James McMahon drinks free

Hello, Spooksters.

It’s been a little while, again, hasn’t it? I think a lot about time these days. Time and dates. Moving into British Summertime gave me a jolt of jetlag as I moved out of the timezone that I left James in. The strangeness of the calendar rolling around again as if nothing happened.

Something I find really hard is the fact that new songs exist that James will never hear. It makes it hard for me to listen to new music. I manage bands for a living; that’s kind of a tough scene. I crave his opinion (because, of course, he would have had an opinion). I miss him bugging me about when they would go on his podcast. And I miss how proud he was when I worked with an artist he actually liked.

This was never more true than when I started to work with We Are Scientists, whose new record Qualifying Miles came out yesterday. Forgive the shameless plug - there is Spoook-relevant context. Because when they turned in the artwork, this was the inner sleeve:

It is a beautiful tribute, and there’s something truly wonderful about James being immortalised in the inner sleeve of a record that’s helped me to get through the last eight months. I think he’d be really chuffed.

There’s a song on the album called “What You Want Is Gone”. The chorus lyric is ‘You can’t just wait around for what you want, if what you want is gone’. It’s not about James, or me. It’s not even about grief or loss, at least not that kind of loss. But for anyone who’s lost someone, that’s the big question, isn’t it. How do we move forward in a world they no longer share with us? The world keeps turning, and time moves on, whether we want it to or not. It’s like being on a treadmill without the big red emergency off button - somehow, you just have to keep walking.

So, I’m back in the fields, drinking warm beer and watching bands play new songs. To say James is a missing piece at every show would be dishonest, as he would quite happily have never gone to another festival again in his life. But I miss him at them all. And there is one show this summer that he would have given anything to be at. I’m not going to see Oasis, but if you are, please belt out some tunes for James. I like to think if enough of you do that, he’ll be there, somehow.

Qualifying Miles is out now in all good record shops, in case you want to see James’s dedication in the flesh. Or simply enjoy this picture of us with a giant robot:

PS - Have any of you seen the BBC drama Mixtape, about a lad from Yorkshire, growing up in the 80s obsessed with music, who gets his dream job writing for the NME? Oof.