I hoped it wouldn't come to this...

Hello intrepid reader,

What follows is a modified version of an email I sent to my mailing list subscribers last night. If you’d like to receive email updates from me to find out what I’m doing, what I’m thinking, when I’m touring or when I’m releasing music, sign up here.

I don't like to take up too much of people's time, so I'll try to be brief (let's see if I can manage it).

This guy doesn't even have a face and I STILL know that he's not convinced. Neither am I.

Sadly, due to low ticket sales, the gig I was due to play at Apollo Audio on Friday of this week has been cancelled by the venue. I'm told that anyone who bought tickets will receive a full refund and I wanted to get the word out straight away just in case you were planning to make the trip to the show.

I definitely don't begrudge the venue for this at all. Apollo Audio is a working music studio with pretty massive overheads and razor thin margins (I remember discussing running costs with Billy, the guy running the show there and, friends, it is NOT cheap!), so they have reluctantly taken the decision to pull the show in order to not run at a potentially massive loss for the evening.

It's a fairly open question as to what the problem was with shifting tickets for this show. Truth be told, I'm sure that it's a combination of a lot of different things, but that's not the main thing I wanted to talk about. No, what I ACTUALLY want to talk about is this:

This is not an isolated incident.

It's no secret that the music industry has been faced with these problems all over the country. The Music Venue Trust has been screaming from the hills about the gathering storm for years now. 2023 saw 125 live music venues in the UK close their doors for good - a whopping 16% of all live music venues across the country.

That is a chilling statistic.

Some of you may know that I spent my youth at a music venue in Harlow, my hometown in Essex, called The Square. I was a young, awkward kid at 14 years old, unsure of who I was or where I fit in. Then, thanks to (among other things) my late grandma pointing my mum in the direction of The Square's Rock School programme, I found my sanctuary. A place where the misfits, the weirdos, the outcast and the damned could all co-exist in this 275-ish capacity music venue on the corner of the town and just...be ourselves.

There were no dress codes, no pre-conditions to entry, no real expectations placed upon you. All you needed was open-mindedness, respect, tolerance and to follow my punk rock hero Frank Turner's first rule: Don't Be A Dick.

(Honestly though, there were a couple of dickheads in there, but they usually got barred pretty quickly).

The Square closed it's doors for good in January 2017 after the land it was on got sold out from underneath it and was torn down by developers in 2018. It is now an empty lot. Every time I drive past the site, I am simultaneously sad and furious.

Not for myself - I had a bloody great time, built the foundation of the man I am today and made a tonne of memories. 

No, I'm furious on behalf of the 14-year-olds of today. The awkward kids who don't feel like they belong anywhere. The Square was a lifeline for me and my peers (and I have no doubt that, for some of them, that lifeline was FAR MORE literal than it was for me). Where on Earth are these kids supposed to go now?!

“So what’s your point, Dan?”

That's a bloody good question! I'll try to get to the point now!

Stories like the one about The Square are sadly becoming more and more common all over the UK and the pace is only getting faster (remember, 125 closures last year alone!).

It is really simple when it comes to these venues: Use it or lose it.

We need to make sure that these places are getting filled up with music lovers (that's you and your friends) checking out all of the bands that are just starting out on their journey. That means getting out to your local live music nights and taking a chance on a band or bands that you've NEVER heard of.

And yeah, some of those bands are going to be dreadful. I'm not gonna lie about that. I've seen some utter stinkers out there.

But every once in a while, you see something truly remarkable. A performance that utterly captivates you. A song that you feel sure was written just for you. You have found your new favourite band and you will not rest until ALL of your friends have joined the cult alongside you (and then get really pissed off when none of them like it as much as you do, but that's beside the point).

And yes, to tie it all back to where we started, it means buying advance tickets to the shows wherever you can.

Venues need the confidence to put these nights on without worrying that this is the show that will tip things over and force them to close their doors for the last time if they don't pull it. Advance ticket sales are HUGELY important to steady the nerves of venue management and promotors (and, to be honest, it keeps the artists' blood pressure at a much healthier level too!).

“Is he STILL going?!”

Well, what do you know! I utterly failed to keep that brief!

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk!

Find out when I’ll ACTUALLY be playing music by checking out my tour dates here.

I’ll see you all soon.

D

A band?! A producer?! Brand new, unheard songs?! Must be time for the new Dan Thomas album!

It's finally time!

After months of planning, demoing and wrangling with schedules, I'm finally heading into the studio for my first full-length album!

That's me and the band (!) in the studio with my friend and producer, Martin Lumsden, rehearsing ahead of recording sessions next week!

We've had a LOT of discussions about this record and it's DEFINITELY going to sound different to what I've put out in the past. Whilst it's not going to be a complete transformation, it's definitely going to be a progression and something that I think is a more authentic record than anything else I've recorded.

Some stuff, you'll have heard me play before...but some stuff, you've NEVER heard before!

Nope, none of you!

There's at least one song in there at the moment that has NEVER been played live yet!

We'll be documenting the recording of the album as we go, so expect cool stuff coming to you as and when it happens. Who knows...maybe there'll even be live video!

Super excited to finally be getting to work!

Celebrating creativity

As a creative person, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking that I suck.

Creating things is hard work. You want to make something that can stand up amongst your peers and (just maybe) your heroes, but as you improve, your standards get higher and therefore so much of what you create just doesn’t cut it.

Which is why it’s magic when it does.

This is a lyric from the song “The Dying Of The Light” from my upcoming album. A song about how angry it makes me that, one day, I’m going to die and how I’m regularly stopped dead in my tracks by that thought:

“I try to live my life in the moment, but it’s hard to live there when you know you’re only renting”

I don’t often allow myself to talk about something that I made in such self-congratulatory terms, but I definitely gave myself a smug little pat on the back when I came up with that one. It’s one of my favourite lyrics that I’ve ever written.

Naturally, I’m now absolutely convinced that I’ve peaked creatively and will never come up with anything better, but that’s a story for another time (and possibly a therapist). For now, I’m being positive.

What’s something you’ve created that you’re super proud of? It doesn’t have to be art - it can be anything you’ve done where you worked hard at something and saw results that you were really proud to have accomplished. Let me know in the comments.

New Year Reflections

Happy New Year, everyone!

What can I say about 2023? It’s been a crazy year, in more ways than one, and I’ve ended the year in a very different place than where I started.

I started the year as a full-time employee in my pensions day job and playing a fair amount of gigs, but in a pretty sporadic, unfocused kind of way.

Heading into 2024, I’m now working part-time in the day job and splitting my remaining time between being a home educator for my daughter and touring the UK and beyond!

My wife Nic and I have had to seriously restructure our lives in the last year between:

• My wife being made redundant from her full-time job and deciding to start her own business as an ADHD coach (seriously, go check her out on LinkedIn, she’s incredible!),

• The both of us beginning our home education journey with our daughter,

• Both of us (but mostly Nic) helping with my mother-in-law’s struggles with Alzheimer’s and the effect this understandably has on the rest of the family, and lastly,

• My increasingly busy schedule on the road.

Yup, 2023 was definitely a year of change. Any one of those changes would be challenging on their own at the best of times, but managing all of these at once has been an extremely steep learning curve.

But…

Despite all of these challenges, I really feel like we’ve come out the other side stronger and happier for it. I distinctly remember one day towards the end of the year sitting on the sofa, looking at Nic and saying:

“I’ve just realised: I’m the happiest I’ve ever been with my life”.

It’s not like I don’t still have my share of struggles and I DEFINITELY still have bad days (I’m not sure that there’s a cure for those!). But it feels like the bad days are in SERVICE of something. Like we’re working towards the life that we actually want to live instead of just going through the motions and faithfully treading down the path of least resistance.

So I want to thank everybody who’s been a part of my journey in 2023 - the amazing people I’ve met on the road this year (FAR too many of you to name), my brilliant, hard-working tour manager, Ian Russell, the venues and people who’ve opened up their doors (and often their homes) to me to give me a place to do my thing, my incredible parents, Lynn and Peter, for all of their support (and putting in some SERIOUS overtime as grandparents!), my father-in-law, Chris, for his support and guidance and, most importantly, my beautiful family, Nic and Amelia, for keeping me grounded, loving and supporting me unconditionally and giving me something to come home to.

2024 is going to be a SUPER busy year - I’m about to start recording my debut full length album later this month and then I’m heading out for a seriously crazy list of countries on tour that will take me across two whole continents!

I’m giddy with excitement to get to work this year and see what 2024 brings - it certainly won’t be boring!

In the meantime, I’ve announced just SOME of the amazing shows I’ll be playing this year - check out the Tour section on the website for details.

Looking forward to seeing you all on the road!

Dan

Happy Neurodiversary To Me!

Evening everyone!

So, any of you who know me or have heard me talk at any length (and it is often at considerable length) are likely aware that I live with ADHD. I was diagnosed towards the end of 2022 after two years of fighting for a diagnosis. I don’t mind telling you all that I damn near wept the day I got my diagnosis confirmed over the phone. I wrote a more lengthy post about this on my Facebook page on the day, but I’ll refer back to the relevant bits as I go here.

So we come to today.

I was idly checking notifications on my phone this afternoon (instead of doing anything I was actually supposed to be doing, of course!) and saw that my Facebook memories contained the aforementioned post from last year.

It was (and currently still is) a year ago to the day that I received my diagnosis…that sure as hell crept up on me!

I have learned SO much about myself over the last year. There are more ways in which my neurological differences affect me than I ever realised and I’m constantly learning more and more. So many things that seem completely unrelated all begin to make sense once you understand how they exist under ADHD’s umbrella.

I was (partially) wrong about one thing this time last year, though. In my post, I said:

”There is a sense of grief that comes with knowing that things might have been very different had there been earlier intervention and I know from my own research that the grief will likely feel more profound once my medication starts and begins to help me”.

Whilst I do still grieve for the way my younger self was misunderstood, mislabelled and very often dismissed by other people (some of whom really should have known better), starting my medication was mostly accompanied by a sense of overwhelming joy. Like someone turned down the volume a bit and now I can hear myself think in peace.

I’ve learned a lot about how to take better care of myself now that I’m more in tune with what my needs are as someone living with ADHD - earplugs for overstimulating environments, self-compassion, a good night’s rest (tough for gigging musicians!) and above all, awareness of what my brain is up to at any one given moment. I’m also much better at communicating my struggles and needs with other people and learning to be less of a people-pleaser and to be more honest with others about when my struggles are going to affect them.

I’ve got so much more to learn and I’ll likely carry on learning until the day I drop, but I’ve found SO many amazing people in the ADHD community this last year who are doing incredible things to help others with their struggles, as well as many more who are being warriors with their own difficulties and differences who inspire me EVERY DAY.

I know I’m in good hands.