TV On The Radio

TV On The Radio

I only ever met TV on the Radio's Gerard Smith once. It was three years ago in the Muzak-scented lobby of a west London hotel. Smith chucked the odd word into my hour-long interview with the band, but it was only when the conversation wandered towards the twin behemoths of Funkadelic and Led Zeppelin that he really perked up, remembering how he inherited LPs from older family members and how important those second-hand pieces of plastic became to him. When he did speak the rest of the band just let him talk – I remember thinking perhaps it didn't happen that often. Perhaps they just wanted to sit back and enjoy it.

I thought of that moment again this morning when I heard that Gerard had died, aged just 34, from lung cancer. There are few professions that expect young men to spend as much highly pressurised time together as music, and recently TOVTR singer Tunde Adebimpe told me how the band had nearly split after relentless touring. But he also said that however bad it got these were the only other four people in the world he'd want to talk to, and I think that cuts to the heart of how painful it is when a band loses a member and how unlikely we are to ever really understand how they feel.

It's a concept worn smooth by overuse, but the best sort of bands really are like gangs. They have their own language, mannerisms, tics, in-jokes and ways of dealing with the constant influx of label people, journalists and fans. When someone suddenly dies, all those outsiders want to know how they feel about everything right now. But that's impossible for them to say.

Thirty-one years ago Paul McCartney's immediate (media) reaction to John Lennon's murder was to say, "It's a drag," a phrase that, when spoken, was full of melancholy, but in print sounds flippant. A few weeks ago, Dave Grohl was asked about the death of his former Nirvana bandmate Kurt Cobain. Even 17 years later he still found it hard to talk about and was, in his attempt to preserve something for himself, brilliantly honest.

"I'm not really telling you the truth right now," he told a BBC reporter. "You're a journalist, and this is going out on the radio. You're not really entitled to know how I feel about these things because they're mine."

I once interviewed Chris Blackwell, who founded Island Records and signed Bob Marley. He told me that he only has one picture of him and Marley together (both felt it important that Marley wasn't photographed with his – white – label boss) and that's a copy. The original was destroyed in a fire and the photographer, sensing a serious payday, won't sell him the negative. Three decades certainly haven't dulled how Blackwell feels about his biggest star's death, at 36. "I will always remember Bob as being a fantastic person," Blackwell told me. "He had incredible charisma – when he walked in a room you knew about it. And he was very moral, he lead quietly and by example. The truth is I loved him very much indeed. It still feels ridiculous to me how he was taken so young."

Most of the time we – as outsiders – will only ever glimpse the pain felt when a band-member dies. But Danny Thompson – who played alongside folk legend John Martyn for years – was still genuinely upset by the singer-songwriter's death when I interviewed him a year later. Aged 70, he sat in his kitchen staring at a picture of the two of them as young men, arms flung around each other, their eyes lit up after what must have been a great gig. As he looked, he spoke as honestly as anyone could possibly do when someone they've never met before asks them about the death of a loved one. "Look at him," Thompson said, obviously moved. "Just look at my curly-haired mate ..."

TV On The Radio