Your Round the Clock Rock n’ Roll Obituary Service.

I just found out that Arthur Lee has died of leukaemia.

I'll have to do this post without the cool pictures of him I've just spent an age looking up because this shitty laptop and shitty blogger.com won't let me post pictures or whatever and I've no time left to piss around.

Out of touch as I am, the sad news reached me via the rather un-rock n’ roll medium of the midday news on Radio 4. It’s nice they mentioned him at all I suppose.

“Arthur Lee, singer and guitarist with the sixties band Love…”

The world stops for a second as I start to pay attention and wonder how this sentence is going to end - ...has unexpectedly scored a no#1 single? has shot somebody, or been arrested again? Has broken the world record for solo hot air balloon flight? Has announced weird and outspoken views on the conflict in the middle east? Has burned a Paris hotel to the ground?

No, realistically of course, there’s only one thing Arthur Lee could have done to merit a spot on the BBC lunchtime news.

And as with the deaths of so many cool people over the past couple of years (and why is it that musicians who are boring and unremarkable never seem to die? Why is it always the inspiring, elusive, iconic dudes whom we want to live forever? – first Syd, now this, give us a break universe!), synchronicity jumps in my face so much it’s not even funny. Weird and alone, I’ve been doing what comes naturally and blasting ‘Forever Changes’ loads over the past week or so.

There wouldn’t be much to gain in becoming the 1,128th writer to go on and on about how great it is, but needless to say, if any rock album ever had ‘masterpiece’ written all over it and became more of a masterpiece the more you listen – this is the one. And if anyone begs to differ, I hereby empower my readers to ignore, belittle and taunt until they see sense. Harangue them for being insufficiently mystical, for being just too damn square to pick up on the sheer Blakeian post-teenage confused, visionary WHAH that Arthur Lee is laying down amid progressions and arrangements so spaced out and ambitious and unique and fully formed as to make any serious connoisseur of ‘60s pop music flip his or her wig in a matter of seconds.

And the first two Love albums are pretty fucking good too – heavenly flower-punk dementia writ large.

I was lucky enough to see the reformed Love (effectively Arthur Lee + backing band, but never mind, they were good) twice; first at All Tomorrow’s Parties, playing an absolutely triumphant set, blasting most of the modern bands on the bill out of the water with pure messianic garage-rock grandeur, with Arthur on fine form, rejoicing as the audience of teens and 20-somethings sang along to every word of his weird, old songs. And secondly, they played in Swansea, whilst I was living there. This was a cosmically significant event for me, because NOBODY at all EVER played in Swansea, and as I’d spent the proceeding three months wandering the streets, parks and beaches aimlessly, listening to Forever Changes incessantly, to learn that the dude behind this genius album I loved so much was rolling into town to play at a dilapidated Victorian pavilion 400 yards from my house was obviously kind of a trip!
That was a great show too, surprisingly well-attended and mega-loud with a sort of slightly crazed hick-town atmosphere – y’know, where every stoner and weirdo in the whole county seems to turn up whether they know the group or not. But that kinda worked well. I was lucky it seems, as I hear sad rumours that many other Love/Lee shows on their seemingly endless tours of the past few years were grinding and tragic disasters, with Arthur too tired or ill or freaked out or whatever to really perform. Up to today I had no idea he had Leukaemia. No wonder he had trouble keeping it together sometimes.

I’ll be back in Swansea next week, doing some work on the house I used to live in. I’ll probably be walking past that pavilion many times. Once again, the sun is shining, and once again I have real idea of where to go or what to do. And I’m already on another ‘Forever Changes’ jag, so I see no reason why I should stop blasting it now.


And if you see Andmoreagain
Then you will know Andmoreagain
For you can see you in her eyes

And you hear your heart beating
Tum-tum-tum-tum

And when you’ve given all you had
And everything still turns out bad
And all your secrets are your own

And you hear your heart beating
Tum-tum-tum-tum

And I’m trapped in my armour
But my things are material
And I’m lost in confusion
Cos my things are material
And you don’t know how much...

...I love you

Arthur Lee was 22 years old when Love recorded Forever Changes.