Absent Friends
Last week I learned that my old friend and bandmate David ‘Bozz’ Boswell had died. Although we lost touch in the early 2000s, we shared a house during the nineties, wrote and recorded songs together and for a while were as close as brothers, so it’s strange and surprisingly painful to know that he’s gone.
His death got me thinking about the nature of friendship. How evasive and transitory it can be. There are the steady friendships you maintain for decades and the ones that burn brightly then somehow lessen in intensity until they die out altogether. Sometimes losing a friend can be more traumatic than a romantic breakup while others, the fading kind, don’t hurt at all. Some, meanwhile, will make you realise that perhaps you should have tried to be a better friend than you were and force you to take stock of that. But like any relationship that has reached the end of its lifespan, it’s possible, with the passing of time, to recognise what those past friendships gave you. And I know that I would not be the person I am, or enjoyed so many of the creative experiences I have, without Bozz arriving in my life at a crucial time and setting me on a certain path.
We met in October of 1995 at Barnsley College, which as an institution marked itself out as a Higher Education gathering place for the kinds of messy people who either didn’t try hard enough during Sixth Form or tended to leave things until the last minute. I was the former and Bozz was the latter, having decided on impulse to upturn his life and register for a music production course just days before the start of term. A friend introduced the two of us one evening in the student bar and we immediately clicked over a shared love of music. Bozz was eight years older than me, and had already been performing as a touring musician since he was 16. Initially as a heavy metal drummer, then a guitarist in a punk band, an Al Di Meola-influenced jazz fusion musician and a House DJ. At the time we met, he’d just come fresh from living at a residential studio in Liverpool where he made music for low-budget Bollywood movies. I’d never met anyone quite like him, and admit to having been bewitched by the volume of life and experience he presented me with. He said he was thinking of forming a band, so I told him I played bass and minutes later he was proudly introducing me to strangers.
“This is Adam,” he said, slapping me on my shoulder. “My bass player.”
While he had no idea about my musical abilities, he accepted my word that I knew how to play and this was legitimising in itself. An act of faith that no one had ever placed in me before. So, while the skuzzy garage rock we played together wasn’t really my thing, I went along with it for the chance to be around him and the two of us spent a couple of years ploughing a furrow that was never going to make anyone rich or famous. Bozz however, thought otherwise.
“If you want to be on Top of the Pops,” he said, only half joking, “Then stick with me, kid.”
Despite my misgivings, that time meant the world to me. Bozz taught me enduring lessons about music and song structure. Instilled in me a love of Lou Reed, The Stooges, Echo and the Bunnymen and Leonard Cohen. Many of the things I adore about music as well as some that I can be quite snobby about, are traceable back to ideas he fed to me at a developmental stage. Crucially, he introduced me to several firsts. The first time I played a gig, the first time I used a recording studio and heard my music playing back at me through a mixing desk, the first time I co-wrote a proper song, all of them happened with Bozz, who was the most naturally gifted musician I’ve ever known.
6ft 2”, 25 stone and most often dressed in a drooping black leather baker boy cap and a tattered beige cardigan, Bozz did not fit the image you’d immediately conjure when someone says the word ‘musician’.
“You remind me of…” I began to tell him once, before he cut me off.
“Onslow,” he said. “You were going to say Onslow from Keeping Up Appearances.”
“No I wasn’t,” I lied.
“Good,” he said. “I’m much prettier than fucking Onslow.”
Even setting aside the visual he presented, you still wouldn’t have guessed at the musical abilities he possessed because Bozz was the clumsiest and most chaotic human being I’ve ever encountered. He interacted with the world like a man wearing boxing gloves, incapable of entering a room without accidentally destroying something. Like a reverse Midas, items seemed to lessen in value at the touch of his hand, somehow subject to accelerated decay. Adhesives would dry to a useless crust and fling themselves away from whatever they were holding in place. Screws reversed out of their holes. Furniture collapsed beneath him. His guitar, somehow, had dry rot in the headstock.
“It just fell apart.” he’d say, holding part of my kitchen tap in his hand. Standing over the shattered remains of my favourite mug. Informing me of the freshly broken handle on my toilet. “Nothing lasts.”
All this changed when you placed an instrument in his hands. The first time he played guitar for me, he settled into an armchair at my student house and performed effortless renditions of Van Halen’s ‘Eruption’, The Beatles ‘Blackbird’, The Stooges ‘T.V. Eye’ and a long, improvised version of Nick Drake’s ‘Pink Moon’, his fingers elegantly dancing across the neck. Then he let his guitar drop to the floor with a clang and started rolling himself a cigarette.
“Make us a brew,” he said, and when I handed him a steaming mug he immediately leapt to his feet, having dropped the entire contents into his lap.
As much as our friendship was defined by music, it’s the time we spent living together that taught me the most, underscored as it often was by poverty. The two of us always somehow penniless. Having no money teaches you a whole range of life lessons no one should ever have to learn but, in time, have value. I learned how it feels to go to your bank and withdraw £1.83 then try to work out how to transform it into three days of meals for two. What it’s like to queue up at a Cash Converter, having walked past the beloved guitar you’d pawned a fortnight earlier, and attempt to sell your toaster. The bleak sense of hope you feel when the electric card on your meter runs out and you find yourself attempting to boil water for a cup of tea by placing a lit candle beneath a stovetop kettle. My time with Bozz taught me about the shame that comes with having nothing, as well as the understanding and empathy that accompanies it. It instilled in me the idea that whatever you have, you should share it with others, even when all you have is fuck all. Of course, I didn’t consider this kind of word-art philosophy at the time, too busy thinking about my empty stomach and the letter I’d received about a county court judgement. But that time left a permanent and important mark on me.
After college, I moved back to the East Yorkshire coast but our band limped on through Bozz’s force of will. He’d moved to Sheffield and each week I would use my days off from work to travel there by coach so we could rehearse. I would stay overnight in his room at the YMCA and for a while that was our plan, for me to live curled up on his floor like a cat until we became famous. But then I moved to Manchester, got a steady job and the band become untenable, so I phoned Bozz and told him that I was quitting. I felt bad about it but I knew he’d be fine. By that point he was deeply involved in the Sheffield music scene, and our band had never been the only musical project he had on the go. While we called each other often after that, I wouldn’t see him again until 1998, when he appeared in the music video for the All Seeing I’s single ‘Walk Like a Panther’.
Bozz had joined the All Seeing I after our band split, and they became the big break that he’d always needed. He sang on their album, toured Europe and headlined the dance stage with them at the Leeds and Reading festivals in ‘99. He arranged me a backstage pass for Leeds and it was wonderful to see him there, this unlikely, broadly-smiling figure taking his place in the VIP section while Huey from the Fun Lovin’ Criminals walked past, a cloud of women in his wake.
During that year of unlikely things, he appeared on Top of the Pops, playing ‘The First Man in Space’ with Phil Oakey from The Human League. It was a heart-lifting sight, this man who’d once shared his last tin of beans with me, now sharing a mic with the guy who wrote ‘Don’t You Want Me Baby’. After it aired, I phoned him up and asked why he’d performed wearing a wide-brimmed cowboy hat and a poncho.
“Our stylist didn’t know what to do with me, so said ‘Fuck it! I’ll just cover you up!’”
Over time, Bozz and I lost touch, each of us finding ourselves too busy or distracted to reach out to each other. Time passed, we got new phone numbers, new addresses, splintered away from one another. It happens, even when it shouldn’t. But I occasionally heard what he was up to via mutual friends, always creating new things, helping and elevating other musicians on the Sheffield music scene, just as he’d done in Barnsley for me.
“You’re the best fucking bass player in the world,” he told me once, as we sat in his room at the YMCA. “You’re not, like. Not really. But you’re mine, so you’re the best in the fucking world.”
It was scrambled endorsements like this, “you’re not the best but you’re good enough”, that later gave me enough confidence to play with other musicians. To step onto stages with bands and eventually do it alone as a writer, standing there beneath the lights with notebooks full of my stories. It seems unlikely that I would be occupying the creative world I am, and have come as far as I have, without our years of friendship. It doesn’t matter that at the time of his death we’d not spoken for almost a quarter of a century. Except that of course that it does, and I have regrets about it. Via an acquaintance, I would discover that the fading of our friendship had hurt Bozz. That he’d felt abandoned by me. I had no idea he felt this way and had chances to fix that misunderstanding but it made me uncomfortable and I kept putting it off, always believing I’d have time to deal with it down the line. There was always something I had to get out of the way first. Now I’m out of time, and I’ll have to live with the fact that I never let him know what he’d done for me and what our time together meant. There is never enough time, I learned. All we really have is now.
Thinking back on our life together, there are many images of Bozz that persist for me. The sight of him Iggy Pop-howling into a mic and wrapped in cable as he twirled around our rehearsal room like a spinning top. Slumped in the armchair of our house and heavily smoking, like a steam engine with a long forgotten purpose. Flailing beside our cooker to avoid spattering fat after he’d decided to cook oven chips in a pan full of melted Stork margarine. Waving his hands in apology as he tried to explain to me how he’d managed to shatter my fishbowl and, in his panic, also tread on my goldfish. But my favourite image is of him on his knees, pawing through the snow outside my house in Barnsley.
It was a few weeks before he’d moved in with me, and the weather that week felt like a tribute to Narnia, everywhere clotted with deep snow, the roads treacherous with ice. And it was these conditions that had caused him to fall as he approached my house that evening and hear the sound of coins leaving his pocket and disappearing into the darkness.
“I felt like someone from fucking Mario,” he told me as he limped through my door, rubbing at his sore buttocks. “Coins fucking flying everywhere.”
Because of the weather, the bus route back to his home on the outskirts of town had been cancelled, so he stayed the night at mine. The next morning, I pulled on a jumper and headed downstairs, where I found him in his coat and standing beside the door, ready to head outside.
“Come ed,” he said, “Give me a hand.”
We headed to the spot where he’d fallen and he began using the toe of his boot like an archaeologist’s trowel, cautiously scraping it through the snow that had descended overnight. After a minute or so, he dropped to his knees and began raking his hands through the snow. With a small cry of triumph, he removed a single coin, then recommenced digging. I knelt beside him to help, the pair of us clawing the ground and withdrawing coins until there were none left to find. We got to our feet, our jeans soaking wet, and I poured my stash of coins into his frozen hands. He pressed a pound coin back into mine by way of thanks, then turned to look up the road towards town.
“I’m gonna check the buses,” he said. “See you when I see you.”
Despite the cold, I stayed on the corner of my street and watched him go, his giant form shrinking into the distance. And I was still watching him when he lost his balance at the brow of the hill, slipped, and fell from sight.
p.s. If you want to know more about Bozz, here’s a nice interview with him from January. I suspect it’s the last he ever did. I wish we’d talked more about UFOs.
Any other business:
What I’ve been reading: Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life by Dan Nadel. A dense and fascinating portrait of Robert Crumb, an artist who had a huge influence on me back when I was at art college, and does a great job of drawing the dark and stilted form of American society that created him.
What I’ve been listening to: Greatest Hits by Leonard Cohen, because of the previously mentioned sadness and sentimentality. I’ll never warm to his version of ‘Hallelujah’ though. I know he wrote it but Bozz was so damning about it that I can’t hear it without thinking of his protests (“Eighties Bontempi organ shit!”). Ditto John Cale’s version (“He sings like he’s trying to calm a fucking horse!”). Despite that, it’s great album.
What I’ve been doing: Walking my dog at 5am before the worst of the heat then sitting in my garden to write. It’s been the only upside of the heatwave.
What I’ll be doing: On August 10th I’ll be at Arvon Lumb Bank as the guest author for Amy Liptrot and Rob Cowen’s narrative nonfiction course. The last time I met Amy as I was hosting a literary event for her on Brexit eve, so hopefully August 11th will be a less eventful day for the nation. Then, on August 29th, I’ll be talking about memoir and reading from my work at the Grand Opera House York as part of a gala event for the wonderful mental health charity Menfulness, headlined by multi platinum singer/songwriter JP Cooper. Tickets are only £25 and you can get them here.
This is just gorgeous Adam
Lovely piece. Beautiful memories.