Preemptive Retaliation

Growing up, my family bonded around television. A tradition of ours was to sit around the tv and watch whatever new show was airing that evening. It was one of the few things that we all enjoyed doing together, and we talked about our excitement for the shows and opinions on where each season was going. It was close and intimate. Personal. For me, watching Stargate SG1 was a family activity, something just for us. So, in school, when I heard someone randomly quote one of the characters from the previous episode, I was taken aback. They watched the show? They enjoyed it too? What is this? Simultaneously my private life had been invaded and expanded. My intimate family moments had been unfairly shared with millions of others. How could they encroach on something so personal?

This is what Frightened Rabbit are to me.

The first time I heard them I was living with Rob. It was a sunny day and we were getting ready to go out drinking by drinking in the flat. As customary for pre dancing drinks we queued up songs on Youtube and tried to impress each other with weak jokes. After an upbeat number from my selection (probably some pop-punk nostalgia trip) the sound of a sadly hopeful organ came from his laptop’s tinny speakers, and Keep Yourself Warm started playing. I wasn’t too into it at first, but Rob placated me with a knowing smile, saying, “Just listen to it. It’s all about fucking.” Which, undoubtedly, it was.

That was my first introduction to the band; a youtube video which had the lyrics crawling across the screen in some shitty font that I played over and over again piecing together what it was about. I imagined it, and still do, taking place in The Garage, with its hot, clammy bodies writhing against each other. The song make me think of that place, and I mean really think about it – how packed it was of fun and lust and heartbreak – and I made it the opening chapter of my novel. There was something so true about the song, so unabashedly honest about going out and getting fucked up that I wanted to emulate. It struck a chord.

Soon after I bought The Midnight Organ Fight and played it constantly. There was something so charming about it. It was depressing,-but its tracks were sung with tongue in cheek. This made the songs applicable even for the sunniest of days, and I listened to the hell out of that album – to the point where, much to Rob’s dismay, I declared myself a huge fan and that I had discovered them myself.

And that was it. They were mine. The deceptively low brow word smithery of the lyrics were mine to understand. The images resonated with my life, with my experiences, with my awkwardness and my own stilted experiences with embarrassed pathos. The songs seemed so catered to me, so utterly personal, that how could anyone else actually like them? It was impossible. When a friend chose to tattoo symbols of the band onto him, etching Scott’s signature permanently onto his arm, I rolled my eyes and shrugged it off. He didn’t get them like I did.

Even when I saw them in concert, in a heaving sold out weekend end of a similarily sold out touir, with hundreds of people stamping the floor and belting out the lyrics in unison; even then I didn’t admit that other people liked them like I did.

A few weeks ago I went to see Mastersystem in the Art School. I took my friend Thomas along with me and we both ended up getting hopelessly drunk in the bar when it finished. The place was emptying out and we were talking away with anyone we could meet when the band came in and sat a few tables across. And there was Scott Hutchison. I was half star-struck and half bashful but wholly drunk and immediately dragged Thomas across to sit with them. I asked if we could join them for a drink, they agreed and there we were. Suddenly my beers and rum and whatever caught up with me and I was struck dumb. What could I say here? What could I say to the man who had accompanied me for hundreds of hours, who had sung me through countless commutes and showers and short stories? Apparently nothing. Thomas talked with him about heartbreak and poetry, and I seethed with envy, trying not to keel over with alcohol poisoning. I left that place without speaking to him, wondering if I’d ever get the chance to again.

Well, we know how that turned out.

I’ve been writing this for a few days now, and I can’t get through it without feeling upset. When I started it there was a pain in my chest, as if something is straining past my ribs. I burst into tears a few times, but that could’ve been because I was drinking when writing it.

I wrote the majority of this on a train to Edinburgh from Newcastle. I was hurtling towards Edinburgh with the sea to my right, and Forth over the horizon ahead. I thought there was some poignancy to it, as if I was gravitating around where he killed himself. I’m sure many, like me, have listened again to the song that prophesised it, self fulfilling or otherwise. And I suppose there’s a solace to that. When Chester Bennington ended his life I was making a similar journey. I was on a train, a little drunk and uncomfortably warm. I was listening to Meteora, an album that reminded me of locking myself in my room with the volume up as high as it could go. Beside me sat a stranger, like any other, and I watched her lift her phone and flick through the Linkin Park albums she was listening to. I wanted to talk to her about it, to share my thoughts on the whole mess, but I didn’t. She was just another person in the world with her own little aches. We were completely separate, but we were feeling it together.

And there’s comfort in that. Seeing the outpour on social media and elsewhere has been heartwarming, in a sense. I’m not so fucking callous to shrug them off and claim that they don’t like the band, they don’t relate to the lyrics as much as I do… because obviously that’s not the case. Seeing everyone share their experiences with his music has made me reconsider my own. Like with my television shows, something private has been invaded, almost taken from me… but not to its detriment. This death wasn’t private, it didn’t happen to me only. There are others going through the same, and there’s solace in having that comradery, that comfort in numbers. I don’t know if Scott knew the amount of people he touched with his music. Maybe it was all private to him.

I don’t know. It hurts, and that’s all I can say. It hurts in a distant, but very real way.

When I arrived home from my work trip Anna asked me how I was doing, how I was dealing with it all. I told her that I was dealing with it like any other suicide by someone I barely knew. I was going to write a novel about it, I said, sadly, with a tongue firmly in my cheek.