Darkness Into Light (For John - Two Years On)

So, I’m here again. Its two years now since we lost John. I’m still a crazy minded muso, I still crash in and out of relationships, I still query, question and over analyse myself. I’m still chasing the stars, and I still wear the same pendant around my neck that I bought on March 12th 2004 with my friend Freya from the indoor market in Canterbury. The reposted diary entry from The Change’s website, recounts what happened the day afterward, when John emerged briefly like the star he was from his terminal depression and reached out in his typically unassuming manner.

But after that, the hands retreated and he got dragged down, and life took him spiralling down like a vortex of futility and he lost himself in a void. Maybe he just burned out – he was 56 - and had never let himself fall in line with the expectations of others. He remained original, genuine and sincere up until the end.
One of my friends told me that he thought it was a cowardly act, the way John chose to let the curtain fall. Its easy for happy and secure fuck wits to look from the outside and pass judgement, particularly as the dead can’t answer back. But I’ll say this in defence of my friend, I know of no-one else whoever gave so much to so many people and never expected anything from it. John only took something once, and it was his to take. Keep this in mind too, he stopped a lot of people taking the same thing from themselves.
Over the thirty years that he lectured at the University of Kent, he was a truly unique figure, and not just as a teacher, but as a mentor and counsellor to thousands, he probably did more for those people than any rock star ever did. I don’t need idols. I reject your icons, your politicians who are engineering this current epoch of highly polished, mediated futility. John might have lost his fight, but the battle is still on. It’s the battle that grew out of the urge to stop us from annihilating ourselves since The Bomb arrived, since we started to realise that we were fucking with our planet, our people and letting the superficial lay siege to our souls. Its my battle too. I might seem to play up to roll of the long haired hippy, but let me tell you this, I’ve had enough of death, I’ve had enough of violence, I’ve had enough of living in a world engineered to perfect the art of self-destruction, oblivion, and alienation. Try to fuck us over anymore and I’ll turn on you as hard as granite. I’ll create something out of your destruction, you fetid gangrenous politicians and ‘Yes Men’ selling us out to save and cover your own asses in gold. I’ve seen what your wars do, I saw it in the eyes of my grandfather as he was dying, and it infected me.Two weeks before John died, I had one of my meetings with Gustav Metzger, we spent about five hours in Milbank Park behind Tate Britain. I finished my thesis as a tribute to John. Gustav knows about destruction, most of his family were murdered by the Nazis, he had his door kicked down by the S.A on Kristallnacht. He engineered the demonstrations in Trafalgar Square against The Bomb, he went to prison for it with Bertrand Russell, he would go again if he had too. But he is a man of tremendous compassion, his character is one of total humility. The living proof that out of violence, death and destruction we have it within our humanity to rise above it, and in doing so, I believe create a pathway out of the mire that the human race has put itself into.

I have sleepless nights. I lie awake –sometimes I fight with my bed – and I am wracked with guilt, because I have made promises, to myself, to my brief as a writer and musician, to the human race. I have been born into a position far better than most, I have a responsibility, a duty, and I have not yet delivered. Please don’t assume that with these lofty expectations that I am pompous, it is born out of total sincerity, I am small cog in a huge machine, but I refuse to tow the line of expectation. I can’t just let go, and choose the “we’re all fucked anyway” get-out clause. We human beings can do great, as well as terrible, things. I just believe that we need to redress the balance somewhat at the moment.

I still miss John. Occasionally I think that I see him on the other side of the road, or I sense his presence particularly in troubled times. In many respects he had a wonderful and colourful life, more so than many, the difference is that his contribution will never be featured as a retrospective front cover of Mojo magazine. Who gives a fuck, anyway?! Real action doesn’t need accolades or reverence. It is still continuing to work through the lives of those who gave so much for so long, until he could give no more. Johnny B, I salute you!

Reposted from May 28th 2005.

It is a year today since my dear friend John Bousfield died. It seems like five minutes since we lost him, and five years too. He was a great ally of mine, a force for good in my life who believed in me, and believed that the power to shape the world was in the collective hands of humanity. We had been pro-active together through the charity Gathering Roots in Canterbury, organising music events that endorsed and handed its profits over to various causes. This is when I first became close to him, enjoying many wonderful evenings with others in his flat eating fabulous meals, drinking copious amounts of wine and figuring out how we were going to change the world.

After we both left the charity, we became close friends spending countless hours together talking over our lives. It always struck me that despite the 30 odd year age gap between us, how similar our problems were…but that was John, and he was forever young until the last troublesome months of his life. He was the same age as my father, who seems to me to be a world apart…but John was always of the moment, and someone who had literally saved the lives of many young people for over thirty years in his work as a lecturer (though I must confess, I never experienced the pleasure of his off-beat, genial, and Fluxus like lectures). Believe me, I do not exaggerate…this man saved lives, not only in the sense of firing the imaginations and spirits of thousands of students but also in his open minded, warm hearted and approachable nature that drew troubled souls toward him in need of good counsel and advice.

This was, however, simply the mark of the man, and although he would hate me writing it, I think that he was truly a great man. We shared a great love of music, and I regret that there was so much that he could have taught me but for which we ran out of time. His influence upon me was to harden my resolve upon the course of my life, particularly with the notion of music’s ability to change, or at least to affect society. We did it. We booked the halls, hired the bands, printed the posters, made the money and made a difference. This knowledge remains a strong force within my continuing need to make music and perform it in a way that, if even for a moment, makes people feel that there is something bigger, and that there is a difference to make.

I think that John was spiritually very advanced. A true seeker, who constantly asked questions and troubled himself over the paths to a higher plain laid out in front of him. I pray that before he moved on that he glimpsed what he was looking for, and that he grasped the silver thread that the divine drops down to us in difficult times. I had hoped that I would carry on down my own spiritual path with John as a close advisor, someone who could guide me and maybe the spiritual growth that we shared will still light my way in the future.

There are many stories that I could repeat here about our times together, but I will relate just one for you here, and it is one that I have told countless times over the past year. John was taken ill over the Christmas of 2003 and had a difficult start to early 2004, my birthday was March the 13th when he was present at my boozy, celebration bash in Canterbury. It was a wonderful occasion for myself, I was surrounded by many friends a lot of whom had never met each other. John was on fine form, leaving a great impression upon many of the people who had brought me through some very difficult times in my life that had been going on over the previous months. It sounds corny to write it, but the love was out in force that night. The man was literally sparking, interacting in his most casual, engaging and fascinating style…that had always been the hallmark in John as social megastar. I remember taking him to one side at one point and saying,
“Y’know John, I’m stoked. It means so fucking much to me to bring all these people together and to see them so happy and into each other.”

John replied,
“Well, its love isn’t it! That’s what it is, its love.”

And that was the very essence of the man. It would be easy for a number of pricks out there to criticise John, he could be self-indulgent and he had pursued and confronted the extremes of many aspects of life within his time. Let them. Ultimately, I can only write about the man who I knew as force for good in all aspects within my life, and someone who wore his frailties on his sleeve but who raged against them as challenges.

When I heard of his death it wasn’t a surprise to me. I had been deeply concerned over his wellbeing for a while, and had tried to help him but to no avail, the story of which is personal and best kept so. It occurred during a time of great difficulty for myself. I was still desperately struggling to come to terms with two deaths within my own family, of startling unique people who were deeply immersed within my sense of self and character. I was drinking heavily, spending days spaced out, clinging to friends who tolerated my self-indulgence and futile pursuits. I was feeling tremendous pressure to complete my thesis on Gustav Metzger, and to make The Change become reality. I was involved in numerous loose relationships, whilst awkwardly distancing myself from the woman with whom I had been inseperable from for two years. I had also become deeply emotionally involved with a girl who was in a difficult relationship, and who was still living with her partner. I was deeply concerned that I might self-destruct, go mad, or worse still follow John into the abyss. The Change had just played a storming hour-long gig at the Penny Theatre in Canterbury three days before he died, my hands were still bandaged and bruised from cutting my fingers on guitar strings through many, many epic windmills. I was in a very extreme, and heightened space, with adrenalin coursing through my veins. Somehow, I made it through…and I think that the key motivation for this was that I wanted to nail my work on Metzger to honour John’s memory, and more importantly follow through on the ambitions that I’d told him about so many times before.

As I write this today, I wonder where I would be if he was still here. He was a great ally of mine, and no-one I think will ever fill that personal void that I now feel. Nonetheless, I am still here…I have passion, ability and a brain too. Nothing will stop me, which in happier times was John’s attitude toward life. Quit now? I haven’t even started!

So, here is to John. A great man, a dear friend, a brilliant teacher (in many ways), the father of a really great son and daughter, and the father figure of countless students who came into contact with him over the years. I hope that in all the achievements of my future, that I can celebrate his memory and still resonating life-force.


Tom.

Post-script:

Here are the lyrics to a song that I wrote in the days following John’s death. There is nothing about the words or the music that I would change.

Darkness Into Light (For John)

You raged in the day,
Stared hard at the night,
Turned away from the sunset
And transformed into light.

We gazed at the rise
Breathed deep on this life,
Danced in the brightness
Then stood up for the fight.

Darkness turns into light,
Darkness turns into light,
Darkness turns into light,
Light breathes into life.

We burned in the shadow,
Drew faith in new heights
Thrust a fist in the air
Then prayed for their plight.

I look at the embers,
And know they’ll ignite,
Love’s fire still burns,
To keep us warm in the night.

Darkness turns into light,
Darkness turns into light,
Darkness turns into light,
Light breathes into life.


You raged in the day,
Stared hard at the night,
Turned away from the sunset
And transformed into light.

Darkness turns into light,
Darkness turns into light,
Darkness turns into light,
Light breathes love breathes life.