On Loss
#Two departures affected me heavily at the end of 2025. I've been meaning to write about the people but it turned out that I needed some time and distance to try and make sense of it. And that it is something more personal.
Perry Bamonte
The first person was Perry Bamonte of The Cure – not someone I personally knew. Bamonte played on five of The Cure's studio albums, and especially on Wish, which I consider to be The Cure's best album, and a release of formative importance for me.
I'm less into The Cure's music released after Wish. Bamonte had been playing with them for years before he "joined" the band. Specifically on Wish, his presence can be felt, not just heard, on tracks like High, and Friday I'm in Love. The whole album sounds so different than its predecessor (itself also among The Cure's best).
Ken Downie
Just days earlier, the news about Ken Downie's passing had made the rounds and it made me deeply sad. Bamonte's death added to the sadness, but Downie's felt shocking.
I did not know him either. I knew his work on The Black Dog's "Spanners" album. That felt a bit like knowing him through his music. It's a beautiful, humorous, playful, at times weird, record. When Plaid later split out, their music never went to the places, nor did the things that made Spanners (or Bytes) bear repeated listening and going back to, over the years. Plaid's music is exquisite, but the soul of Spanners, the samples, the flavours, that must have come from whatever Downie was part of. (His later work lost that too.)
Downie meant to me the humour, the inventiveness, the not-taking-yourself-too-seriously, that can be heard not just on Black Dog's early work, but also on electronic albums by KLF, Orb, BoC, FSOL – bands who would make something new and truly original, containing beautifully reinterpreted bits of prior art, and manage to carry it lightly, as if it was easy to do, simple to make of that quality. Downie was that.
The death of Andy Hughes (The Orb) in 2009 felt somewhat similar.
On whatever this is
It took me months afterwards, my mind endlessly distracted by the wars of mad kings, plus the flood of AI on top, to realise that I am mourning.
This must have started back in 2023 when I suddenly lost my mother. I've not got over that. Then, somewhat unexpected, whenever I've had to say goodbye to a colleague, it'd get to me in the form of profound disappointment, sometimes anger. Then people responsible for art that has become part of my own identity kept dying, and I felt terrible, having never personally known them. And more recently, AI has taken over many things the making of which used to bring joy (still does), and replaced the process with a slot machine loop, and the results – with a bland soup of bits, a reflection of something that "isn't it", but is accepted as it. The slop culture rapidly emerging around it is repulsive.
And so I mourn all that loss: of family, of people I looked up to, of people caught in tragedies in faraway lands, of people caught in the churn, and of things that give us true meaning, like making, connecting, experiencing. Feels like the opposite of togetherness.
I had to join all these dots first, before knowing what to change.