I'm going to take you way back to when I first met You Me At Six.
It was the 13th July, 2011 and I, Jack Windsor, was seeing You Me At Six live for the first time ever. My stomach filled with nerves and excitement as this was my first ever concert and I did not know what to expect.
I woke up that morning at 6:30am because I could hardly sleep. This was the day I'd been waiting for. This was actually the one thing in my life I looked forward to. This was my opportunity to be in the same room as the five guys that had made my life worth living. Think I'm over exaggerating? Think I'm joking?
Well I'm going to well and truly take you back to maybe, what, Four years ago?
It was the day I'd turned 19 and I'll admit myself, I wasn't the best looking person out there. I still don't believe I am. Anyway, besides the point. When I was 19, people in my year at college believed everything was about looks and being in your territory, and by territory, I mean the people you hung about with. When college was meant to be where people didn't judge you on what you looked like, what you've done in your past or who you hung around with.
When I was 19, I had the same hair colour I had now, I refuse to dye it, mainly because I have sandy blonde hair and that will just ruin my colour completely. Oh Lord, what am I like? Going off subject again! Anyway, my hair was bushy, I had an Alex Gaskarth style haircut which wasn't "cool" and I never wore tracksuits either. I listened to different music than everyone else in my year and any time I wore something that wasn't for college, it would either be black and white or grey. I didn't like being so colourful or if you want to say, vibrant, back then. I didn't have a care in the world for what I looked like back then and I still wish I was the same. But people change that for you. Well, they changed it for me anyway.
I also never hung around with the "cool" people, I hung around with the people that had a similar taste in music as me, which is; You Me At Six, Fall Out Boy, Blink-182 and All Time Low, I could go on forever with this list but I'm not going to bother. But yeah, people who liked the same things as me and people who had a friendly personality and I could get along with. Doesn't seem so bad, right?
Well, it gets worse.
The most "popular" person in my year, who's called Connor, used to pick on me. Him and his group of twats.
They used to call me 'dickhead', 'twat', 'emo'. They used to tell me to go and self-harm and to make sure I went all the way down and not just across. They used to push me in the corridor. One day, when I went into the toilet, one of the tapped me on the shoulder and asked me if I wanted them to slit mt throat for me. I've had worse though, this one time, Connor came up to me and told me that the hottest girl in our year liked me, so like my gullible old self, I went up to her and tried to make conversation. She looked at me with a confused look on her face as if to say "Why is there one of the losers trying to talk to me?" When she spoke back to me, she replied "Fuck off, emo." Yeah well she can go and fuck herself now.
You see, I was always going to be picked on. I had no faith in myself. I thought I was a failure in life. But, Josh Franceschi and the rest of You Me At Six, proved me wrong.
I was sitting in Geography one day back in October 2008, listening to You Me At Six's album at the time, Take Off Your Colours, as it was just released and I'd seen them on YouTube and really got into them.
It was only a week until the October break and I had nothing important to do in Geography so I was listening to the You Me At Six song ' Take Off Your Colours' and these words from the lyrics stood out from the rest more the others, it made me realise, I should make a change:
"This is war, this is a heart, these are the strings you'll pull. These are the stakes, they have been raised, this is your call. Too much has changed, I hate this place, but I don't want to leave it this way."
So when it came to the holidays, I'd took the money I'd been saving up to buy a pair of Blink-182 tickets and went out and bought a whole new wardrobe, went to the barbers and got what is noted as a 'scene haircuit'' I got a proper side fringe and layers to make it look perfect and just right. The two week break was up and I'd walked into college on the first day back and looked like a completely different person.
