I am rarely creative and have found that I need to be feeling pretty low emotionally before I have produced anything. Having said that, I do think that a little bit of appreciation does help and when I have shown somebody my work and the best you get most of the time is "That's all right" it does nothing to encourage me to try and do more. There is one of my tunes, Jayne's Jig that I genuienly believe that had it been written by one of the larger bands, would now be played in a lot of sessions etc. but coming from an unknown person, tends not to get listend to properly so on that score, I think that celebrity does help.

I suppose the down side with creativity and celibrity is that many people must be under pressure to come up with what the record companies will sell which may well be counter productive in terms of coming up with anything original.

Jon