I Lost A Friend
Written by Steve Hillier
Date written January 2000
Place written Hove, East Sussex
Originally sung by Sarah Blackwood
Features Roland Juno-106, Korg Prophecy
SPOTIFY LINK
“I’ll never see him again except in memory of someone good”I left Jesmond, Newcastle Upon Tyne in March 1997. I felt as if I’d done everything I could on Tyneside, I’d had two significant and long lasting relationships, both now ended. I’d DJed everywhere from Luckies Pub to the Riverside, performed at pretty much every night club and worked at both Universities. I’d formed a music act and we were doing well. It was time to move on, and I had a choice: London for the sake of work, or Brighton for the sake of my happiness. I chose the latter. I’ve not regretted the move once.
But I didn't leave Jesmond completely. I returned half a dozen times even before we made Make It Better back at the Arts Centre, trying to find…something. A pilgrimage, an inability to let go? These were not happy occasions, I’d alight at Central Station and pull up my hoodie or pull down a baseball cap in case I bumped into someone I knew. Paradoxically I’d hang out in the bars later that day hoping to bump into someone, anyone I knew from the old days. I think I spent more time in the Forth Hotel after leaving Newcastle than I did when I lived there.
I’m not sure exactly when it was, but one cold winter’s morning in 1998 I was walking around Newcastle city centre and into the library, just behind the HMV records that we’d opened two years earlier. I wanted to speak to my ex-girlfriend, I had no idea how to reach her. I had an address but couldn’t bring myself to simply turn up unannounced… I needed a telephone number. So ‘I searched the phone book’…nothing. More broken-hearted than depressed, I spent the rest of the day wandering around the city searching for evidence of my past. Anything that would validate the decade I’d spent on Tyneside in the rain. It’s peculiar, but now I have spent more than double the time living in Brighton than in Newcastle, I have more memories of heading north to find my past than of the past that I actually lived up there.
I Lost A Friend is that lonely day in song form, one of my favourite self-penned songs. This is what Dubstar was about, not breakbeats and rock guitars… a dagger through the heart and a melody through the head. There are two versions of this song, the I (Friday Night) B-Side and the ‘version’, which is stripped right back and loses the Smiths-style DMX drum machine for something more sympathetic to the song. I prefer that one.
INSIDE OUTLINES, the first collection of solo piano pieces by Stephen Hillier is out now: