Three in one day. Blimey. In relation to the third of them, in particular, the world actually does feel a little emptier today.
1. Sky "Sunlight" Saxon, erstwhile singer of The Seeds, one of the better of the "Nuggets"-era bands, responsible in particular for "Can't Seem To Make You Mine", one of the best songs of that or any other age. Saxon, like many others of a similar time and place (that place being, of course, a garage somewhere), underwent a second moment in the spotlight during the garage-rock revival of the latter half of the eighties, but it was not to last.
2. Steven Wells. I always read whatever Wellsy wrote. I didn't always, or perhaps almost ever, find myself in agreement with its content, but Wells had a style all his own, and he was an integral part of the coarsely (very coarsely in Wells's case) woven fabric that was the Golden Age of the New Musical Express.
3. Which leaves the big one, the genuinely unfillable hole. The King of Pop is dead. Long live the King of Pop. I can't believe how churned up I am about Michael Jackson's death. (In fact I am writing this through an unexpected veil of tears.) It's not that it was a shock (c.f. Grant McLennan) so much as that it feels so appallingly inevitable. It is as if, from the moment he was born, Michael Jackson's life was going to end this way - fundamentally alone, lost, his life controlled by people other than himself, and yet he has continued to be a part of the lives of so many people, from the media, who kept falling over themselves to portray him as crazy, wacko, a figure of fun, to people like our own eleven-year-old, who self-evidently has only discovered Michael Jackson long after Jackson's best musical days were behind him, but who will undoubtedly have been devastated upon hearing the news (I think a part of my own devastation is about feeling his pain). The parallels between Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley can now be accurately measured. I suspect they are many. Now that Michael has left the building, all we have is his legacy. And that, as we all now know, is greater than any one man could bear.
