Back in April I got the unexpected news that one of my dearest friends, Adam Warne, had died.
He was in the year below me at Boston Grammar School but I properly met him when I joined hardcore punk band Vehicle Derek in early 1988 as the bass player (he was the drummer). The pic at the top is of us onstage in about May 1988 when Vehicle Derek were supporting either The Senseless Things or Mega City Four. We went onto become firm friends and got up to all sorts of musical, artistic and plain old hanging-around-mischief, whether it was in bands, creating art, or just zooming around town.
We hung out despite the miles between us after he settled in Leeds and I moved to Oxford, and wrote letters in the meantime. As with so much of life as you get older there was a huge period where we didn’t see each other. But I did catch up with him in 2012.
The pic at the bottom is from that meeting when I was up in Leeds on a trip (last year when I reminded him that it had been 4 years since we last met he wrote back ‘Sweet Jiminy Jesus Cricket Christbiscuits! The situation simply must be remedied!’ but…regrettably no plans got made).
This was taken after he and I’d had a considerably extended lunch in Leeds Art Gallery, spending absolutely ages wandering up and down Memory Lane (as well as Filling-In-The-Gaps Road, What-We-Were-Currently-Doing Avenue, Future-Plans Street, Man-Look-I-Never-Told-You-This-At-The-Time…But Snicket and a couple of back-tracked diversions into Awkward-Silence-Well…There-You-Go, Right…Fancy-Another-Cuppa? Cul-De-Sac). It was great to know that by-and-large we were still on our own delightfully out of tune wavelength whilst finding out we had both done loads of brand-new things in the meantime.
There should be a paragraph here that sums things up nicely but I am utterly bewildered by the idea/thought/reality of him passing away. I have however found reading everyone’s thoughts and memories of him on the Facebook memorial page to be really ace and the pictures are lovely and I feel insanely proud of what he achieved.
He was, to paraphrase what he once said was “his favourite number”, googolplex to the power of googolplex.
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