I wasn't a big fan of Belle and Sebastian, but a guy that used to work in the same lab as me was playing 'The Boy With The Arab Strap' album in the lab one day, and I remarked on it. He was delighted that someone else knew who they were, and we got chatting... (bearing in mind we never said a word to each other prior to that.) Turns out that was the spark that started a long and very strong friendship... I was even his Best Man at his wedding, and I also visited him in Italy and he took me to the Italian Grand Prix. We are still in touch to this day, and he was a key friend who got me started in music recording.
He was a friend of the band and even ran his own B&S themed nightclub events in a basement bar in London, and I DJ'd there a couple of times, the only condition being that I played at least one B&S track. The club was called Tigermilking, and it was great fun - even though he rarely, if ever, made a profit from the night. My favourite memory was one night when they screwed up the sound system, and as compensation, they let a select few of us know that the beer tap in the room was actually live and that the organisers (including me) could help themselves to free beer. My mate
Stuart got so drunk he fell off the stage.
His website with some vintage photos is still there, and the website is unusually poignant for a really awful reason... the next club night was organised by some of his friends, including a girl called
Liz. Tragically, just over a week before the club night (that the website still advertises), she was murdered by a suicide bomber on the London Underground.
I only ever met her a couple of times (at Tigermilking) but I was friendly with her boyfriend, Rob. I wrote a song in her memory and posted it on SoundCloud, and it features
photography by fellow GTPlaneteer,
@F1GTR
