Weekends With My Brother

My mum used to call me on Thursday and Sunday evenings. It was part of her routine, I guess a part of our routine. I was the youngest of four children. My siblings did all the things (and more) before me. Paper rounds. Saturday jobs. Going off to university. Getting a degree. Getting a job. Getting married (or settling down). Having kids (or choosing not to).

I skipped several of these. I literally skipped out of university. I never had a proper job. I never settled down. If you don’t do anything or go anywhere and you live alone, it’s hard to have an excuse to miss those twice weekly phone calls.

Was I a good son? I don’t think it’s my fault I grew up different. I’m not saying it’s anyone else’s fault either. I was just built that way. Of course what my mum wanted for me was different to what I wanted and different to how things turned out. She definitely wanted someone who was successful, someone she could show off about. But that didn’t need to me. She wanted someone to go to Oxford or Cambridge, so when none of my siblings achieved that status, I became the last hope. But academia and me were never good bed fellows. I wonder at what point she gave up on that dream? It was a status thing, so in the grand scheme of things did it ever really matter?

She had grandchildren, so she didn’t need me for that. She wanted me to have a steady job, a proper career and I guess to have a partner to settle down with. I mean, that’s not for show off reasons, that’s a reasonable hope for a parent. I don’t think she cared for the music, although if I’d made a success of it (or a career of it) then maybe that would’ve helped. She liked the writing. She could show a magazine or an anthology with a story of mine in it to her friends. A published writer meant something.

She was less happy when I stopped writing. When I told her I was done with writing. But at the time, I was done with writing. It had become a law of diminishing returns. Less markets for my short stories, more competition to try and get published. I’d tried to write novels and I’d failed to make any headway. Writing was hard. Why punish yourself for something that was going nowhere?

It took a pandemic and a lot of free time to get me back into writing. Even then all I’d really done was put together an anthology of my published (and some of my unpublished) work. I hadn’t written anything new. It’s probably chance that I’ve ended up writing this. Look at the opening few entries to this blog – they don’t promise much do they? Now we’re almost one hundred thousand words later. How did that happen?

I’m not really a phone person. Those twice weekly calls with my mum were nearly always her calling me. For five years in Bristol I did pretty much nothing but spend my time on the phone. In Penzance when I worked for the council I had to answer the phone a lot of the time. But outside of work, phones were the tool of last resort. Maybe I was ahead of the curve. The current generation never answer the phone. Leave it to go to voicemail. It’s probably spam anyway. Phoning someone is just rude. Remember land lines? They don’t.

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Microsoft bought Skype in 2011. In 2012 I started conversing with my brother via Skype. I don’t really remember why or how it started. In the previous 20 years I’d probably had about half a dozen phone calls with my brother. Why was Skype different?

Skype tied in with the music. In 2012 91 Vibrations released a five track ep titled Out Through the Wires. An unexpected comeback. I’d give it a 6 out of 10. The opening track was a genuine collaboration – I’d written the basis of the track, but Tim added a lot of additional parts. The other four tracks were more or less solo efforts, with minimal or no additions from the other member of the band.

It took six years to follow it up with an album – Lost Frequencies. This is because we recorded at least two completely different versions. We also wrote a bunch of songs, gathering my nephew and niece (post their time in The Rustic Age) to record vocals for us. I was taken with the music of Ladytron back then and I suppose I was trying to steer us in that direction. Some of these songs were quite good. The album sort of existed as a demo, but we always felt it needed another song or two to really work.

It threatened to happen and then didn’t. Some of the lyrics I’d written were pretty bad. I hadn’t become a songwriter at that stage, but maybe I had to be bad first to develop my way towards being less bad.

Lost Frequences doesn’t have any songs on it. A vocoded voice features on one of the best tracks – Salvage – which apparently I wrote the music for, though I never had any memory of doing that. Otherwise it’s all instrumental. Discreetly ambient. Less a collaboration than even the comeback ep. Tim had written most of it by himself. Which was fine by me.

Those six years (2012 – 2018) are an odd time period. Between us we made a lot of music and almost none of it ever got released. One month we set the challenge of each composing fifty new pieces of music. I think I fell about eight short, but I’m pretty sure Tim turned in his fifty. I bought my first guitar. I recorded an album of my own titled Graveyards of the Strange. I still couldn’t sing, but with enough fuzz added my guitar playing just about passed muster. The lyrics were getting better. I briefly put it out on Bandcamp and then later took it down again.

These various false starts aren’t that interesting, but they are a background of sorts. A reason for why we were now chatting via Skype on a regular basis. If we hadn’t had the music we wouldn’t have had a reason to do it.

Sunday mornings became our appointed catch up time, much as Thursday and Sunday evenings were with my mum. We Skyped most weekends for about ten years. That’s a long time. During that period our mum died. Later Tim’s wife Sue died. In 2023 Tim died. In 2025 Skype itself died.

On a brighter note, 2018 saw the relaunch of the record label I’d wound up in 1992. After six years of false starts, suddenly we were putting out all kinds of music. Lost Frequencies was a pretty strong indicator that we’d become very different people musically. We collaborated on a few things, but mostly Tim was doing his own thing as Statski and I was doing my own thing under an ever increasing range of varied band names. But it seemed to work.

At some point during or just after the pandemic I came up with an idea for what I dubbed ‘the song project.’ I’d always wanted the songs I’d written for The Goodbye Look to be performed by a proper band, real musicians all playing together in a studio. But that was beyond both my budget and my social capabilities to arrange. The philosophy of the song project was for me to write a selection of new songs and get a range of different singers and musicians to perform them. This would encompass my brother, members of Blue Onyx (the Moody Blues tribute band he played with) and also my niece and nephew (graduates of The Rustic Age). This offered access to a range of potential singers and musicians, all of whom had natural abilities I simply did not possess.

The playing together in a studio element was still logistically complex, but even recorded separately or in partnership with my brother down in the New Forest, they would be a world away from what I was producing largely on my own. The idea fizzled and bloomed and got talked about at various points. Somewhere in all this, it eventually transmogrified into Tim working with different performers on songs either he or they would write. All that remained of my original idea was the name I’d suggested for the project (something not that inspiring like Other Voices). Tim actually helped to record one song with his daughter Nicola and her partner, but somehow my feedback struck the wrong note with him and the project was sunk before it had even really got started.

We were close as brothers but also unequals in a lot of ways. He was always thoughtful, considered, logical in his thinking. I was scattergun. always flitting about from one idea to the next, desperate to release something to deadlines that made no particular sense in the wider scheme of things.

If I shared a piece of new music, Tim would invariably listen to it three or four or even half a dozen times before delivering a considered judgement (or else diplomatically telling me what he assumed I wanted to hear - or sometimes both). By contrast I never seemed to have the same time to consume stuff – or he’d upload something and not inform me in advance – and my opinions lacked the same careful reflection and clarity of thought. Saying the wrong thing was a minefield I regularly found myself traversing and I didn’t always succeed.

Tim often had a negative outlook on the value of his own work and would sometimes reject attempts to submit it to places where it might get a fair hearing (or even to release it at all). But he was doing interesting music in a relatively small field (creating complex ambient drone pieces using an eclectic range of analogue hardware) and over the years several internet broadcasters featured his work. Coaxing him to release stuff was in the end a worthwhile struggle, for me and I think (hope) also for him.

So we had our moments and our moods (we never argued, but we could sulk with the best of them), but mostly we spoke for more hours than we’d realised about a lot of different things. Music was obviously the main topic (the latest set of Longform Edition releases, the Guardian end of year top 50 lists, the new album from Lana Del Ray etc.), but there was also sport, TV, books, or even sometimes politics. We regularly revisited past shared experiences, some of the notable (non) achievements from our earlier musical days. When I converted Tim to the joys of women’s tennis, it only took a month or two before he had a deeper understanding of the game and the key players than I had accrued over more than a decade, but he’d still defer to me as if his opinion carried less value.

Sunday mornings were never the same after his death. In a superficial sense it was like when a long running TV show you’ve always watched at a set time suddenly gets cancelled. There’s a hole in your routine and you don’t know quite how to fill it. There are alternatives, but nothing that does the same job.

Of course I was now free to get up when I wanted on a Sunday morning without having that nine a.m. appointment to be at my computer. If it was sunny I could go outside and not clock watch to make sure I returned in time. It gave back flexibility to my weekends, but it also made every day the same. Sundays lost their place in the schedule, they became just another day.

Tim taught me a lot, was an immeasurable influence and presence in the music I made (so much so that even completing a third Goodbye Look album without his aid felt like something I had to do, just to prove I could). There were suddenly a lot of things (most of them trivial) that I no longer had someone to share with. And my knowledge and appreciation of the current music scene was critically diminished without his input.

Sundays are now just another day. Weekends still offer a difference, not in my living or working regime, but in that of the wider public. So not all days quite blend into one, but there’s something missing there now and I’ll never get that back. But we had a run of over a decade, which in total adds up to a lot of hours, a lot of rambling and amiable conversations, and for that I will always count my blessings.