Reinvention is not star dust.

How often do you get a chance to start a new life, whenever it suits you? Witness protection aside, people in some walks of life, do change, do look for personalities and lives to suit their style but for most of us it’s a challenge. As much as people like to have the ability to change direction by creating a new you or a new personality, our inhibitions provide enough hurdles to keep us pushed in the same direction our parents, our teachers, our bosses our leaders picked for us. So how do we change direction, for the one direction we really really want to follow? Perhaps we can take a lead from music.

When I read Alvin Stardust died, it triggered a memory of someone who took a chance to change direction and personality, to be more than they were supposed to be. The passing of another 70’s rock star hardly made a splash in the media, after all, he only have a couple of hits and one of those ‘My Coo Ca Choo’, wasn’t even him in the beginning. So what to make of another rock chameleon, who wasn’t happy, born as Bernard William Jewry, going to great lengths to change his life. Bernard was into music early and as a roadie for Shane Fenton and the Fentones, he made the most of his chances when the real Shane died and Bernard took on the frontman name and responsibilities, having some minor hits in the process. While Shane was hitting the bandstands of Brighton and the piers, a young writer, producer, Peter Shelley, penned a pop song under an assumed name of Alvin Stardust, recorded it and ultimately had it picked to be sung on TV. Unfortunately Peter, after one appearance as Alvin Stardust, was not the stage hugging rock star his song conveyed and he started looking around for the real Alvin Stardust to do his music justice. Bernard aka Shane was in the mood for a change and after a meeting with Peter, Alvin Stardust was born, or invented or assumed or created. Reinventing himself as a leather clad rock god, Bernard aka Shane aka Alvin, went onto have a few more hits and eventually found a lucrative life on the nostalgia circuit and never once looked back on Bernard.

Music has long been the domain of hiding behind a facade, a mask and identities fabricated by creative minds and perhaps the reason it still attracts so many to a night on stage. Music isn’t interested in the everyday, the ordinary, the bland, it wants to be on stage and perhaps that’s the starting point for your change. Find a stage, find an audience, change your personality, make a statement, after all, today’s media gives you a myriad of channels to find your voice and change direction. Today it’s so much easier to find a venue for your talents, to change your personality and generally become a ‘rockstar’. Where Bernard had luck on his side, morphing into people he wanted to be, today you can use social media giants Youtube, Google, Facebook, Twitter, countless APPs purposely developed for changing your life, all built for you to find your voice.

So what are you waiting for, the world is your stage, go be a rock star.