The Black Hole

Dir: Gary Nelson (1979)
With Robert Forster, Anthony Perkins, Ernest Borgnine, Maximilian Schell et al

Sometimes a piece of art, a movie, a book, music, reaches you at exactly the right time, the right age.

The Black Hole came out in 1979 when I was 8 years old and it captured my imagination like nothing else. I saw it that summer with my best friend from round the corner, David. He was a bit older than me but we were completely on the same wavelength. We enjoyed the same stuff and we played brilliantly together. It was the first time I had gone to the cinema on my own, or at least without a grown up. The film possessed us completely. We took forever to walk home afterwards. It felt that we had to act out every one of our favourite scenes, channelling the moves, the mannerisms and the spirits of our favourite characters.

Star Wars had come out two years earlier, when I was just a bit too young for it. My Nana took us to see Star Wars on the vast screen at the old Kelburne Cinema in Paisley one rainy day in the summer holidays. My brother, a toddler at the time, had fallen asleep during the matinee and Nana didn’t want to wake him, so we stayed put and sat and watched it all over again. I enjoyed the film, but it didn’t resonate with me the way The Black Hole did.

One criticism you can make endlessly about The Black Hole – it’s no Star Wars. In the first three minutes of Star Wars alone, there’s more action than in the first twenty of The Black Hole, maybe even the whole film. There are many obvious comparisons between the two movies – they are both set in outer space with laser guns and cute robots. And while there is more than a hint of bandwagon jumping in the latter film, they are fundamentally different movies, arguably even different genres – if Star Wars is a space western, The Black Hole is more . . . space gothic horror. But more about that in a bit.

I didn’t care about any of that back then. I loved everything about The Black Hole. I had the original soundtrack LP, which Nana won in one of the competitions she was always entering. I bought Alan Dean Foster’s novelisation with summer holiday pocket money and read it many times (which possibly helped to fill out a lot of the plot holes and inconsistencies I can see now in the movie). And somewhere on my shelf I have the DVD version, bought on impulse in Fopp one rainy day ten or so years ago. I threw out my dodgy old DVD player so right now I’m streaming the film on Disney+ from my laptop. Does anyone even have stuff on shelves any more?

Sometimes it’s better not to interrogate the reasons for returning to a particular text or piece of art, sometimes the reason reveals itself as you write and reflect. I’m not quite sure why I’m watching this film now. I haven’t written anything for months, most of the year in fact, since the start of the coronavirus crisis, with lockdown and all the anxiety and uncertainty it has brought into our lives. I realise as I start to write that words are trickier propositions now after so many months away from using them to organise my thoughts. They don’t come as easily. My line of thought is too easily broken. It makes me aware that my internal life has been increasingly dominated by imagistic sense impressions, emotions, all of it vague and unarticulated. Nothing seems clear anymore. It’s been a weird year.

Maybe I just want to be spirited away to the far edges of the universe. I want to feel totally immersed in that world again, as I did when I first saw it because it’s deep into 2020 and I’m in the mood for some escapism. I’m ready to descend into some kind of fantasy void.

The Disney+ version starts with an “overture”: two and a half minutes of John Barry’s main theme over a blank black screen. (Way to get the kids engaged, Disney!) I have always been a fan of Barry’s music – his ear for a great tune, his swooning harmonies, his love of a strident french horn – and I have always loved this soundtrack because it’s a pure nostalgic hyperlink to that summer and the first time seeing the film. Listening to it now, however, over that black screen, I find the music oddly jarring. It’s a kind of military march, imperious and bombastic, like it’s setting the scene to a film about Americans in WWII. The black screen overture gives way to the opening title sequence and another grand theme from Barry, this time an eerie, spiralling waltz. I can hear flashes of Strauss (Richard) and Mahler in the orchestration, maybe; some zingy synth work distantly recalls Messiaen’s Turangalila Symphony. But really it’s all a bit of a plod: a stately adagio compared to the sparky andante of John Williams’s brassy Star Wars opener.

Watching it’s a bit of a plod, too, I’ll be honest. I want to love the film as much as I did back then but it’s a hard movie to stick with. There’s a lot of expository dialogue, religiousy wiffle-waffle, wibbly-wobbly sci-chat, portentous philosophical doomchat. The movie finally begins with a robotic voice incanting this nonsense:

2130; day 547. Unscheduled course correction due at 2200. Pre-correction check: rotation axis plus three degrees. Nitrous oxide pressure: 4100 rising to 5,000. Quad jet C and D on pre-select. Rotor ignition sequence beginning in 3-0. Thruster line reactors on standby.

The voice belongs to V.I.N.CENT, a floating puppy-eyed robot whose name stands for “Vital Information Necessary Centralised”. V.I.N.CENT is very obviously a cuddly C-3PO/ R2-D2 hybrid but doesn’t quite have the charisma of either. As a boy, I absolutely adored V.I.N.CENT. I sort of wished I could have him for a pet, to teach me interesting things, to stand up for me and fight my battles. For my birthday that year, I was given model kits of him and his evil robot nemesis, the silent, glowering Maximilian.

Where Maximilian is a mute maroon hulk, V.I.N.CENT is endlessly rattling off folksy aphorisms and improving epithets. He variously quotes Greek philosophers, Arabic proverbs and American Civil War Admiral David Farragut (“Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!”), amongst others.

“Are you put on this ship to bug me, V.I.N.CENT?” asks one of the humans. “No,” V.I.N.CENT replies. “To educate you.”

I had rather enjoyed V.I.N.CENT’s capacity for smart sounding bits of wisdom, whereas now it seems laboured and just slows everything down. If there’s any education going on in this movie, it is certainly not of the scientific kind. For all the talk of anti-gravity bubbles and event horizons, “the science” on display is as wonky as the dodgy greenscreen backgrounds. The film was famously derided by celebrity astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson as one of worst movies ever made, one which “didn’t get any of the interesting science about black holes right”.

It’s not a perfect movie by any means; a lot of things just don’t stack up. But it seems almost churlish to pick holes in The Black Hole like that. Movies get stuff wrong all the time. History movies get history wrong. Biopics get biographies wrong. Comedies fail to make you laugh.

The fact is that black hole in The Black Hole isn’t really a black hole, not in the astrophysical sense, but rather in the metaphysical sense. As a cinematic presence, there is no questioning the hole’s awesome aura. From the giant glazed ceilings of the control tower of the USS Cygnus, it lurks like a cosmic maelstrom, drawing stars into its swirling cerulean vortex. Is that what black holes really look like? Does it really matter? There’s something irresistible, something undeniably beautiful about it and you kind of get why crazy Max Reinhardt is obsessed by it and wants to launch himself into the centre of it. Who wouldn’t?

Watching again, I’m struck by the range of references to other texts. For a sci-fi kids’ flick, it’s surprisingly literary. Dante’s Inferno gets a name-check within the first five minutes. V.I.N.CENT quotes Cicero. Reinhardt quotes from the Book of Genesis. There is something of Poe’s Descent into the Maelstrom in its Gothic mood and the mariner’s obsession with a whirling void. Milton isn’t quoted directly but his vision of Hell is all over this movie, especially in the final “Heaven and Hell” sequence as the characters spiral off on divergent paths at the black hole’s event horizon.

Its literariness is a distraction, though, and not central to the business of the movie which is . . . what, exactly? What’s the film really about? What on earth, you ask yourself, is going on?

What’s going on, for example, with Old B.O.B.? What’s with the sad eyes and Texas accent? And what’s with the acronym? His name, he tells us, stands for “Bio-sanitation Battalion”, which isn’t even a proper acronym. It’s details like this, like the gratuitous intertextuality, that bring me right out of the drama. For Neil De Grasse Tyson it’s bad science. For others it might be bad acting or bad set design or continuity gaffes. For me it’s stupid acronyms. Why did the writers give them these ridiculous tortured names? And while we’re at it… robot/ human ESP? Robot pubs? That ending? There’s a lot to unhook you from the story, here.

Old B.O.B., though, may hold the key to the mystery of the movie’s Big Theme, or its controlling idea. It’s not a heroic quest, not a whodunnit, not a ghost story or a horror or any kind of good vs evil thing. It’s something else.

“This is a death ship,” says B.O.B.

And sure enough, death is everywhere in this movie. The robot funeral that Captain Holland witnesses. The walking dead of the Cygnus’s “crew”. Dr Kate’s dead dad. The death of Anthony Perkins’s character, Dr Alex Durant, at the hands/ blades of mad Maximilian. Harry’s own self-inflicted death during his bungled escape. The script references death all the time. It’s the great Disney death movie in space.

“Death is the point of all our searching”, this movie seems to say. “Death, the ultimate prize”. At one point, in a line almost thrown into the void so casually and with such little moment is it uttered, Reinhardt seemingly invokes St. Thomas Aquinas when he says, “Some cause must have created all this . . .” gesturing out towards the black hole. “But what caused that cause?”

Perhaps Reinhardt believes he will, within the black hole – “In, through and beyond!” – find proof of the existence of God. Perhaps, in some ways, The Black Hole is a quest story after all. As Reinhardt says, the prize of sailing his ship into the black hole is, “The possibility to possess the great truth of the unknown.” Is this a quest for death-in-life, a quest for immortality?

The tragic irony here is of course that, as B.O.B. explains, “The most valuable thing in the universe, intelligent life, means nothing to Dr. Reinhardt.” It is this, rather than his belief in Thomas Aquinas’s “first cause” philosophical proof of God, which ultimately dooms him, in the closing section of the movie, to burn in a Hell of his own making. As the characters pass through the black hole, Reinhardt becomes weirdly subsumed by the dark Satanic mass of Maximilian, his eyes flickering in terror from behind the robot’s visor as machine and man roast upon a craggy rock amidst a raging inferno, as the cloaked figures of the Cygnus’s undead crew file below them towards the flames. A robot hell designed by Milton.

It would be terrifying if it wasn’t all so perplexing. You also have to wonder how a film about such existential matters ended up with cuddly robots and laser battles. Is it even a space movie?

But why am I watching this nonsense? Why am I giving it the time of day?

Maybe there’s that feeling of being tethered to the edge of the abyss that the coronavirus pandemic has allowed to grow in our locked-down lives. Maybe there’s nothing to look towards except our own oblivion. I can feel my own mind starting to splinter, as the gravitational pull of the void asserts its hold. What am I looking for? Or have I in fact stopped looking?

I’m taking far too long (again) to find the point of this. My insomnia returns with a vengeance as November grows long and the days grow short. Events pile up. America has gone mad, schisming into a heaven/ hell of its own making. We try to buy a new house. The world beyond our windows seems to shrink as lockdowns return across the country. The virus seems to be circling around us. I begin a brief period of self-isolation, due to a contact at work testing positive, but I’m fine and staying in doesn’t seem any different to the way the rest of the year has gone.

And then, one night, wrestling with insomnia, I make the connection, about my need to revisit my imaginative wanderings in space. At some point earlier in the year, I had started doing a guided meditation with my daughter at bedtime. It was based on the idea of what you see when you close your eyes. Those swirling shapes and blocks of blurry colour that float behind your eyelids, and the imprint of your retina that you can still see distantly as a black circle through it all.

We called it The Big Black Dot.

Artwork by Chrissie Callaghan
www.sketchybeaststudio.com

Every night for four or five months after stories, cuddled up cosy in bed, I would take her through the inner space of her imagination, in search of the big black dot. It was far away at first, gradually drawing closer as we floated and drifted through the fuzzy red stars and blurry blocks of green and orange and purple. Up and over the the rainbow bridge, into darkest space, the big black dot loomed like a planet. As we drew closer still, its edges became clearer. Was it really a planet? Or was it a window you can look through? A door you can walk through? A pool of water you can dive into? A fluffy carpet you can lie on?

And as we hung in space, the big black dot moved gradually beneath us. We let go of whatever we were holding on to and fell, down down down, and landed softly on the surface of the big black dot. It held us there, safe and comfortable, looking up at the stars we had been floating in only moments before. And as we looked up, there, in the sky just above us, would be . . . another big black dot, shiny this time, like a giant eye gazing down on us. And we would see ourselves, reflected in the shining surface of the big black dot, stretched out, relaxed and happy, looking up.

And we see the eye blink. Once. Then again. Until finally it closes and we fall into a deep, deep sleep. . .

I am reminded that I had big plans this year to do more writing, in a serious and committed way. I had plans to attend a writing retreat with the Arvon Foundation, to edit the many stories I had written for my daughter, to commission artwork for them and to work towards finding an outlet for them. Maybe even a publisher. Of course, none of this has happened.

The artwork, above, with the Big Black Dot lettering, was an attempt at this, belatedly, to try and put this “story” into a book for my daughter. But like many other plans this year has disappeared into the void, sucked up – in, through and beyond – into god knows where.

The Black Hole suffers from its portentous over-working of a giant metaphor that’s almost too big and to vague to really do anything with. The Big Black Dot is something else. It’s not a metaphor for anything. And in writing this it makes me think that somewhere, dimly, on the event horizon of the soul-sucking maelstrom that has been the year 2020, there is the glimmer of a life beyond the darkness.

Fight Club

Do I really need to read this book again?

Isn’t once enough? And haven’t I seen the movie like a dozen times? And aren’t they the same anyway?

It’s not like it’s real literature, this stuff. Right? It’s pulp. It’s pop. With its movie poster cover of Brad Pitt and Ed Norton “in character” and that joke soap title device.

Did I ever learn to properly pronounce Palahniuk? “PAL-a-nuck”, I heard someone say on a podcast the other day. I always said “Pal-AN-yuk”.

Palahniuk said Fight Club “might be the most-quoted novel of the 20th century”. I wonder if he gets paid every time some op-ed writer or features hack or sub or anyone anywhere connected with putting words in print said “The first rule about ____ is you don’t talk about _____”

I wonder if he gets a royalty every time someone gets called a “snowflake”.

Obviously he doesn’t. Nobody makes any money out of writing any more, unless you’ve had a hit movie. But this shit has been in currency since the 90s – since the fucking 90s – which actually makes it a prime target for this blog since everything here seems to be about the 90s.

So, tell me why do I need to read this book again? And why now? What’s the point of reading anything?

I am Joe’s complete indifference.

I am 29 again. I’m living in Garnethill, a block and a half from the Art School and two from Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow’s answer to the Sunset Strip but slicked with piss and supper wrappers instead of palm trees and sunshine. All the glamour, glitz and debauchery you can shake a battered sausage at. The M8 motorway’s within easy earshot, but Garnethill is remote as an eagle’s eerie and feels like the Glasgow student rental market’s biggest best kept secret.

I watch the movie and I love it, as everybody does. I shoplift the book from my McJob (or more accurately, my Bargain Job) in a bookshop where I toil at the trough twice a week to provide beer stamps and food tokens to supplement the student loan that paid for the teacher training course which I am still – unbelievably – paying off at £2 a fucking week or whatever nearly 20 years later. I tear through the book in one or two sittings and somehow my shoplifted copy stays with me all that time until now, despite many flittings, lendings and charity shop culls.

Garnethill & Jordanhill. Mark & Jo. Val & Ali. Dom & Gordon. Claire & Johnny. Eastbank Academy & Duncanrig High.

In this world of dualities, we can’t forget our old pals, depression and anxiety, who announced their presence in my life that year, auguring the first indications of my having taken a massive misstep in life. My year of teacher training year ended with my first conversations about mental health with full-bore medical professionals. I’d sort of self-hypnotised myself about going into teaching and it wasn’t going well. Standing at the platform edge at Shettleston station fantasising darkly about potential ways out was a particular low point. I was in massive denial about everything. Why was I putting myself through this? Maybe I was doing it to please my mother. Maybe I was doing it to please my father. Maybe I’d convinced myself I needed to have a profession, a vocation, a title, something – metaphorical or literal – that I could hang around my neck to define me in some way, to create substance and structure out of the slime that I surely was.

And maybe that’s what depression is. Your own personal Tyler Durden rearing up inside and kicking the absolute shit out of you. Or trying to knock sense into you.

I am the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.

Reading the book again, depression is, on some level, one of the things that Fight Club seems to be about. I have to say “on some level”, of course, because Fight Club has more levels than a New York City skyscraper. It’s “about” a lot of things, but depression is surely in there. All that stuff about hitting bottom? And I mean, what’s this if not a perfect literary evocation of the blackness of depression:

I wanted to breathe smoke. Birds and deer are a silly luxury, and all the fish should be floating. I wanted to burn the Louvre. I’d do the Elgin Marbles with a sledgehammer and wipe my ass with the Mona Lisa. This is my world now.

But don’t go looking for answers, because on another of those levels Fight Club is like some kind of anti-self help book:

Maybe self-improvement isn’t the answer. Maybe self-destruction is the answer . . .
Maybe we have to break everything to make something better of ourselves . . .
It’s only after you’ve lost everything, that you’re free to do anything . . .
I should run from self-improvement and should be running towards disaster . . .

On some other level – quite a few of them, actually – it’s a how-to manual, like the Anarchists’ Cookbook wrapped up inside a day-glo narrative. Fight Club cheerfully primes its readers on the basics of a number of anarchist staples, such as how to make napalm, or nitroglycerine, or plastic explosive, or how to make a silencer for a gun. If you’re paying attention you can even learn how to topple a building, or at the very least how to blow up your own apartment.

Some of the more socially acceptable “tips” include how to be a cinema projectionist, how to run an allotment, and how to make soap. (First we render fat.) On the whole, you could say that Fight Club instructively demonstrates effective multitasking – up to a point, anyway.

On another level again, perhaps in a building all its own, Fight Club can be read as a philosophical treatise on the crisis of masculinity. That’s well-enough elaborated on elsewhere but it’s really interesting looking back at how tame and simplistic this notion seems with everything that’s going on right now regarding the debate around gender fluidity and the increasingly strident noises made on the radical left where even discussion of biological gender is considered hate speech. In this context, masculinity has it easy.

But how does Fight Club work as a novel?

My first reaction on re-reading it is that the language in this book is one of the reasons why novels – and novelists – continue to exist at all. You can’t write a how-to book or a self-help book or a philosophical treatise with this kind of language. No-one talks like this. No-one else really even writes like this. The only home for this kind of language is in a novel. It’s intrinsically literary.

It’s playful, but not self-consciously so. It’s exuberant, but not tiresomely so. It takes joy in its unusualness, but not at the expense of story and character, but in service equally of both.

And it’s not just the words. There’s the constant timeline fuckery.  The jump-cut syntax and channel-hopping narrative are instinctive and familiar and hugely entertaining. That “twist”, hidden in plain sight from the very first line. The character definition and narrative voice are so beautifully honed, no wonder this book struck a chord that still reverberates.

But it’s the language, the searing, soaring language that keeps me gripped, image after lacerating image. It’s punchy enough to snap a tooth off at the root, you could say.

The text is jam packed with verbs, the muscle and sinew of literature. This book is all go, all do. In Fight Club verbs do the work of adjectives. What he sees, we see. But you see what’s happening, first and foremost, not just pages and pages of costume and scenery. There’s a total lack of adverbial phrases, or static paragraphs bloated with description. Like you read a book like this to know what colour the wallpaper is. The fetching red leather jacket that Tyler Durden wears in the film is nowhere in this book. The bits of description that do exist are there to underscore the violence and darkness at the heart of the narrator’s world.

It’s all very Elmore Leonard in this respect, but the novel it reminds me of most here is American Psycho, a book every bit as brutal as Fight Club, but which uses language in a very different way. Brett Easton Ellis distances you with endless descriptions and lists of brand names. These descriptions point to the vacuity of his narrator Patrick Bateman and highlight his obsession with surface and status, as represented by Bill Blass shirts and silk-screened Armani ties. You don’t see the person he’s describing so much as you see a walking till receipt.

In Fight Club you see everything you need to, but you also feel. A lot. Mostly pain.

Last week, I tapped a guy and he and I got on the list for a fight. The guy must have had a bad week, got both of my arms behind my head in a full nelson and rammed my face into the concrete floor until my teeth bit open the inside of my cheek and my eye was swollen shut and was bleeding, and after I said, stop, I could look down and there was a print of half my face in blood on the floor.

And what do we get at the end of it all? After all this fighting, all this violence and mayhem? Well, his narrator gets the girl, for one, which puts it right up there with all the fairy tale endings that have ever been, and strikes an oddly conservative note for a novel with such radical content. Is Fight Club then a sort of fairy tale? A parable for our times about the redemptive powers of love?

This isn’t love as in caring. This is about property as in ownership.

Possibly not.

Apart from that, though, and different from the movie, there are no explosions, no end of the credit system, no collapsing buildings, no collapse of the world order. No nothing. Which is a closure of sorts, and in a funny kind of 90s kind of way, the end of the book reminds me a bit of the Seinfeld credo.

I’ve met God across his long walnut desk with his diplomas hanging on the wall behind him, and God asks me, “Why?”
Didn’t I realise that each of us is a sacred, unique snowflake of special unique specialness?
Can’t I see how we’re all manifestations of love?
I look at God behind his desk, taking notes on a pad, but God’s got this all wrong.
We are not special.
We are not crap or trash, either.
We just are.
We just are, and what happens just happens.
And God says, “No, that’s not right.”
Yeah. Well. Whatever. You can’t teach God anything.

Gullible Travels – for Russell

There’s nothing like the death of a dear one to make you ask all the big questions.

Why do we do what we do?
How do we know who we know?
Why do things die when they die?
How does friendship survive?
How does love thrive?
What’s the point of doing anything?

The older I get, the longer I live, the more I think that the point of living is simply to make life that bit more bearable for other people.

You don’t know it, my friend, but you kind of showed me that. Not just for me but for countless others who knew you and loved you. You had an amazing talent for looking after people. You even made a living out of caring.

You took people in to your heart, your home. You gave them your time, your space, your energy, even when it cost you, even when it irked you, even when it pained you. Whoever it was, you always had your eye on their angle of vulnerability, and you did what you could to make it better.

Now we’re all taking in the news that you’ve gone. Suddenly and without fuss or fanfare you just slipped away quietly one night, hoped we wouldn’t notice. But we noticed. We’re going to be noticing for a long time that you’re no longer with us.

You were always such a plotter, a planner, a schemer. There was always a project to be getting on with, always a new destination to be setting off for. When we met that time back in East Kilbride at the end of 2015, some twenty years since the last time, it was the day before my birthday and everything was up in the air with both of us. I remember saying to you how much I had always admired this aspect of you, that you were always so firmly future focussed.

And suddenly we were the best of friends again, swapping music crushes, sudden pashes, flash-in-the-pan fads, new raves, old faves. Like twenty years were nothing. I assumed from that point on we’d stay friends into our old age, checking in, hanging out.

It was music that made friends of us back then, at that draughty old rehearsal studio out in the country lanes by Auldhouse. It was music that brought us close, that started conversations, that led to deep discussions long into the night.

You had my name listed as “Sax” in your phone (was that the joke? “Sax in ma phone”?) which made me laugh, even though I haven’t played the thing in earnest in years. For me, Russ, you were all about the bass.

There’s so much music in my life because of you. Things I’d never have listened to in a lifetime have become lifelong companions because of you. There are bands who are indelibly stamped in my mind with your passion and enthusiasm, like a rock n’ roll tattoo. There are songs that conjure places, people, gigs, jams, days spent wandering, nights spent smoking menthol cigs in cars and bars in East Kilbride, Glasgow, London, New York, Boston, Worcester MA.

It’s impossible to list every single piece of music that magically sings of you, but here’s a few things kicking about my shelves at home that conjure you as I best remember you.

Supertramp
Supertramp (1970)

You liked proper proggy muso music. Long songs, extended solos, big looping bass lines. I only really knew Supertramp from their hippy-haired Top of the Pops hits; you were all about their early stuff, which I grew to love. Try Again was your favourite, you said, and my first entry point into your musical universe. Weird, trippy, slightly gothic, melodic, mellifluous and emotional.

But it was there in the air that we share in the twilight
Humming a sad song, where was our day gone
But in the dark was a spark, a remark I remember

Where The Eagle Flies
Traffic (1974)

It’s really all about that one song, Dream Gerrard, and that incredible wah-wah tenor sax. I remember buying a wah-wah pedal for £25, using it a couple of times on my own horn in the rehearsal studio then eventually passing it on to you (who made much better use of it). The song appeared on one of the mix tapes you made that I played a lot, which also contained another Traffic track that’s quintessentially you – The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys – as well as a song you wrote and recorded yourself, called Gullible Travels, which I liked a lot.

Gullible travels
Baby’s gone and papa’s dead
Gonna leave this place now
It’s cold and sick
And I’m feeling blue
cos I’m leaving you

You were amazed I even remembered the song, never mind quote the chorus to you…

Shooting Rubber Bands at the Stars
Edie Brickell & The New Bohemians (1988)

I’m not usually big on lyrics, as you know. I’m paying more attention to them now though, especially the first song of this album, What I Am, and I wonder if the reason you loved it so much was because it seems to sum you up so well.

I’m not aware of too many things
I know what I know if you know what I mean

What I am is what I am
you what you are or what

Or maybe it was just the wah-wah solo. I remember you describing me once as a “Bohemian”, which I thought was preposterous. But by East Kilbride standards, though, I suppose both of us probably were.

Queen
Queen (1973)

I’m thinking, obviously, of the first track, Keep Yourself Alive. It’s a rather cruel and ironic title given the circumstances, but I bet you’d allow yourself a chuckle. Or even a LOL. I never got on with Queen, though God knows you tried to win me to the cause. I eventually bought this album at your insistence and listening again now I think I hear something of what you heard. Adrenaline pumping hard-rockin bombast, a bunch of guys acting as if they were already superstars, doing wildly inventive things with guitars, and a massive flouncing fatally flawed show off in the middle of it all. It’s basically your anthem.

Moving Pictures
Rush (1980)

Another key piece of genetic material in your musical DNA. Not hard to see what appealed to you about this triumverate of turbocharged neo-prog hyper-rockers. And the 1991 Roll The Bones gig was a big one for us.

Again, the lyrics in the first track, Tom Sawyer,  seem to say meaningful things about you.  I don’t know. Pick a lyric.

Don’t put him down as arrogant
He reserves the quiet defense
Riding out the day’s events

Always hopeful yet discontent
He knows changes aren’t permanent
But change is

The world is, the world is
Love and life are deep
Maybe as his eyes are wide

Ritual de lo habitual
Jane’s Addiction (1990)

We played the bejesus out of this. Manicmetal. Mischief music. The song about shoplifting caught your ear by accident late one night on MTV, you passed it on like a flu bug. Every few days another track became a fevered favourite. Like we’d invited a pyromaniac worm into our ears. You’ll find this weird, but I always think of the song Of Course… as being about you and me. I have no idea what the song is actually about, but these lines spoke to me of our relationship: simultaneously close and aloof, affectionate and brusque, concerned and indifferent. Like brothers in music.

When I was a boy,
My big brother held on to my hands,
Then he made me slap my own face.
I looked up to him then, and still do.
He was trying to teach me something.
Now I know what it was!
Now I know what he meant!
Now I know how it is!

Varmints
Anna Meredith (2016)

You used to send me things in the post. Ruth Gordon’s autobiography appeared one day – the Harold and Maude actor you had a massive thing for. You were so delighted to have found it from an ebay seller halfway across America. There was the card you made from a photo you’d taken congratulating me on a new job. Mostly it was music, of course – Future Islands, Tame Impala, couple of other things, chief among which was this album by the Scottish artist Anna Meredith which I grew to love enormously. I bought tickets for her band show in March at the CCA that I wanted you to come to but by then you were doing the First Bus thing and you couldn’t commit the time. Things moved so very quickly after that. The year passed in a blur and I saw you only a couple more times.

The Anna Meredith thing was so typical of you in so many ways. You were so open to new and interesting stuff. For every Rush or Bryan May gig we went to, there was an equivalent Ornette Coleman & Prime Time or John Zorn. And as much as you loved big bombastic cockrock, you could be just as passionate about female artists – Joni Mitchell, Ricky Lee Jones, Tracy Chapman, Oleta Adams, Aimee Mann.

Only latterly I found out we had a shared love of St Vincent. Now, since you’ve gone, I keep returning to her song about love and loss and New York. It always transports me to our week there in 1993 when you were heading to Worcester, MA, to begin a career in care and I was off on a transcontinental train trip.

All the things we did. That first sunset taxi ride into Manhattan from JFK, taking in that breathtaking skyline – a waterside city the height of the clouds, the colour of rust and diamonds. Staying at the Chelsea Y. Endless wanderings. Walking downtown to Battery Park from 110th St. Dinner in the Dojo. Tasting tahini. Camp Kiwago. Nights with Carolyn. Seymour’s house full of whales in Jersey. Then returning the next year when you were settled in Worcester and the madness of all that.

I was in New York recently and the wide city streets still ring with those memories.

She sings,

I have lost a hero
I have lost a friend

and boy do I know it.