Skip to Navigation | Skip to Content

Matt Kent Photography

16.07.10

3am.

When I was a teenager, a mere slip of a lad, one of my best friends died. Now many, many years on another close friend has passed away. The intervening years doesn’t make the grief experienced any easier.

One of them had his life cut tragically short, before he’d even had a chance to live any of it and the other, whilst forty years older, was just embarking on a new stage of his life too. Both equally cruel and distressing.

Whilst trying to do a bit of self psycho analysis recently I asked my brother when he thought I’d started getting depression, something I suffer from intermittently. He said that he thought my friend dying at such a young age changed my outlook on life. I went from being a fun loving teenager to someone much more cynical than they should have been at 14. I’d never really thought of that event as being a pivotal change for me. Of course I was upset and devastated but I really didn’t think about it as life changing for me in that way until he said it. I’d always put it down to guilt over my mum dying and a marriage break up that happened around the same time but maybe he’s right, maybe the rot had set in earlier. Maybe. Lying awake at 3am in the morning though tends to make your mind wander to all sorts of things and takes you, more often than not, along the self analysis road, which is where I find myself now. I started re-reading a book I started writing a couple of years back. One of the many I have started but never finished. This one was to be a musical odyssey and one that contained quite a bit of auto-biographical stuff, dealing with my own introduction to music and I came across this section:

“Saturday jobs, whilst paying the way to buying music mags, were to become a pain in the arse. They got in the way of football and record buying excursions. One of them also literally cost my closest friend his life and after that I never did another Saturday job.

When The Who announced the ‘Quadrophenia’ tour in 1973 myself, Pat and a group of his friends skipped school to go and buy tickets. We left home early, around 6.30 am and the box office opened at 10. As we approached The Lyceum, where the band was playing, over Waterloo Bridge you could see a bit of a queue, but it didn’t look huge. What we didn’t realise was that the Police had sent the queue all around the backstreets and back into the Strand where it reached down to Trafalgar Square. It was massive. Hours of queuing, pushing, jumping the queue and Police ‘restraint’ saw us, luckily, bag some of the last tickets for the shows. We got through to the front using a combination of physical feats and guile, which actually consisted of Pat’s friend Jimmy *** shouting “Wally, over here!” or “Let me though, I’m a Doctor!” (We weren’t very advanced then) and we actually vaulted the last two crowd barriers to get away from the Police, to reach the Valhalla that was the Lyceum box office. I had two tickets for the last night and had a choice of letting one of my best mates, either Steve *** or Jimmy ***, who both liked The Who, have the extra ticket. I spun a coin and Jimmy won. Steve went on to see the band many times with me after that, whilst for Jimmy it was to be his only time. He was killed in a tragic accident whilst working at his Saturday job in Woolworth’s in London’s Oxford Street. This was in the days when litigation didn’t even exist as a word in Britain let alone as a practice and his family were left with nothing other than a dead son. That branch of Woolworth’s closed down pretty soon after that.

Jimmy was such a cool guy, a fantastic comic and mimic who, had he seen adulthood, would undoubtedly have been a star. I remember hearing the news that he’d died and going home and kicking my rack of singles and completely destroying Free’s ‘Wishing Well’. That was my first taste of losing someone I loved. It was difficult to deal with then and, almost 35 years, later it’s still equally difficult to deal without feeling such anger towards a boss and a company that would expose someone so young to dangerous practices.

I remember the funeral and sobbing my heart out and the girl’s at school cruelly laughing at me the next day for it. I’ve never really been able to cry since, not properly. Not even when my parents died.”

So maybe my brother Pat is right, maybe a lot of the things that have plagued me in adult life do stem from that moment. I’ll have to think about it a bit more.

The recent death of my friend has brought this further into focus. Although an adult he still had so much of his life to live and yet it was taken from him before he had a chance to experience the new phase he was entering. Unlike Jimmy, whose life was taken in a split second, he had a long fight, one he battled so bravely and with such humour and grace. I’ve never understood the purpose of life, not sure if I really want to if I’m perfectly honest as it’s always seemed so, well, pointless I guess. 

But it’s made me think more about myself, my life. People that really know me (and there are very few) know a different person than those who think they know me. I need to find a balance between those ‘two Matt’s’ and try to find someone who I know and who I like. Don’t know how I’m going to do it but I am going to try. 

I miss both of my friends, one of them from a lifetime ago and one so recent. 

I hope that I get to cry at some point.

Matt

back