40 and Blacklisted

What the music industry never tells you about surviving past thirty-five.

You’ve sat in the rehearsal room, staring at the worn-in drum kit with dull cymbals. You count the lines etched into them by green-fingered, cigarette-smoking drummers from yesterday’s lost venues. Those same speaker cabs—tattered cloth, cracked plastic—have doubled as pop-up bars and makeshift shelves for lonely guitarists nursing pints. They don’t tell you about the future: when the gear is older than most bands on Spotify’s “New Metal” playlists, you begin to wonder if the path between age and music begins to diverge. Beneath the surface, the industry’s quiet fetish for youth and polish feeds its own machine.

You think you’re too late.

This is our blacklist.

In the 90s there was a fever dream that we could play anywhere, do anything—that nothing was impossible. If there was a mountain to climb, we believed we could summit it in a week. We were ambitious and dangerous. In our 20s we were told we were too heavy, too aggressive, too different for a scene drowning in post-Nirvana sludge. Falling over while playing guitar was the only notable highlight in a sea of grunge-fuelled dullness. If there was light, it was the kind you couldn’t see in the dark.

Our 30s were solid: experience-driven, workaholics, with a work ethic that would have shamed 1980s yuppies. We had material in spades but no real platform. In the end the others abandoned ship as we wrestled with line-up changes and endless directional shifts. The rawness remained, but the “niche” card was played frequently—a backhanded compliment to our DIY status. So when you arrive in your 40s there’s a wry smile on sullen lips as you see kids wearing Metallica and Iron Maiden shirts. A novelty, or a circular act of retro—“my dad loves those bands” kind of statement?

It’s always been there. The polite “no”s, the gentle avoidance drifting into full oblivion. Where there was once hunger, now there are ghosted emails. You can replace hunger with experience. But what do you replace experience with?

Taste is a powerful but demotivating tool. Where one dreams, another lies. You can lie awake at night, ruminating on past decisions, song structures, lyrics, riffs, genres, faces, mistakes. Self-doubt spirals into chaos and your head fills with voices you can no longer trust. Maybe they were right. You begin chasing, in a desperate attempt to keep up, and instead of inventing you end up re-inventing—back to those stylised Nirvana tribute bands of 1995.

Then we realised, among the diluted strains of our influences, there was something pure—away from the toxicity. Our blacklist isn’t a failure. It’s freedom. We don’t need the pressure to sound like the flavour of the month. We don’t need to water down the darkness, no gatekeepers to please. We are what we are.

We used to think we were being punished. We are the outsiders after all. We don’t fit the narrative, don’t fit the social circles. Our music was blood in the water, and we wanted the sharks of the industry to tear us apart. Our pins and needles were kept from stifling our hands and feet, trying to silence the inner voice crying out.

In time we wondered how long we could cope with the challenge. The coattails were shortening, just like our patience. It’s okay not to conform—our mantra since our teens was to challenge everything, never follow the crowd. So being blacklisted wasn’t a punishment at all. It was our badge of honour. It’s a list—a list of inclusion, not exclusion. Where we can be who and what we are without the martyrs of the scene pulling the strings.

We don’t have to excuse ourselves. We are not waiting for permission. We’ve tried to fit in for too long.

Is there a Holy Grail? Can we reach musical paradise? If you’re the master of your own destiny, that’s something to be proud of. The road is long and uncertain, and we’re still learning.

This isn’t a plea for help, nor a pity party. Far from it. This is an invitation to become part of a community. Where music, art, and fiction are led by deciphering the nascar lines of our heroes.

“Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean.” — Ryūnosuke Satorō

Forty and Blacklisted.

Just getting started.

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Further reading:

Read “The Plague Beneath the Pavement: York’s Buried Past” from March 2026.