24/100, A Morning Reckoning

and a song is a prayer.

Last Thursday marked six years since the death of Scott Hutchison, lead singer in the Scottish band, Frightened Rabbit. He died on the 9th May 2016. He was 36. In the wake of a suicide what is there to say? Everything and nothing. In the wake of Scott’s death, tributes from around the world poured in, but it was closer to home where the real stories lay. Everyone connected to music in Edinburgh or Glasgow had a Scott story. Everyone knew how hard he worked, how happy he was to say yes to things that would stretch him just a little bit further. A little bit too far.

My aunt died by suicide when I was seven. Successfully completing a task she’d tried before. After, nothing was the same. People behave like they’ve moved on, but there was always a hole. That dreaded full stop. My grandmother had a photograph of her printed and framed, sat it on the sideboard in the dining room. I hated it. I couldn’t stand to see her smiling at us, looking so innocent, not knowing how it would end. I wonder now if it was my grandmother’s way of keeping her there, around the table with the rest of us.

My eldest son lost his first tooth in the two days Scott was missing. The weather was beautiful, the type of first burst of heat we think is rare for May. We say it every year. He was missing, people were tweeting, posting on Instagram, everyone hoping to find him and I took the kids to a field to play to take my mind of it, his tooth fell out somewhere between the furrows. We couldn’t find it. I drew a map for the tooth fairy, told him she’d be able to find it in the field. But he barely believed anyway.

Every year, in the days leading up the anniversary of Scott’s death, I try to plug the hole. Listen to his music, look through old photographs. Every death is a full stop but a suicide an especially abrupt one. There’s a feeling there should be more. It’s a cliche to say it, but 38 is no age at all. There should be more records, more songs, more gigs, more nights with drums echoing the cadence of your own heartbeat. And there isn’t. It just stops. I’ve listened to all his songs. I found myself this year scouring Spotify to try and find something new, anything. Late one night, a Youtube video, shakyily filmed by an old phone, in a venue in Edinburgh that’s closed now, and there he was but god, it was bad. Was it all that bad, back then? Peak indie sleaze, us squeezed into American Apparel disco pants, with sideswept fringes and so much eyeliner it never really came off.

I found an article I’d forgotten about in the New Yorker, it mentions two of his songs, Woke up Hurting and The Work. The strength of Scott’s work lay in his lyrics, and since his death, Faber have released a book of these, The Work, which is a testament to just how good they were. They’re funny, they’re biting, they’re sarcastic. My favourite varies depending on my mood, it’s hard to choose. A few though:

I have a long list, of tepid disappointments, it doesn’t mention you, from An Otherwise Disappointing Life.

From Holy: You’re acting all holy, me I’m just full of holes. Full of holes.

Jesus is just a Spanish boy’s name, from Head’s Roll Off.

This is my safe house in the hurricane, here is where my love lays, 200 treasured bones, from 400 Bones.

And Poke, all of it.

I reread the article late on Thursday night, after walking from soho to Vauxhall, west into the sunset, the weather the same as it was six years ago, read it sitting up in bed, the sky lit with light pollution or maybe it was the Northern Lights, see something carries on.

In the article, Amanda Petrusich sums exactly where his talent lay, Frightened Rabbit was virtuosic when it came to expressing the odd anxieties of an early, hungover morning, when a person wakes up and has to reckon with herself (I find the gendered language interesting here, revealing where the personal lies in this essay) again - the relentless ennui of being, and being, and being.

The relentless ennui of being, and being, and being. It’s there in every song, he grew up not far from where I did. The repeating days of rural Scotland, the need to escape if you were ever going to build a life that wasn’t your parents’, but the stupid, insistent pull of home.

When a person wakes up and has to reckon with herself, I used to reckon with myself every night. Called it prayer. But a song is a prayer, especially one you’re worn inside out..

Now, it’s the morning reckoning I’m more used to. Not hungover mornings, just waking with the morning light, there are 5am now, and needing something other than the ennui, the repeat. I sometimes miss God. I miss the Bible. It was easy to keep under a pillow and reach for. I liked that most of it was written in riddles. Mostly I liked how beautiful it was. Liked the gilt-edged pages, the leather cover, the feeling of it being holy. How holy it made me when I was full of holes. I liked praying for absolution and thinking I’d found it. Now, there’s just the morning light. Recently, I have been reading Simone Weil, gone back to Derrida. It helps. Texts you get the gist of more than the absolute meaning, a meaning I squint at sideways, hoping it doesn’t bolt.

It is hard to reckon with yourself as an artist. How do you keep making when everything else is happening? How do you keep faith in what you make? How do you square your life choices in that cold, pure light, before the city wakes and the noise comes back? Perhaps the answer is this from Hillel, and whosoever saves a life, it is as though he has saved the entire world.’

A song can save a life, a book too. You could argue not many. You could say not enough.

But if whosoever saves a life…has saved the whole world, then that one saved it enough. My aunt was our whole world. Scott was people’s whole world. People would give the world to have them back. After The Last Days was published people wrote to me, and still write to me, to tell me it saved their lives. Art might not do much in geo-political terms, but that it can do that, is enough as an answer when the daily reckoning comes. It does THIS. Something carries on.