My friend and mentor Alan Scott died on Thursday 16th October 2008. This came on compounded sadness as his long time partner Gail Braybon had also departed this earthly life after a long battle with cancer back in August. Alan has been one of my closest friends for much of my life and an unbounded source of inspiration, support and love to many many people. I started writing this piece in the week after his death - and rapped on it at the funeral. Having spent the weekend at their house and having also written a piece about that experience I figured it would make sense to publish this set of thoughts first....
My story with Alan and Gail started before I really remember it. I was 6. I remember when my mother Penny was working on Out of the Cage with Gail, Alan and I would find ourselves hanging out in London together. I remember going out for lunch in Soho, I remember going round the science museum and leaping for the un-catchable ball, having a laugh.
The mix tapes were probably the clincher though. When I was about 10 Alan sent me a mind-blowing cassette labelled Pop music and on the reverse Still pop music. We're talking 1989 or thereabouts. To a kid living in a small town in Lancashire this was just the coolest thing ever - full of sounds that I'd never been exposed to; Blondie, Grandmaster Flash, Sly and Robbie. Post-punk electro-pop and hip-hop were suddenly open doors. Let's face it this stuff was streets ahead of the Abba, Duran Duran or Kylie and Jason that most kids were still listening to. Listening to it again as I type I'm amazed that despite being played to death in successive walkmen and car stereos it still sounds just as good:
Well now you see what you want to be,
Just have your party on TV,
Cos the man from mars won't eat up bars when the TV's on.
Now he's gone back to outer-space,
where he won't have a hastle with the human race,
Saying hip-hop, don't stop, just blast-off, shure-shot.
Cos the man from mars stopped eating cars and eating bars,
and now he only eats guitars! Get up!
Successive tapes exposed me to such delights as Captian Beefheart, Laurie Anderson, the Kronos Quartet, field recordings of African singing, water going down plugholes and psychedelic transmissions from the Grateful Dead to name but a few.
We'd talk on the phone, starting with music but ranging on to absolutely anything, the breadth and depth of it was unbounded. I found someone who was the friendly voice on the end of the phone, outside of the world I inhabited but right on the money when I needed a listening ear or ideas and inspiration.
He was an enabler: photography is a good example here. I'd got a small cheap compact camera and had already realised that I could put slide film or black and white film in it and get interesting results. A nudge, a few phone calls, a trip to the local camera shop and suddenly I'd got a classic Olympus SLR, a couple of lenses and would be bombing around the school taking mad pictures of the lab technicians preparing hearts for dissection. Or gloriously arty portraits for the yearbook. The passion, the interest, the encouragement and the chance to compare notes on this went on. Recently on sending him a set of prints he told me "what are you doing, forget this technology and music stuff, you're re-inventing portraiture for the digital age." - a bit of a tall order perhaps but worth a go.
I miss him. And I'm never going to stop missing him. But that's ok.
