I recently wrote, in a bit of a fraught state, about the death of Scott Hutchinson. Like many other fans I’ve tried to excavate the loss of a hero by pouring over the archives of alternate projects, B-sides, interviews and the old classics. The more I watch and listen, the more things seem to make sense – I suppose this is part of grief and examining death. We automatically narrate both the death we are examining and its effect on our lives in personal terms, as it comes to affect us. Whether this is right or wrong is up for debate, it seems difficult to not conceptualize a lived life as something complete, with a beginning, middle and end yet it is lazy and unrealistic. I can’t imagine anyone reading this, if there is anyone reading this, could sit down and explain their way through the trajectory their life has taken – to do so would be naive and recalcitrant – we don’t have that level of control. I don’t particularly want to debate the nature of free will in what was intended to be a music review but I feel it is important and puts the last piece of writing regarding the tragic death of Scott Hutchinson into perspective.

What a fucking introduction. This is going to be a cheery one!

After reflecting on the death of Scott, I realised a few things which I won’t go over but in more quantitative terms I can express. I am a few months from reaching the ripe old age of 28. That is not a sentence I comfortable with. I first heard Frightened Rabbit in 2008, as far as I can work out. That is almost 10 years spend listening to their music, which is over a third of my entire existence and probably double my conscious existence. Put like that, as if in a government report, its fairly clear why I blubbered like a hot old dog in the sun.

Almost exactly a month before Scott Hutchinson committed suicide, he released a new album with his new collaborative project – Mastersystem. When it came out I gave it a cursory listen but didn’t dwell on it too much. Since Scott’s death I had a period of listening intensely to Frightened Rabbit which was strange and seemed a bit much. After a while I stumbled back onto the Dance Music album and have had it on regularly since. The heavier sound of the project was what initially put me off, it sounded very reminiscent of early Biffy Clyro, it was angst-ridden and cliched at times. However the more I’ve listened to it, the more it has made sense. The deliberate heavy handedness of the lyrics matched with the familiar grunge seem more and more intentional each listen. Scott’s well founded suicidal ideation is ever-present alongside tropes of nature, belonging and the escape and waste of time. The late nineties and early two-thousands feel is a regression which at first seemed uncomfortable but sits well with the palpable discomfort of the lyrics. As I listened I tried to draw a sense of understanding that perhaps he knew, that this was planned, that he had returned to this material in that sense. But here I go, parceling up events and actions into a neat little narrative about someone I didn’t know. It’s easy to listen to this music and the catalog preceding it and wrap it up into a parcel – it makes it easier to consume. What is difficult is not knowing, and if anyone had known, then such a tragedy wouldn’t have happened.

This is a facet of mental illness. We can support, attempt to treat and care for sufferers.  We can virtue signal, stigmatize or rubbish methods or theories. But ultimately, the personal is personal. When I was thinking about this  I turned a few places and started to think about the infamous 27 club. I myself am 27, I have been affected by mental illness in a few different ways. The obvious urge was for me to look at similar figures who were involved in music and had taken their own lives and compare them to Scott Hutchinson. The similarities are obvious; creative, ill-fated, heroic. But there I go again; firstly Scott Hutchinson was 36 so aside from being a musician who suffered with depression that was just conflation of my own story onto what I know about him, secondly the majority of the 27 club died in car accidents or other forms of death associated with being a human – could it be that their association with drink, drugs and depression is heavily romanticized? Assuredly yes.

Where does that leave me then?
Scott’s inability to live happily or even contentedly featured in his music and public persona. The idea that he could push through and continue was part of the Sisyphean beauty of his music, something which I took solace in. When he died, this was something which I felt particularly despairing of. If he couldn’t, could I? Of course this again is conflation. We maybe interconnected but we are certainly not one and the same. To look at this suicide as anything more than a personal tragedy is a disservice to those who cannot unpick themselves from their surroundings. Moreover to conceptualize life brought short as completed or as an inevitability is dangerous and ought to be challenged.

I don’t want to be guilty of virtue signalling or stigmatizing, of rubbishing a method of recovery or coping, but I do want to challenge the narrative somehow. I should stress that I don’t see this a point of debate either, I hope that my expression of sorrow and solidarity can help someone somehow but realistically it won’t unless the narrative changes.

In turning this over in my head and dealing with the loss of someone I didn’t know, I had a recent higher profile death to turn to – David Bowie. I’ve previously expressed my admiration for Adam Buxton’s podcast and he has previously expressed his admiration for David Bowie. After David Bowie’s death Adam Buxton posted two podcasts reflecting on his death Bowiewallow I & II. The Bowiewallowers paced over similar ground which I had gone over, they examined their own relationship with an enigmatic hero which they didn’t really know but felt they knew. They thought about DEATH. They all put it into their own terms, their own stories about Bowie. Their eulogizing brought them together, this was something which I didn’t really have when dealing with Scott’s death – relying on twitter and facebook etc for comfort. As I’ve come to terms with it, I’ve had chats with people who felt similarly, I re-examined my own business and I’ve concluded that each of us is guilty of this packaging up of the personal and projecting it onto the communal. One particularly brilliant part of Bowiewallow comes when Buckles is out walking his pesky pooch and makes an emotive voice note about Bowie’s ‘I can’t give everything away’. –

“Come on, that’s the game – that’s what makes it fun. If I told you everything, if I explained everything, it wouldn’t be fun anymore. It would just be like – ‘ugh, really? I could have worked that out for myself.’ The fun thing, and the bit that make your heart soar is not knowing everything completely, is the mystery, and the space created by that mystery can cultivate hope, hope that there are secrets that you don’t know or fully understand and the hope that there is something more to life than you suspect there is, and the hope that things might get better. All kinds of hopes. He was saying, I think “I can’t explain everything and you wouldn’t want me to, and also I’ve trained myself not to and that is why you like me. And he was right.”

I couldn’t have put it better myself. Not in a million years.

These essential truths, delivered in the pithy cyber podcast hit home for me. I hope they do for you too. The final rumination on the nature of life and death and being comes from Bob Mortimer and Paul Whitehouse who in their new show ‘Mortimer and Whitehouse: gone fishing’ features Bob asking Paul’s opinion on Bowie’s death. Paul responds, “I was sad about David Bowie, because he was a big fan of mine.” Elsewhere their travelling petting aquarium takes them to a vicar with whom they debate life and death, heaven and hell. The Vicar concedes that hell is a means of control of populations. What more do you need to know?

I can’t dryly sum up everything I’ve just considered nor should I have shoehorned in a random show at the end there but I did. I’d do it again if I could.
The takeaway point is to be found in show, when Bob catches a barbel “Whoa, it’s massive!” It is all massive, isn’t it.

In summation-
Dance Music by Mastersytem 10/10
Adam Buxton’s Bowiewallow I & II 10/10
Mortimer and Whithouse: Gone fishing 10/10
Life in its entirety 100/100 and 0/100 sometimes.

Mr Hummels

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