago!

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What would be a fairer way? I know that it might be a bit much to expect corporate mechanoids to have enough imagination, but how about bringing all these people together for some sort of music event/careers fair so they get to see what their work produced and perhaps have a chance at developing their own future too. The worst thing you can do to a creative person is isolate them or deprive them the chance to interact with fellow creatives in a conducive and mutually beneficial situation. That's how most of what you hear, see or read in cultural activity happens anyway, so something that might have brought people together in celebration of creative achievement and being able to think about the future would be a much more just solution than the one imposed on some of them.

Y'know, you could record an album of the music from it - What would it be called? ..............."Now thats what I call social inclusion Vol 1"

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And if there was any justice in the world we'd get Vols 2, 3, 4 etc - which would also be a useful and interesting journal as to the progress and growth of the peoples lives as they continue developing. Much better and equitable way of doing things than making them feel like crap all the time, inflicting excruciating boredom on them, lying about them, corporate bully boy/girl tactics, denial of quality of life, and loads of other stuff that certainly happened to me.

Another piece of advice by the way is if you do a visual show for a band - which I did for about a year from 93-early 95 - and someone videos the result - as somebody did - make sure you get a copy of the tape because that's an important part of your CV, and not only is a useful reference point it's also a demo of what you can do if you're looking for work. I'd love to know where the tape of our show went - and I'm sure it wasn't erased either. What a total shyster. Oh - why is showbiz such a crappy industry full of equally crap people?

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Another piece of advice: If you are doing a visual show for a band and someone shows up at about 11.30pm asking you to sign bits of paper saying that you don't want to be paid for doing it - just say 'Nah, not really mate'. I had that happen to me in 93 as the guitar/vocals guy turns up after obviously thinking about this at work all day/evening, and because it's rather late I'm tired and sign his bits of hastilly draughted bits of paper. From what I can remember the idea was that I was to waive any money for doing the show while the band work to establish itself, which seems a bit wierd really because bands don't make much (if anything) anyway for a long time. At the local band level most things are done on a fairly casual basis so this 'signing' thing seems a bit strange - not to mention somewhat pretentious - and I have wondered since whether there was something else going on there. Probably not - but under the circumstances - you never know do you. Very odd, very very odd.

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How many years did I lose because of that one I wonder?

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I was 24 years old when I entered this competition, 26 when I joined a local radio station. Since then I've probably been surrounded by people who don't or won't tell you anything, then expect you to make decisions within that environment. If you've ever worked in a creative industry like writing or radio you'll find it enfuriating when you get that constant knowing smile from people but no information. This shatters your confidence. You get very little or no guidance from anywhere, and there are no people to discuss stuff with when you have a problem or situation that needs sorting out.

If this is being culturally or socially mugged then I'd say to people be very careful when you have contact with the industry at all - and on any level - and enroll in a 'creative self-defence' course before you make your journey into what for some can be a real nightmare. It might all look like good fun - and perhaps for a few it is - but it can also be a very painful experience and you can see all your hopes and aspirations evaporate.

The most solid advice I'd give to anyone who may be about to go through all this - get yourself into college - where you'll have an infrastructure to support you in a lot of creative projects you might want to do and get with the student union to sign up for all the different societies available to you. You stand a good and better chance of meeting fellow budding musicians/writers/performing arts people in a campus environment and there are loads of opportunities to learn aspects of the business in a safer - more fun - environment than the one I knew. You'll have the chance to put on your gig etc AND even get paid for it from union/JCR/Soc Sec funds, so after three years of great fun and music you'll be better equipped for a future in the creative economy than I think I must be. I know people who started their careers in the union buildings of their respective colleges. You'll have some really good mutually interested friends too!

And - hey - this is worth thinking about! If you want to do altruistic/charity type stuff with your newly found contacts, knowledge, experience and resulting social strength you'll be in a much better position to do so then you would otherwise.