Stephen

My oldest friend, Stephen, died this week.  He passed on Monday evening after a long battle with illness, and was cremated on Wednesday morning.  Gone just like that.  He lived in southern Spain, and I was unable to get there in time for the funeral, so it feels very strange - as if somehow it all happened offstage.

The last time I saw him in person was just over two years ago, when he and his wife, Janis, came to stay over Christmas and New Year.  He was already unwell then and recovering from a major operation.  But he was in good spirits, and we spent many happy hours in my recording studio writing and recording music.

We played in bands together all through our teen years, teaching each other chords and songs as we went.  We ran off to London together aged seventeen, leaving notes on pillows for our parents.  Not a very successful adventure, but it did become the basis of a book, “Runaway”, that I wrote half a century later.

We were in the same class all through primary school, but it wasn’t until Primary 7 that we became friends.  We were sitting across the row from each other and he was scribbling away furiously.  I asked him what he was writing.  “A movie,” he said.  His dad had an 8mm ciné camera, and it was his intention to write and direct a film with it.  It fired me up, and we began a collaboration.  We wrote two movies and shot some daft stuff, but never completed them.  Music had become the obsession. 

“Tintin” too.  His dad had bought him all the books, which he shared with me, and we used to sit round the table going through each book, recording the voices, turn about, on a little reel-to-reel we had.  Those books were also inspirational to me as a writer - the characterisation, the storylining, the humour, the use of location.

Stephen went to art school and I went into journalism.  But while I stayed in Glasgow he and his wife went to London where he got involved in the Bob Godfrey animation studio, writing a short animated film, “Sex Doll” - a parody of the famous French film, “The Red Balloon”.  It had a cinematic release and received great critical acclaim.

Stephen was a brilliant, restless talent.  Creativity bubbled from every pore, so much so that he had trouble harnessing it.  It’s hard to make a living as an artist, but he was never afraid of hard work, and he and Janis did whatever it took to survive.  They sold and printed teeshirts at London markets, Stephen trained and spent some time working as a hypnotherapist.  

When my daughter went to London I asked him to look out for her.  The whole family virtually adopted her.  She always said he was like a second dad to her.

Almost by accident, Stephen and Janis began a child modelling and acting agency, operating from the front room of their house in Ilford.  Children were always in demand for TV advertising, and film and TV dramas, a demand they saw and exploited, rapidly becoming the biggest and most successful agency of its kind in the UK - Scallywags.

Stephen never stopped painting.  Retiring early, he and Janis went to live in the south of Spain, where he built a small recording studio in their hilltop villa - a location I used in one of the books in the Lewis Trilogy.  Music poured out of him.  He wrote and recorded two albums.  I collaborated on some of the songs with him when I had the chance.  But demands on my time, writing and promoting books around the world, meant I didn’t have enough of it leftover to spend creating with him.  To my eternal regret, my semi-retirement from the publishing circus, coincided with the start of his illness.

But despite that we did manage some further collaboration, aided by the internet, and of course that last visit he had here in France.  When I finish the album I am working on it will be dedicated to Stephen (as was my breakthrough book, “The Blackhouse”, all those years ago).  He not only plays on the album, but was a major contributor to the writing and development of the songs.

My daughter and her husband have sponsored the planting of a ring of trees in the Holy Land in his memory.  I think he would have loved that.

Everyone who knew him adored him.  He made us all laugh, sometimes reducing us to tears.  He was a generous loving friend, husband and father.  I cherished his bear hugs, and the scratch of his beard on my cheek.  I wish I could have given him one last hug.

My blip is of my computer screen, with an image of Stephen, his Janis and my Janice, in happier days on a Spanish beach.  In the foreground are a couple of the Tintin figurines he brought as a present on his last visit.