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Out of context: Reply #74956
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I thought I'd expand the story of how I met my friend who passed recently which goes back to the mid 90's, I was painting a writer friend of my mum's house. Oddly enough he offered to pay me in records as he was mad keen on CD's at the time so was given his collection of folk, Fairports, Pentangle etc - no complaints from me! Anyway his cleaner happened to mention her son who was disabled and near blind was big into music and would I like to come and chat to him, so one afternoon I did. We hit it off really well as he was a bit older than me and he had been to lots of interesting gigs and festivals so we chatted a lot about music and football. He was a massive Northampton Town fan so I ended up taking him to matches, play off finals etc and we then went to a lot of gigs together. He collected art, books and was fairly obsessed with Robert Wyatt/Soft Machine so he spent a small fortune on the print - 1/100 and then a further fortune getting the bugger framed.
When I got the call he had passed from COVID his carer told me I need to come down to her house near where he lived to collect boxes of stuff he had bequeathed me. He was really into Can, Popol Vuh and most of all Faust. His carer told me how he had considered the night we went to see Faust play in Milton Keynes was one of the best nights of his life. It was a pretty incredible night all round really as hardly anyone was there, perhaps 20 people tops and when the band played a blinding set - including an angle grinder on railway tracks solo! and then they all came out to the bar afterwards and sat and chatted to the group of us that had remained and drank with us for over an hour and signed stuff and that, they were really lovely chaps and it certainly left a big impression on my friend. I had not seen him for a while as I have moved to Scotland in the past few years but we spoke on the phone often, I'll miss him as he was very knowledgeable about stuff and really was a very kind and lovely man. He is now buried next to his mum in the local graveyard.