Spare a thought too, for one of the greatest humans, I had privilege to call a friend. Mattie Seligman. Wonderful musician, civil rights lawyer & staunch animal rights campaigner. Covid took him April 2020. Here on short notice bass with Dave..
You’ve lost quite a few musician mates over the years, haven’t you mate. Epic, Dave, Darrell, etc. When I watch the old Top of the Pops reruns from the 80s it’s quite remarkable how many of the performers are now dead. I guess drugs and alcohol play a big part in many cases, but still, it’s shocking how many of them are no longer with us. I remember Julie waking me up to the news about Bowie. It came exactly one day after I’d heard his new [final] album for the first time and had banged on to her about how Bowie constantly changes and stretches his boundaries, and how even at his age there are more ideas in his albums than most bands have in their career, so I was looking forward to where he would go next. Shortly after this I got back into Prince in a big way, after discovering that the period where he apparently turned crap was far from it. In fact, he made some of the best music of his career in the 90s. I bought all the albums of his that I didn’t have, banged on at Julie about how great he was, that people had got him wrong, that he’s still knocking out great tracks like Baltimore on his latest [final] album and I was looking forward to where he would go next. Well, you know the rest. I kept my gob shut after that. It did, however, rub it in how stupid I’d been not to go and see him at the O2. The only reason I didn’t go was that I’d heard it was difficult to get home from the O2 at that time. What a ruddy idiot! If I could go back in time I’d happily have walked back from the O2 to Mill Hill, to have got to see him live. I felt bad for a student nurse I was seeing, when I was at the Royal Free. She was obsessed with Prince and George Michael. They made up her entire CD collection. She had me carry a Prince mirror back from his shop in Camden Town, that was in the shape of his symbol. In fact, she had the Prince symbol tattooed on her bum! 2016 must have been awful for her.
