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Seconds away
Fiction: One computer, one man, one dream.
So here I am. Less than 30 seconds away from the biggest event of my life. I'm standing backstage, bottle of water in one hand, phone in the other. I've just received a text: “Gd luk 2nite hun, ill be watchin Xxx”. The text is a welcome distraction. In a few seconds, I will be stepping out onto a platform that is hanging 30 feet over a crowd of over 50,000 people.
I close my eyes, and remember the first time I stepped into the limelight. It was 15 years ago, at my old secondary school. I was already well known around the school, but for all the wrong reasons. Complications when my mother was giving birth meant that I was born with a mental disability. This was pretty obvious in school, as I kept getting words mixed up, and I said some pretty strange things over the years. Things that I would prefer to forget, but things that people always remember. As a result, I was bullied constantly. People were calling me names behind my back, pushing me around the corridors and, all the time, laughing at everything I said and did.
After about two years of the same stuff happening, my friend noticed the pain I was going through and said that I needed a distraction from it. He asked had I ever tried to make music using a computer. He then gave me a case with a CD inside. Reason 4, the writing on the disc read.
The feeling I got when I made my first track is something I can’t easily describe. Once I hit the first key, I couldn't stop. The ideas just kept flowing from my brain, through my arms, out my fingertips, into the computer, and onto the screen in front of me. Within 30 minutes, I had my first track completed, but I wasn't finished yet. I kept going, creating track after track of music. After 13 tracks, my fingertips had become numb, so I had to stop. I was about to close Reason and call it a night, when I saw a button in the bottom-right corner of the screen, marked “Upload to website”. “Ah sure, why not?, I thought, “What could possibly happen?”
A week later, my phone rang. It was my friend. “Dude, drop whatever you're doing, and turn on the radio now! You will not believe what they are playing!” I rushed to my stereo, and turned it on. A familiar sound greeted my ears. It was the music that I uploaded! Apparently my music had been so well received, that someone from a radio station downloaded it and started playing it on their show.
Next thing I knew, I got an email from a record company! “Please call and ask for Gary”, the message read. I returned the call and was asked to meet the exec at Starbucks in Grafton Street. Six hours, a train ride, and a Signature Hot Chocolate later, my world changed for the better. Gary explained everything to me. My music had apparently, in the space of a few days, become the most downloaded music of all time.
I didn't waste time in putting pen to paper and signed a contract right then and there. A month later, the music that I had produced in one day was released as an album, and quickly reached No. 1 in the Album Chart. I was shocked at the success, but I kinda saw it coming, given the popularity that it received online.
But what really shocked me was that, when I went into school the next day, everything changed. Everyone was still looking at me. But they weren't laughing. They weren't even smiling. They were just gazing at me like I was a movie star. I was no longer the laughing stock of the school, the bumbling idiot that everyone made fun of. I was the triumphant music producer, who had turned the bullying that had plagued my life for years, into something that made me successful.
15 years later, here I am, standing backstage at the Ministry of Sound in London; ready to play the biggest and best set of my life for the locals. Of all the dreams that everyone in the dance music business had, there was always one main dream: to play at the Ministry.
I walk towards the roar of 50,000 Londoners, with one thing in common. They are all waiting for me. As I walk onto the platform where the turntables are, the roar almost deafens me. Your wait is over, I mutter to myself, before pressing the green button on the mixing board.....
