About the author…

My name is Johnny Samson, and I was born in Wiltshire, England, in 1973, eldest son of a sailor and a seamstress. I excelled in mediocrity at grammar school, where in 1989 I was voted most likely to have a commercially unsuccessful career in the music industry and write a book about it.

I fulfilled this prediction with alacrity, which is why you’re reading this.

I was writing songs from an early age, and my love of music, writing and free stuff led me to working for a few independent music fanzines that you’ve never heard of circa 1990.

I began playing in bands around the same time, which remained a constant as I hopped between dole cheques and temporary employment in Smalltown England (a home counties town absolutely indistinguishable from about fifty other home counties towns).

I met my future partner and attended their wedding to somebody else in 1998, before their untimely deportation from the UK the following year. The upshot of this was the pair of us moving to Australia in 2000, where I continued to lose money hand-over-fist as a semi-professional musician for the next two decades. Despite writing more than 300 songs, playing well over 500 gigs, and releasing 14 (ish) albums I notably failed to attain any financial success, and resorted to any number of part time jobs to support myself.

Nevertheless, I continued to write, finding myself involved in some thrilling creative endeavours, including the writing and design of training manuals for business process analysts, product catalogues for hydraulic component wholesalers, web copy for beauty therapists and proof-reading local council newsletters.

In 2019 I realised that I now had considerable expertise in the area of playing in bands that nobody has ever heard of, and decided to write a book about it – The Road to Nowhere… hence this website. This proved both enormously rewarding and far cheaper than recording another album, not to mention much easier than finishing my first novel.

I now live in Aotearoa. I’m still playing in bands, and still losing money. I’ve also been working on some film and tv shows as an extra, which pays better and I’ve started writing a bit about that too. In fact, this website has now become a place to post any odd bits of writing I might do. Or not do. I’m pretty lazy these days to be honest.