Thursday 10th March
It is a sad fact of life that as you get older you are far more aware of death. Or more specifically deaths seem to matter to you, as more and more of your contemporaries are falling. As a kid I barely noticed people dying; I am sure they announced it on the News just as they do today – but maybe without the ready-made obituaries. Old Hollywood film-stars or Crooners meant hardly a thing to me. The first death I was really aware of must have been Kennedy, November 1963. I was 12 but I can still remember the sense of shock, the nature of the assassination, the blurry amateur film footage and the funeral shown on TV too. Churchill died in I think 61, and as a young Scout I marched one bitterly cold January Sunday morning; but interested in politics as I was he was from a different time.
In the sixties and almost at the same time it seemed we had Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King and Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix. But I was young I suppose and new heroes were springing up and I didn’t really mourn for them. Then in 1979 John Lennon was killed, another pointless shooting in New York City, and that hit me hard; all our dreams of The Beatles getting back together again were shattered. And John mattered because we all felt we knew him, he was one of us, and cut down while still so young.
And now I feel almost every death of my Heroes. A few years ago it was George Harrison, the gentle spiritual Beatle and before that Freddie Mercury of Queen. This Winter we have had Bowie of course and Glenn Frey of the Eagles and a few others and now George Martin. And even though he was old, twenty years older than the Beatles and never in the spotlight, I felt I knew him too. He was often photographed with the Fab Four and Brian Epstein too and there is no doubt that he helped them in so many ways. Firstly he encouraged them to write more of their own songs and then allowed them the freedom and the benefit if his musical knowledge to explore other instruments, other sounds, other ideas – and the results were astounding. No other group, before or after, has progressed and changed so much in eight short years, and all of it made possible by George Martin – another Hero gone down.
