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A surge of adrenaline and euphoria pumps through my veins, as the voice in my earpiece tells me that the next song is going to be seamlessly dropping in three… two… one. This is the song that will reveal my musicians and vocalists, so I will no longer be alone on the stage.
I school my features into the ‘Prince of Pop’ frown I’m supposed to wear when the lights find my purple hair and ice-blue eyes, because even that, the look on my face, has been rehearsed to within an inch of its life. When you have a face that’s recognizable by the whole planet, there is zero room for mistakes, especially on stage.
Especially this stage.
I gaze into the screaming crowd, the sound of my own voice faint through the headset. This high is good. Nothing compares to the high of being under the white and purple lights with good friends waiting to appear from the wings, my guitar pulsing in my arms, my voice screaming my pain into the faceless void. The nonstop roar almost makes it impossible for me to hear my own voice, but I scream the lyrics I wrote all these years ago, in another life, into the tiny microphone at my cheek and the crowd sings the words back to me.
They scream them back at me.
I know that my pain is nothing compared to some of what these kids are going through. What do I have except a dead dad and a broken heart? My story is the most boring story on the planet. A girl broke me once and since then I’ve been singing my pain. Boo hoo. But some of these people I’m singing to are going through horrible, dark things in their lives. Things that threaten to bring the light to its knees. The one thing that connects us is that I’ve lived through my share of darkness and I know what it’s like in there. So, even if the internet might call me a ‘prince’, I know, in my heart, that I am here to do nothing but serve these people. To give them an outlet, to give them a voice.
A melody for the darkness.
So, I do the only thing I can do: I let my pain mix with their pain until the crowd becomes an ocean of pain and harmony, swaying and screaming along to the music, bracelet lights gleaming purple and black, synchronized by the tour technicians so that the experience is one of surrealism.
It’s like being in a cloud of neo-pop slash punk music, where there is no shame in giving voice to your pain. Instead, there is a celebration about it.
It’s our pain that brought us all together here, at this moment in time, at this specific place in the world, and we won’t let anyone silence us.
The crowds and I are one. I hear the cue in my ear that my musicians are ready to enter the stage behind me. They are standing behind me, silent and invisible like ghosts, waiting until the last notes for the light to reveal them.
It’s showtime.
I throw myself to my knees in my signature move and the crowd loses its mind.
The fans love this move, but more importantly, my management loves it.
I did it for the first time three years ago on a much, much smaller stage than this, on my first show, actually. Back then, it was not staged: it was the result of memories so painful that I folded to my knees right there, under the spotlight, not caring who saw. I should have cared.
Endless video loops of the moment my voice cracked and my knees gave way while I was playing my golden hitHeartbreakerwere circulated on the internet, and it was an instant hit.
It became me.
Since that moment, Issy Woo, my stage name, equals the knee-drop, apparently.
So now I have to do it every single time I open a concert.
The crowd erupts into even louder screams of my name—didn’t think it would be possible.
I start singing my next song,Saint Hope, and, as always, I just hope I can manage it without my voice wavering. I haven’t done it so far, but maybe if I concentrate enough, this time I’ll make it. Jude and I exchange a look: he knows how I struggle with this song. We wrote the music together, and I fell apart in front of him more times than I can count until it was complete.
You got this, his eyes tell me. My heart is beating like a drum inside my chest. The New York night’s freezing cold grabs me by the throat as I belt out the lyrics I wrote about the girl who taught me to hate hope.
This is it, I tell myself.You love this. You don’t hate it.
You don’t hate your life.
And for a second, with the lights blinding me, my two musicians that have become as close to me as brothers behind me on the bass and the drums, my guitar pulsing in my hands and my throat throbbing in time to the music that wants,needsto get out, I almost believe it.
Almost.
…
It happens again while I’m singing the chorus of the fourth song on the set list. It’s a ballad, and my PR team has declared it the ‘most recorded Issy Woo song’ to date. Sure enough, everyone lifts their phones up and the cameras start flashing in my face and I begin to drown again.
It’s been gradually happening to me these past four years.
I’m sinking, slowly suffocating in my own fame, and there isn’t a single thing I can do to pull myself out of it. And that’s when I see them: My best friends, Wes Spencer and Theo Vanderau. They are here, in the VIP seats, right in front of me. They’ve come to see me perform, a day before Christmas Eve.
