From anxious to believin’ real G’s don’t cry, if that’s the truth, then I’m realising I ain’t no gangster.
I come from an inherently musical family. My grandad’s job, sometime throughout the 60s or 70s, was to play music with his band in The Empire in Leicester Square. The way my mum passed music to us was in the car. I’d use the word eclectic, from Toni Braxton to David Bowie to Sade. Nothing was off limits, so I don’t know exactly when I first heard “The Message” by Dr. Dre, but I know it has always existed in my brain, and my brothers, too.
Then my friend died, and everything about that song changed.
My friend Sacha passed in 2015 in a railway accident, just over ten years ago now. There was a set group of us, the four of us, me, my brother, Sacha and her brother Zack. We’d do almost everything together, whether we were watching movies, or playing Bad Boys or, sometimes, listening to music. Sacha was the first person I knew, other than my mother, to have a record player. The first album she bought was House Of Pain’s “Jump Around”, maybe it was a 7” single disk, but that detail I don’t quite remember. I just remember her putting it on.
(L-R) Dill, Sacha &
Zack and Me
I remember the fact we’d listen to the most music in my mum’s car. The four of us, that is. And we’d be allowed to swear with the song, if we’d done enough to learn the lyrics, my mum appreciated the effort more than anything, so she could forgive a couple swear words.
The first time I saw live music was with Sacha. It was Lounge on the Farm. Somewhere in Kent, the four of us, in our eight to ten-year-old wisdom, snuck our way onto a wheelchair vantage ramp to watch Example. It was packed, and I remember the way home talking about how we saw people throwing drinks in the air, people bouncing, and how electric it felt, even if we maybe didn’t use those words to describe it.
All of this to say, my best memories, my most significant memories, the ones I really remember of Sacha spawned when music was involved. So when she passed, we just turned to music without thinking much about it.
Throughout the years, there are numerous songs I can attribute to Sacha. A list too long to put here, in fact, but there’s a couple that mean more. The Message by Dr. Dre is probably the first, and most important, between my brother and me. The song was made for Dre’s brother, Tyree, who passed whilst Dre was on tour. Dre vents his frustrations for three minutes, the first line being “since you finishing him early, what possessed you to start him?” talking to god directly.
Then, Tom by Hak Baker, a song made for his friend who passed. Where the song peaks for me is late in the second verse, “Two times a year I send flowers to your mother, Adidas shell toes and a Ralph Lauren jumper, I do hope your soul’s at rest, mate, I love ya.”
And these songs were there for me, because, really, I didn’t know how to handle grief. I was twelve when Sacha passed away, and my brain wasn’t anywhere near being able to process death. And these songs mean more to me than anything. But over time I’ve learnt to appreciate the songs that provide the memories, more than anything. I listen to Example, Wretch 32, Tinie Tempah, House of Pain, and I remember Sacha as she was.
One of my favourite quotes about grief is from my favourite author, Hanif Abdurraqib; “The thing about loss is, you don’t lose someone once. You lose someone a first initial time, that is the inciting event, and then if you live long enough without them, you lose them repeatedly for as long as you’re alive and they’re not. […]But on the other hand, if you believe, as I do, that grief is kind of just an emotion that’s knocking on the door of memory and asking you to recall something, then there’s real gratitude in that. There’s real gratitude in me reaching for my mother’s voice even when I don’t retrieve it because I’m reaching for my mother nonetheless. It reminds me that I am losing a person over and over and over, but by losing them, I get to return to the site of their living that I can recall, and that is celebratory.”
Listening to those songs gives me the chance to return to the site of Sacha’s living, and to celebrate Sacha as she was.
My family is inherently musical. And when I say family, I also mean Sacha and I also mean Zack. My brother now produces music, most of which I know he dedicates to Sacha. An album he produced just came out today, May 9th. “Fancy That” by PinkPantheress, another friend of ours.
featured in FACE magazine, shot by Simon Wheatley
I hope the three of us are doing her proud.