It's over. It's too late. There's no going back. My unused membership to the notorious and grimly coveted '27 Club' has expired. There is no longer any chance of me sipping space mimosas on a blanket made of rubies with the likes of Hendrix, Cobain and Morrison. The 27 Club, if you don't know, is the place rock stars go to die. I am not a rock star, but I certainly behave like one from time to time, and I always held it in the back of my self-deprecating, pessimistic mind that I'd end up there. Either way, I'm 28 now; I'm no longer invited. And the biggest surprise to me is that I am glad.
It's my birthday!
Those of you who know me well may be familiar with my darker tendencies, my dwellings on the morbid and the mortal; my natural state. It has become ever clearer to me, especially as I set to work on my fifth novel The Ashen Bough, that I possess an unquenchable capacity to constantly imbue my creative output - be it song or prose - with elements of despair, psychosis and suicide. It's obvious where this comes from, even if I may never fully understand why, but as I wave goodbye to the petrifying Twenty Seven, I do so having learned that these things could finally be banished to my imagined worlds, and are no longer attacking me personally. Things may well revert, but for now I choose to believe that the change is permanent.
2014, thus with my 27th birthday hot on the heels of its arrival, didn't start at all well for me (not least because the first song I heard upon the stroke of midnight was Kings of Leon's Use Somebody). I was (unbeknownst back then) stifled by a dead relationship, totally unsure of where I wanted to go, unadventurous and I hadn't written a new song in three years. My last novel was completed but needed a shit ton of redrafting to escape severe banality, and I really didn't care if I were to drop dead at any time before fine-tuning it.
Then my former significant other did something wondrous; she tore the plaster from the wound. It stung like hell when she walked out, and for a moment there as I blitzed my drunken way through a city of sadness, I was certain my life had run its course, but her lesson was a slow burner and I realised that, as I began to feel better, I wasn't just recovering from the break-up, I was recovering from the relationship itself and the sick, sorry shell of a person it had gradually turned me into. She was right, and I just wish I'd realised that before I fell reduced to a shrieking wreck on my knees, pleading with her not to go. Perhaps I could have salvaged some dignity. Never mind.
And that was the beginning of the year. A heartbroken singer-songwriter, newly 27. All the elements for my termination were in place! Could things possibly get worse than a kick off like that? Though I was prepared for a resounding 'YES', it turned out to be a No. How did that happen? My friends arrived. People who, it turned out, were always there for me but I was just too submerged in a bog of takeaway pizzas and How I Met Your Mother repeats to notice before (Just to clarify, I hate that show. I was made to watch it). They pulled me up from the bog, like Dumbledore saving Harry Potter from the underwater zombies in Half Blood Prince (I wish people would stop calling me Harry Potter). They prodded me out of the door and onto an adventure, and the adventure didn't reach an end.
They whisked me away to Paris, and after a wild, wine-fuelled gallivant around the French capital I returned a jovial pirate with a new best friend, who then left, but then returned. I became part of an unstoppable trio, jumping into dinghies and sailing the Regents Canal, hopping round my room to wacky soundtracks and running off to all corners of the country in Ellie's Batmobile. And I found a kindred spirit in a namesake also bereaved of a long-term love. We were two sad Joes being Recalled To Life and pulling each other through. We crawled to Green Park to gaze upon the jagged tree of death and I realised I wanted to live. I was waking up. I was writing songs. The 27 club be damned! Sorry Kurt, sorry Amy. I'm pretty sure fame is also a requirement for membership anyway, and there was no danger of me achieving that any time soon, nor of me caring.
It wasn't all smooth. I hit snags. I became bemused, broken and besotted by newcomers, I occasionally dwelt upon the hopeful possession of people who cannot be contained, and I erroneously thought that love had dug its talons into me yet again. But summer had arrived, and it was medicine. I cycled along the coast, I sailed the sea, I blistered in the sun before experiencing a live show by the legendary Black Sabbath, I shed a joyous tear to my favourite bands in a Welsh field during the Greatest Weekend Of My Life, and I hurled my increasingly skinnier body into a Bavarian lake (before an oncoming resident serpent bade me leave immediately). Some shred of my dwindling negativity came to the fore upon said Bavarian holiday, regrettably, and I paid the price for it (albeit a price heroically slashed by the conviction and efforts of my genius, life-saving brother), but it was all a learning curve and, while I'm rightly ashamed, I'm not dwelling. I'm stronger for it.
Joe Groke finally emerged from his prolonged hibernation - my musical side returned as I broadened my horizons beyond compare as a music fan. With my friend Danny on the bongos I began gigging again - '60s era Marc Bolan reincarnated - maybe I could have skyrocketed to fame and still have joined that club yet. My gigs had evolved from what they were when I was a 22 year old whining about a girl from Derby; I now have a cartoon mascot sidekick, a tray of biscuits and cakes for the audience and a stage presence my formerly more introverted self would be terrified of (tell former me that he'd one day be rapping on stage and he'd run screaming for the hills). I feel I was fully out of the coma by October, and am now the very person I have always wanted to be. There is nothing and nobody weighing me down or suppressing my personality; my wits and values are at their most forthright, my feelings controllable and my anger all but extinguished, and I really think that this is for the first time in maybe a decade.
Winter's threat was meeker and more laughable than ever. The blues never came. I squeezed in an October dry spell (which I shall recommence after these birthday festivities have passed) before turning into a gentlemanly vampire for Halloween, then ploughed through a trio of November birthdays, with varying degrees of personal success, before it was time for Christmas to roll around.
And this is more or less where it comes to an end. The close of the year brought jolly Dickensian excursions, a new job, the beginnings of my biggest literary project to date and, as ever, a Christmas day to remember (two, in fact, this year).
So that, if you care, is how I survived the rockstar year. And as you're reading this then there's a very good chance that you had a hand in that triumph. As I mused on new year's eve, I am generally sorry to see off 2014, and that makes it a winner of a year, but what little of 2015 there has been so far has shown promise. My time as a resident of Soho is at an end, and the ever-long party with it, I imagine. But this is necessary, I need to keep growing. Thank you to all who were there, including those I lost along the way (to geography, not mortality!), you know who you are.
And if you're interested in hearing me talk about myself even more, I'll be at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street tonight celebrating my birthday in a flood of beer to rival that which claimed six lives in the Parish of St. Giles in 1814.
