And then I got kicked out.
It probably shouldn’t have been a shock, really. After at least six concurrent weeks of at least one band member not being able to make rehearsals, our guitarist (I shall refrain from airing my personal feelings towards him here) decided we should ‘take a break’. Naively, I wholeheartedly agreed – it would give me the chance to book some time off work, write some new lyrics and come back refreshed and ready to take on the world – right? Imagine the look on my face a few weeks later when I checked Twitter one morning and saw a post from the band’s account that went something along the lines of: We’re finally back! Come see us play our first reunion show with our original line-up! Buy your tickets here . . .
No one had told me. No one from my band, which I had loved so much that I had gotten a tattoo of our totalled van on my leg, had given me the courtesy of a call or even a text to tell me that they’d ‘re-formed’ with their previous singer. I’d been publicly kicked out in the most humiliating way. That same day, after many angry tears, I marched down to a local tattoo studio and got a design that covered up the tattoo on my leg, feeling devastated that the people that I considered my closest friends could hurt me in such a callous way.
I knew almost immediately that I wasn’t done with music. I didn’t know what I was going to do, or how I was going to do it, but I was going to keep writing and releasing songs. Before I’d joined my band, I’d created a YouTube channel for my solo music that went under the name TheseSilentSeas (pretentious, sure, but I thought it was artsy and cool) where I’d uploaded some acoustic demos that I’d recorded in my bedroom with some free music software. Could I go back to that channel and go back to writing under that name, as though the band and its subsequent drama had never happened? No – I was going to go solo. Officially solo. Over the following weeks, I compiled the acoustic demos I had recorded into my first ever EP, titled Human Behaviour, put them online for purchase under my real name for the very first time, and opened a brand-new YouTube channel just to claim the username: emmablackery.
As I began to upload my home-made demos to my brand-new channel, I realised that in order to achieve my dream of becoming a successful solo artist, I would need to dedicate as much time to YouTube as I could. Whenever I was given a rare day off work, I would sit in my bedroom, write brand-new songs on my acoustic guitar and record them with a cheap microphone. I would then proceed to spam my own Facebook wall with my new creations in a desperate attempt to get anyone and everyone I knew to give my songs a listen. I began to upload covers of popular songs and even started making content that wasn’t strictly music-related, such as Q&A videos, in the hope of gaining a new audience. One evening, after searching YouTube for ideas for new and exciting content, I accidentally stumbled across the underground world of vlogging. I’d certainly seen kids talking to their webcams in the past, and had even attempted it myself once or twice, but hadn’t given it too much thought. Yet, here in front of me were people my age, talking into professional cameras with hundreds of thousands of viewers tuning in to hear what they had to say! It was that night back in May 2012 when I realised what I wanted to do. I was going to build an audience of my own by sharing my life online, in the hope of perhaps one day being able to quit my job at the café and becoming a full-time musician like I’d always dreamed.
After a few nights of planning, I decided that if I truly wanted to build up a YouTube channel, I had to get a decent camera. I began to research what equipment my new YouTube heroes had, and discovered that DSLRs were the new thing that ‘vloggers’ were using; suddenly, videos in beautiful HD quality were popping up all over the site! However, when I decided to do a quick Google search for the specific camera my favourite vlogger was using, after pausing their video in the right spot, my heart sank. The cheapest one I could find was just over £630. My monthly wage at the department store café varied between £600 and £800! The only way I could possibly afford one (and still afford to live) was to put the DSLR on a credit card. This is a stupid idea, I said to myself, hesitantly entering my card details. You won’t be able to pay this off for years, and you’ll only use it once for a crappy music video, and then give up. This is stupid. Don’t do it.
I did it anyway.
I pressed the complete transaction button and sat back in my desk chair. Had I really just blown £630 that I couldn’t afford on a DSLR camera? I had zero expertise on how to use one – I’d never even held one before! I was utterly clueless, and suddenly very worried about what I had just gotten myself into. What kind of judgement would I get from my friends and family when they found out I’d blown a month’s wages on a camera that I would definitely give up on using after one try?!
When the postman arrived a few days later with my new purchase, I ran to the front door and eagerly unwrapped it. The camera was heavy, bulky and definitely more complicated than the crappy handheld I’d been using previously – I instantly sensed I was out of my depth. The next few evenings were spent at my laptop, furiously researching anything to do with DSLRs. What did ‘aperture’ mean? What was ‘shutter speed’? Couldn’t I just turn it on, press record, and get a beautiful music video? My question was answered as soon as I came home from the local park after filming my first home-made music video for my song, ‘Fixation’. No, you most definitely couldn’t just press record and get a masterpiece. My attempt at a music video was laughable, even by my 2012 standards (or lack thereof). I didn’t manage to film enough footage before my tiny memory card ran out of space, so I had to copy and paste one of the scenes three different times (I even played the scene in reverse at one point to make it look like a different take – 2012 Emma had a lot of balls, and zero dignity). Most of the footage was also grainy and out of focus! Was this all a DSLR could do?
With a sigh, I uploaded my haphazard attempt at a video, hoping the music itself would bring in the views from my three(!) subscribers, and sadly put my new toy aside. What a waste of money.
A couple of months passed. By day, during time off from my job, I’d pick up my DSLR again, spurt some rubbish about my life into the camera and upload it, hoping that something I said would go viral and that new people would find my music video. By night, I would watch my favourite YouTubers – including a guy who would read a popular (but poorly written) young-adult novel out loud to his camera and give his comedic opinion on it. YouTube, despite not feeling like something I could do very well myself, quickly became my new escape. When I was watching videos from my favourite vloggers, I wouldn’t be thinking about Jessica bossing me about at work, or the £630 on my credit card that I couldn’t pay off. I wouldn’t be thinking about the fact that I had no future plans, no traditional career ambition, no desire to leave home due to my specific type of anxiety – I was simply laughing at YouTubers talking about procrastination, or about things they’d thought were true when they were kids, or slightly weirder videos of vloggers painting their entire body in purple paint. There was always something new, with the ability to distract me from a bad day at work, and the videos were always from someone I felt was truly talking to and connecting with me. These guys got me. I still remember the evening I sat at my computer, watching the latest episode of the young-adult novel being ripped apart, and thinking to myself, Didn’t that Fifty Shades of Grey book just come out? Isn’t that supposedly quite cringey? What if instead of talking about music . . . I try reading that and criticising it? To my surprise, I found the jump from making music-based vlogs to comedy videos a lot easier than I’d imagined. After many years of being teased at school, I’d quickly turned to humour to hide my insecurities, and I’d always thought my wit was a strength – even though I’d never considered it as a career option. The first episode of my ‘Let’s Read: Fifty Shades of Grey’ series was uploaded in June 2012. Whilst I was nervous and unnatural on camera, and the video was poorly lit and terribly edited with some free software I found on my laptop, I wholeheartedly believed that I was making content that the world would enjoy. In time, I’d be proven right.
One evening in late December 2012, I logged in to YouTube, and was faced with something I’d never seen before. In front of me was a bright pink alert on my homepage:
ATTENTION. We have received copyright complaint(s) regarding material you posted, as follows: ‘Let’s Read: Fifty Shades of Grey’: Episode 2.
Please note: Repeat incidents of copyright infringement will result in the deletion of your account and all videos you have uploaded. Please delete any videos for which you do not own the necessary rights, and refrain from uploading infringing videos.
Well, needless to say, I was scared shitless. My heart started to pound. It turned out that someone at the publishing house for Fifty Shades of Grey had seen my series and put in a copyright notification to get my series of critiques taken down. If I’d known then what I know now, I would have fought back. I would’ve claimed the commentary and criticism made the original work transformative and that it had every right to exist, but alas, I was young and new to the platform – and so I deleted every video in the ‘Let’s Read’ series. Every. Single. One. Oh, how I wish I’d backed up my content to a hard drive – sadly, I can find no backup copies of any of the twenty-two videos I made for the series, and I have long since accepted that they are gone for ever. Looking back, however, I see this terrifying, pinktinted warning as a blessing in disguise. It was from this copyright takedown that I decided to finally bite the bullet and press on with my original comedy sketches and vlogs. My first real ‘comedy vlog’ was called ‘Zelda or GTFO’, where I talked about how any future partner of mine would need to love The Legend of Zelda game series as much as I do. It was, of course, these types of videos that then became more popular than my ‘Let’s Read’ series ever was, and helped to grow my channel to numbers I’d never even dreamed of having just months previously. By December 2012, just seven months after starting my channel, I’d reached 20,000 subscribers.
And then . . . I got fired from my managerial job. Yep! I was pulled aside after a shift at the new café on Christmas Eve and told that, as a manager who only came in for four-hour shifts, I was of little value to the company and was being let go. However, when a window closes, sometimes, a big-ass door opens. I left the café that night without a single tear rolling down my face – YouTube had become such a passion project of mine that despite earning only a fraction of what my ‘real job’ was giving me, I’d been pouring every hour I could into the site. Towards the end of my time there, I was coming up with new ideas at work and writing scripts for them instead of serving customers, walking around the back out of sight to check my views, using every day off as an opportunity to film new videos and editing them in the evenings after work until the early hours, resulting in me getting into work the next day absolutely exhausted. Needless to say, I was a sucky manager, and by all rights, I probably deserved to be fired. However, despite concern from my dad about my income (and now a gap in employment on my CV) I knew that this was a sign. This was my time – and I had to give it everything I had.
That evening, I told my dad I’d been let go, and said to him, ‘Dad, you need to trust me. I can make a living from this. Maybe one day I’ll actually earn more from YouTube than I did at the café. I have to take this opportunity and see what happens.’
I would say that my dad was supportive from the get-go, but I wouldn’t want to lie in my own book. He was concerned that one month I’d do well with YouTube earnings, and the next month earn nothing at all. I think, looking back, that if I hadn’t been so caught up in my new passion I probably would have agreed with him, but by the time my last shift rolled around on New Year’s Eve, I was in too deep. YouTube was going to be my future – no more early starts, no more workplace bullying, no more worrying about what I wanted to do for a living: this was the answer.
Since early 2013, YouTube has been my full-time job, my passion, my livelihood, and the rest of my story is visible for the world to see through my hundreds of videos. In the few months after being fired, I would begin to upload comedy sketches on a weekly basis, reach the 100,000 subscriber milestone, make videos with creators I looked up to, return to music and release a second solo EP that would reach number one in the iTunes Rock Chart in the UK. To date, I have completed my first ever headline tour (which sold out in minutes), supported Busted in arenas across the country, reached one million subscribers (and counting!), overcome enough of my anxiety issues to move out of my dad’s house and live on my own, communicated my message of determination and the importance of hard work to millions of people across the world, headlined Shepherd’s Bush Empire in London and now I’ve written a book.
Oh, and in case you were wondering: I paid off that credit card, too.
Luck Is For Losers
So, you were a waitress, and you happened to catch a break, you’re thinking. It could’ve happened to anyone. Let me tell you – I’ve thought the exact same. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve called myself ‘a waitress that got a chance’. The thing is – and this is something that I understand can be hard to appreciate when it isn’t directly visible – it’s taken a lot of hard work for me to get to where I am now. Listen, I’m in no position to complain. I love what I do. I wake up every morning in disbelief that I can actually call what I do my job. However, it has involved years of consistent creative thinking, filming, editing, uploading, posting on social media, keeping up with trends, doing research, flying across the world at all hours to be at events – it is a wonderful life, but definitely an exhausting one, and not one I could uphold without a lot of dedication. I realise now that yes, having my videos gain a bit of traction at the beginning may have been a stroke of luck, buried somewhere deep in an algorithm that no one understands, but those Fifty Shades videos providing entertaining critique that no one on Youtube was providing, and maintaining and building my audience would not have been possible without a lot of grafting – ultimately, my videos would not have taken off if I hadn’t worked to make them the best that I could.
My first videos in 2012 were certainly not incredible, but improvement comes from practice: watching each and every video from those who influenced me, learning their editing techniques, researching lenses and microphones to make my videos the best quality I could afford. My point is, if you want results, you have to put in the work. So did I get lucky to begin with, or did I just provide the content that was missing at the time? Perhaps both statements are correct, but it’s important to remember that luck alone gets you nowhere. One of my heroes, ex-wrestler and MMA fighter CM Punk, once said that luck is for losers. Straight and to the point, but when you think about it, quite true. At the end of the day, you have to make your own luck – waiting around for a dream to happen will get you nowhere. Believe me – I know a lot about that, too.
Let me tell you a story. When I was growing up, an only child in my home town of Basildon, Essex, I listened to the music you’d expect a girl from the early ’90s to like – Spice Girls, S Club 7, Steps, Britney Spears, and basically any pop song from one of those big compilation CDs that my dad would rent from our local library. Ever since I learned to talk at the age of three (I was a late developer . . . I’m still waiting to reach adult height, too), I loved singing. I dreamt of being the lead singer in a pop group, sketching rubbish pictures every day after school of myself on stage with my friends. When my parents got me listening to ’80s icons such as Michael Jackson and Madonna, I began to dream of being a solo artist instead. As soon a
s I was old enough to be able to use a Walkman, I developed a habit of listening to my favourite songs in the dark when I was supposed to be asleep, pretending my pitch-black bedroom was a stage, in front of me a sea of lights from a screaming crowd watching me perform. I’m not ashamed to admit this habit actually continued long into my twenties. (Do I still do it? I’m not telling you.)
Sadly, when I was growing up, our family never had much money to spare. I’m not going to sit here and say we were dirt poor – we paid our bills, we never went without food and we always had a roof over our heads – but things were tight enough to mean that asking my parents if I could go to a stage school or take singing lessons was out of the question. I don’t even recall ever asking them, as I knew what the answer would be. It wasn’t that my parents didn’t want to support me – I guess they just saw my singing as a nice hobby, and that putting money behind something that wouldn’t be a full-time job would be a waste of money that could go on other things. I don’t blame them for that, nor do I wonder, What if I’d gone to theatre school? I know that we simply did what was smart, and what was best for our family. However, when I was twelve (and posters of bands such as Busted, McFly and Green Day had begun to take over my bedroom walls), my dad took me into our local music store and allowed me to pick out an early birthday present.
My first guitar, I’m not ashamed to say, was a piece of shit (sorry, Dad). It was an electric guitar with a snakeskin pattern, equipped with a bright yellow strap that read, POLICE LINE – DO NOT CROSS. Paired with my £20 portable amp, I felt like the coolest up-and-coming musician of my generation. I, my friends, was hot shit. Trying hard to learn how to play the simplest of riffs on one string (hello, ‘Seven Nation Army’) and not realising that when strings went rusty they needed changing; not understanding what bass, middle and treble were on my amp, and thus turning all three dials up to maximum – I was a rock GODDESS. To be honest, I didn’t even really play the damn thing, or learn any songs the whole way through – most of the time I just stood in my bedroom, unplugged guitar around my body, jumping in the air in time to a chorus, dreaming of the day I’d be appointed as the fourth member of Busted. A pipe dream, sure, but one I acted out on my own every afternoon after school. Someday, I’d be sharing a stage with Busted. I think that, in my head, I knew it was rubbish – I wasn’t in a band, I wasn’t writing my own music, I didn’t even know anything about the music industry – I just had a dream, something that would distract me from the usual suspects: homework, body issues, bullying and every other distraction that came with growing up.
Feel Good 101_The Outsiders' Guide to a Happier Life Page 2
