Click the "Personas Gallery" button to view the ever-growing cast of Personas appearing in the videos!
Airworld Arts
Connect
Derrick's Semi-Fictional Backstory
All Good Fictional Characters Start With One...
The Personas Concept was conceived as a way for Airman Alone to connect with a larger audience by presenting the music in a more accessible and relatable way. The ‘actual self/creator guy’ acts primarily as ‘the man behind the curtain’, so that the visual focus remains on the various personas, starting with Derrick the Red.
Key to this approach is being up-front about the artificiality of the various persona images, so the viewers can appreciate them as a kind of fantasy imagery, hopefully underscored with a bit of absurdist humor.
Derrick’s full name is Derrick Derrickson, an aging alternative rocker from Iceland. Raised near the small village of Kirkjubæjarklaustur, he spent his youth wandering around spectacular landforms like Fjaðrárgljúfur Canyon, dreaming of making a name for himself in the newly burgeoning Reykjavik club scene.
Moving there in 1984, he put together a backing band and started to do just that. He has since maintained a small but devoted club following, mostly as a result of his minor 1986 synth-rock hit “Who’s Your Friend?” - but has recently started to enjoy wider success - much of which started with the release of an exciting new version of the song on his fast-growing YouTube channel in August of 2024...
Reminder - Derrick isn't real - but the first version of the song did come out in 1986 - distributed mostly to friends and girls I met traveling around the world (that's another story...) - but the bit about the new version in 2024 is true!
So, Derrick Is Not Actually Real...
