The Dead

Nearer than we think

Jul 09, 2025

I start this week with a response to a question that the singer Nick Cave put on his Red Hand post this week. Cave is certainly the most interesting person in the musical business at the moment. He certainly understands ‘transcendence’.

Dear Melody,

Phill Calvert, the original drummer of The Birthday Party, contacted me last week to tell me that an old school friend of ours had passed away. His name was David Green, but we knew him as ‘Dud’. Dud was a very sweet, affable guy with a mischievous sense of humour. Although we were very close in those days, I lost contact with him after I left Australia and hadn’t really thought about him for a long time. According to reports, he died alone and isolated in his Melbourne flat. I felt strangely affected by the news, unable to reconcile the bright, lovable young man with his seemingly despairing and lonely demise.

To answer your question, I arrive at the venue about thirty minutes before the show begins. I usually have a room of my own where I change into my stage clothes, put on a little make-up, and do some vocal exercises. Then I sit in silence, with my eyes closed, for about fifteen minutes. During this time I bring to mind those dear to me who have passed away, focusing on each person individually, and silently solicit their presence. For someone of my age this is a fairly substantial task. I assign specific qualities or powers to them that reflect their personalities, and I call upon those qualities. I call on Arthur, for example, for his joyfulness; Jethro for his anarchic spirit; my mother for her courage; and my father for his dynamism. I also look to my old friend Mick Geyer for his diligence; Tracy Pew, Shane, and Conway for their subversiveness, disorder and wicked humour. I call upon Anita for her pure creativity and Roland for his extraordinary inventiveness, and so forth. I appeal to these individuals, and many more, much like a devout person might petition the saints for assistance. I remember all these people and I feel a deep spiritual empowerment, so that when I take to the stage, I am carried along by this unearthly fraternity and their special powers. For me, this is an immense strength - an energy that illuminates what is truly meaningful and what is not. Communing with the dead is, in that respect, as clarifying an exercise as anything can be. We are quickly reminded of what matters and what does not. And what matters at that moment to me, as I step onto the stage, is to give my best and not waste the opportunity I have been given. We musicians are in the business of transcendence, after all.

So, Melody, that is how I prepare for a concert, and that’s what I will do before I go on stage with Colin Greenwood tomorrow night in Rochefort. Although tomorrow night I will be welcoming another person to this otherworldly assembly, Dud Green. I will assign to Dud the quality of vigilance or attentiveness, perhaps as a reminder to remain alert to the passing of time and to make contact, now and then - an email, a text, a phone call, a letter - with those who have slipped from my mind, those loved but unremembered, the forgotten living, while they are still with us.

Love, Nick

I have a similar practice each night where I remember and evoke those precious souls who have left us, and I wanted to say a little more about this.

Firstly, I was always fascinated by the fact that we die. We are born and eventually find ourselves in this place for some uncertain time, and then we appear to disappear, in what we call death. I suppose the question is always how do we use the time, uncertain as it is, allotted to us?

I have written before about when I first saw someone die, my lovely grandfather, train-driver and storyteller:

People were in and out of the house on that Saturday, and my Grandfather left the swelling throng to shave in the kitchen. The running of water from the tap was followed by a loud crash, and he was dead! Felled by a massive heart attack.

Time slowed for me, and pandemonium ensued around us, my Gran crying amidst a climate of disbelief. There I sat, perfectly still in the eye of this storm and deep within, I knew that death did not exist, that all that my grandfather was could not be destroyed. Since that day as a 6-year-old, I have had no fear of death, that it is the opposite of birth and not life.

My six-year-old realisation tested to the core two years ago when I was diagnosed with bowel cancer, followed by a 5-hour operation and chemotherapy.

Two weeks ago, I wrote about my Summer of the Snake and shamanically what that meant to me. This was when a series of changes were triggered in the imaginal, eternal world for me that eventually manifested in the external world. Throughout this time, I was always aware that, between starlight and ashes, we make our story.

Both my wife and I gave all our wishes to the snake that summer and asked it to clear the ground. We needed that help to move to our forever home and to put all the elements into balance; we also asked for unhelpful behaviours, patterns, and triggers to be removed. So things needed to die, so that we could live, the snake biting its tail.

The second time I was aware of death was at Senior School, I was off school with the flu one week, and my friend Martin came down to visit me; we had become firm friends through skateboarding and were both regulars at the Wokingham Skate Park. He bought me a bar of chocolate in his kind way. We discussed skateboarding and what was happening at the skate park. That was the last time I saw Martin.

That evening dark November, as his brother drove home down Barkham Hill, their car ploughed into the back of a tractor without lights, and Martin was killed. Martin’s brother survived but was injured. In the assembly on Monday, Martin’s death was announced. Some of my fellow pupils did not know what to do with this knowledge and made facile and insensitive jokes. This was death, and few could recognise it and realise its finality.

I have never forgotten him.

Three’s the spell, so now I want to write about my friend from college, James:

I must write about James, even though it’s hard to write about him.

James was beautiful.

Now it’s hard to define beauty, especially male beauty; James was slight, and there was also an aura of sadness about him. Beauty and sadness.

His father had played football for West Ham, and he now worked in films. I only met his dad once when I went out to Spain for a couple of weeks to keep James company when his Father was working on ‘The Empire of the Sun’, the film based on the JG Ballard novel. He was number two to Spielberg. His father was a charismatic man, and his partner was a very attractive New Zealander who suffered from what was then called Yuppie Flu or what’s now taken more seriously as ME. James’ father has gone on to have quite a career, and if you search him online, you can see his involvement with many films from ‘Flash Gordon’ to ‘The Avengers’.

I met another friend, Gizmo, first in the canteen with his large glasses and long coat. And then there was James with Levi's and a distressed U2 jacket. He has dark hair and an action-man-shaped scar on his cheek. He lived in Hayes with his Grandparents, I learnt because his father was away filming. Of course, the question naturally arose: where was his mother?

James explained that she had found out about his father’s infidelity and had killed herself. This boy seemed untethered from life and with one foot already in the world of the dead. His slightness meant a breeze would knock him over, and yet he was a more than useful sportsman.

That year began the Goth Movement; yes, we had had bands like The Cure, but this reignited with a Leeds band called The Sisters of Mercy. Their image and dark music ignited our imaginations, and we were soon wearing Goth gear brought from markets in London.

On Thursdays, I did not have lessons until the afternoon; however, I loved the crack of college and would come in early to meet James at The Slug and Lettuce, a pub up by the castle, where we would drink coffee and smoke. It got around that people were there, and they would come and join us. I suppose we were quite pretentious talking philosophy and politics, but it was harmless fun.

During the summer holiday, I kept up with James, meeting him in Slough. When Mum and Dad went on holiday, James and another boy, called Microphone on account of his hair, moved into the house. We smoked cigarettes and watched ‘Apocalypse Now’ and “Dallas, Texas’.

I lost touch with James once college ended, and I recall rightly, he went to Leeds to read Philosophy. When my first marriage ended, I contacted him, and he told me he was working as a cameraman for the BBC and had a girlfriend. We talked about meeting up, but sadly nothing came of it.

Those days had gone. I had only really known him for two years, but he made an impression on me. It was a couple of years later that I found out about his suicide.

There was almost a poetic inevitability about it in my mind. Apparently his work had been hard, and he had separated from his girlfriend. He had hung himself. I felt desperately sad for him. I hold him in my imagination often. What loneliness and lack of hope must you feel to put a rope around your neck and end your life? I think of James often.

One day a couple of years ago, I felt James with me, and he communicated that he wanted me to go to Windsor; I caught the train from Ashford in Surrey, where we lived and travelled to Windsor and just walked round visiting the places we had once been. That was it, no big reveal, but I felt his presence with me that day, a curious piece of soul reclamation.

The dead are nearer than we think!

David’s Substack

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