In the early 2010s I struggle when two of my top ten friends kill themselves. Not least because I discover that I only have about ten close friends, so it’s a 20 per cent loss. It’s like losing two fingers – you can carry on, but life is different.
It’s rare that you put your friends in order. Do you ever rank your friends? You might be able to identify your best friend, but what about your fifth best friend? Or your seventh? What’s the difference between the eighth and the ninth?
I never think about ranking them until I’m writing about them for The Essay on Radio 3 in an episode about being nuts. I mention them in the earlier chapter ‘A bit nuts’. When I hand it in my editor suggests we avoid any complications or complaints by not naming them. So I write about ‘my close friend’ blowing his brains out with a shotgun, and when I come to talk about a second friend who’s hung himself I find I can’t just write ‘another close friend’ because it somehow makes them indistinguishable, so I write ‘an even closer friend’. And that’s when I realize that I’ve ranked them, and that he’s a closer friend than the other, possibly by dint of how much longer we’ve known each other, and by sharing more formative experiences when we were finding our place in the world.
We knew each other before we became successful. He’s in that small group of friends who make the move from obscurity to some degree of fame at the same time: Dawn, Jennifer, Pete, Nige, Rik, Ben and Simon. This is a useful control group to have. We all know what we were like before the change. We have no airs and graces with each other. We know the actual truth. Not that this is sensational in any way, it’s just more accurate if more mundane than the press version. It’s about all the minor incidents which make up a human being, not the big leaps: Dawn’s much regretted perm; Jennifer’s obsession with VPL (visible panty line); Pete’s joy at finding cheap Ray-Bans in a chemist’s on Wardour Street; Nige’s worry that his new jacket makes him look like an undercover policeman; and Ben’s insatiable desire to beat me at squash, to the extent that if I’ve played someone else in between our matches he accuses me of cheating.
I think the ranking changes depending on which friend I’m with at the time, but Simon Brint is definitely in the top three, often in the top spot, especially when we spend lots of time together in the recording studio, or on shared holidays, of which we have many. Russell, who I meet in my mid-thirties, and with whom I share a love of pubs, Exeter City FC and walking on Dartmoor, is further down the batting order but nevertheless a solid fixture in the team.
I can use their names now because I’ve shown this chapter to people who might be affected and they’ve given me the OK.
I meet Simon at the Comic Strip Club in 1980, he’s in the house band which plays the opening music, the intros to each act and the backing to all the songs throughout the evening. Whenever people need musical accompaniment they turn to Simon.
The Comic Strip Club sees a lot of new comedians pass through its doors, and when that group of comedians starts breaking into television, Simon is the natural choice to create the music for them. He has a phenomenal gift for interpreting mood through music, and an innate sense of humour which never lets the music intrude on any jokes. He’s particularly brilliant at pastiche – he can effortlessly emulate every musical style from Abba to Guns’n’Roses.
He becomes the composer for a long list of shows, including The Comic Strip Presents . . ., French & Saunders, Bottom, Absolutely Fabulous, Alexei Sayle’s Stuff, The Lenny Henry Show, The Ruby Wax Show, The Mary Whitehouse Experience and A Bit of Fry & Laurie; even reworking the Blue Peter theme tune in the early nineties.
Some people find him a little aloof but he’s really just a bit shy and if you become his friend he’s very loyal, very good company, and very amusing. We do lots of tours together in the early days, he’s so civilized and convivial, so well read, and has such phenomenal taste – this is a man who saw the first Hendrix gig in Britain when less than fifty people turned up to a club in Hythe – and he introduces me to so many things that I still enjoy to this day: the Pina Bausch dance company, the country singer Gillian Welch, and the sixties psychedelic folk group The Holy Modal Rounders. We cover their track ‘Flop Eared Mule’ in The Idiot Bastard Band: idiotic lyrics delivered with high intensity, scant musical talent, and an over-abundance of enthusiasm. The essence of punk really, but from sixties New York, and on acid.
In his personal life Simon’s an exquisite minimalist, and lives in spaces that are painted several barely perceptibly different shades of grey. However, although everything looks clean and ordered, all the cupboards are bursting with stuff; absolutely chock-full of multitrack tapes, gizmos, instruments and recording equipment, and a million different leads, wires and transformers. Open a door too quickly and it all falls out – and perhaps this is a metaphor for Simon himself.
He confides in me when he begins to struggle with his mental health. As you may have gathered, I’m of the opinion that ‘being sane’ is quite subjective, and I don’t think Simon is any more or less ‘sane’ than anyone else. We are all a bit nuts. But as his thoughts become more confused they seem to proliferate, each new turmoil sowing further disorientation; bad thoughts building upon each other at an alarming rate until they threaten to burst the seams of his brain.
By the time he’s in his late fifties most of the people he works for stop making their own shows, and the new generation of programme makers tend to bring along their own composers. He loses his place in the world and finds it increasingly difficult to deal with.
The trouble with spiralling thoughts of self-destruction is that it gets harder and harder to press the reset button. You might think it through and retrieve some kind of equilibrium but you never get all the way back to zero. You’ve already been where you’ve been.
He moves back to a small town in Somerset, the town where he was born. Alarm bells should have been ringing then really, because in hindsight it feels like he was already trying to complete the cycle – to get back to the beginning.
It’s shocking listening to someone describe how they might do it. It’s incredibly unnerving. I feel powerless, and useless, and not a good enough friend.
His wife Amanda is brilliant with him and they get professional help. He takes the drugs they prescribe, but they just make him feel less and less himself, which is part of the problem in the first place.
I’m on tour with The Bad Shepherds, and I’m just refuelling the van in a petrol station in Penrith when Jennifer calls.
‘It’s about Simon,’ she says.
And I know what’s happened before she says it. I know because it’s exactly the same tone of voice my friend Pete Wood uses the year before.
‘It’s about Russell,’ he says, as I sit on the bed in a Birmingham hotel room after a gig.
I first meet Russell when I move to Devon in 1995. We both turn out for the village cricket team – for the knockabout mid-week team, not the serious Saturday League team. It pretty much defines the kind of people we are: we don’t take sport too seriously, but we like some kind of diversion before we hit the bar. We find a similar attitude to sailing: we sail out of Dartmouth in a sixteen-foot boat, which is little more than a dinghy, we drink merrily while we are aboard, and even more merrily when we get back to shore. In supporting Exeter City FC we like to go to all the home matches and the local derbies in Plymouth, Torquay and Yeovil, then settle down into a lovely session in a pub once we get home.
This sounds like all we do is drink, but we’re not alcoholics, we’re just living out the fantasy that was denied us as schoolboys: we share a bond in wanting to prove how unfettered we are, and going to the pub seems to prove this. We’re aided and abetted by the fact that most of the pubs around us are bloody gorgeous.
We’re also helped by the fact that Jennifer and Cindy, his partner, have struck up their own friendship, so we become a quartet, regularly trying out all the eating establishments within a thirty-mile radius. We occasionally do this with another couple, Pete and Jo Wood, and we like to squash into one car and have a designated driver.
Russell works in the dark art of marketing and is forever glad-handing potential clients in every restaurant we go to. One evening we go to the Agaric in Ashburton and as we leave Russell does that thing of spotting a client on the way out. He spends ten minutes playing the big ‘I am’ and schmoozing.
Outside, we’re just getting into the car, and Russell is getting into the ‘short straw’ seat for the ride home, when, unbeknown to us, the client follows us out of the restaurant with his wife.
‘He’s getting into the boot!’ she cries out in alarm just as I close it and Russell’s head pops out through the parcel shelf. Market your way out of that, sunshine! We laugh all the way home.
Some years later things go awry between Russell and Cindy and they split up. I make the fatal error of trying to be on both sides, or is it trying to be on neither? Whichever, it’s not a good choice as, understandably, they both want loyalty to their cause. My bond with both of them becomes strained.
Russell starts other relationships, mostly with younger women, but they don’t work out. He becomes a bit belligerent and makes a few enemies in the pubs we like to frequent. It later transpires that the man in Ashburton isn’t the only client he’s lost, and that he’s in serious debt.
Russell doesn’t seek me out as much as he did, but we still go to the football together. One day we’re coming back and he says he’s got things to do and doesn’t fancy the pub. He gets out of the car.
‘Goodbye,’ he says.
This is two weeks before I get the phone call sitting on the bed in the Birmingham hotel room. It’s only then that I recognize how oddly Russell said ‘Goodbye’ a fortnight before. It haunts me. He knew then. He knew he was going to do it. He was planning it. He was actually saying ‘Goodbye’ for ever. With a smile on his face.
It becomes obvious he’d been planning it for months. Clearing his house, it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to deduce he’s been emptying his freezer over the last few months, to the point where there’s not a single thing left in it. My daughter Ella remembers having a peculiar meal there some weeks before: kippers, broad beans, and Alphabites followed by a Viennetta.
He thinks he’s being heroic. He thinks he’s tidied up all the loose ends. He leaves a note insisting we play The Jam’s ‘Going Underground’ as his coffin is carried out of the church. It’s all so unspeakably sad because there’s nothing heroic about devastating all your friends and acquaintances, and traumatizing all the children who looked up to you as their jolly honorary uncle. His freezer might be empty and the suicide note left neatly on the table as he goes out onto the moor to blow his brains out with a shotgun, but his life is actually a mess of debt and disorder and in a small rural community many of the emergency service people know him personally and have to deal with his body.
But he just couldn’t face it any more. He’d had enough. He didn’t see enough happiness on the horizon.
I find both suicides very hard to deal with. It’s impossible not to feel that if I’d applied myself more, if I’d been more vigilant, more present, more helpful, that I might be sipping cold dry sherry in a tapas bar in Madrid with Simon, or rocking back with laughter in a country pub with Russell.
On the other hand, I have considered helping someone to die.