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Eddy Says
Eddy Says: A sad goodbye to Stuart Cable
By Eddy Temple-Morris | Published on Wednesday 9 June 2010
I have a tendency to get over emotional when I’ve had less than five hours sleep, and Monday, when I wrote this, was such a day. I also get quite emotional over my fatherland, Wales. So look out, it’s a double whammy today.
The first thing I did on Monday morning was log onto Twitter to check the situation vis-à-vis the two last slots I was booking at the Secret Garden Party, which I was giving away in a competition. While there I saw a tweet, from my pals Utah Saints, actually a ‘re-tweet’ of Chris Moyles, who was shocked at the “news of Stuart Cable”. “What the fuck?”, I thought. “What happened to Stuart?” I called the Utahs, who confirmed, to my utter horror, that Stuart had been found dead at his home at 5am and that the circumstances surrounding his death were “not suspicious”.
I’ve since heard, unofficially, that it may have been a stupid accident; simply that, after a great party, Stuart fell asleep on his back and, in classic rock tradition, drowned when he puked in his sleep. This is pure conjecture but seems plausible. Like most big, barrel chested valley boys, he loved a jar with his mates, same as most of us.
I’m long enough in the tooth to have lost half a dozen friends over the years, but, for some reason, this one has hit me really hard.
Many of you will be incredulous that I would be in any way moved by the death of an ex-Stereophonic, but a few of you who used to watch ‘Up For It’ on MTV UK in and around 1998 will know how close I was to this band. When I got my own show on MTV – before my boss Christine and I discovered Zane Lowe on a VHS tape, before Melody Maker packed it in, before I’d ever done a radio show or remixed a single tune – I championed a little three-piece band from Cwmaman, near Aberdare, in the rolling valleys of south Wales. I had fallen deeply in love with a track called ‘Traffic’, and I got progressively more and more emotional about it, and them, on air.
At that time, every single radio station was ignoring them. Every major one, anyway. I remember when they played Barfly at The Monarch (before the Camden venue simply became The Barfly), Steve Lamacq, then co-host of the excellent ‘Evening Session’ alongside Jo Whiley, was there. After the gig he said, and I quote: “The lead singer’s not a star, they’ve got no songs, and they won’t get further than The Monarch”. Not long afterwards, I found myself on MTV every single day for two hours, live. ‘Traffic’ affected me deeply, and I’d go on air, and make these passionate speeches about the band, and why they deserved to be huge. Kelly Jones’s dad, Oscar, told me sometime later that he was watching, and that he shed a tear at the time.
Happily, Steve Lamacq got this one horribly wrong, and my emotional outpourings on MTV served as a spark to a tinderbox. Not long afterwards, Stereophonics were headlining Cardiff University, where they sweetly invited me up to say thanks. Not long after that, they were playing their biggest gig to date, in Cardiff Castle, and asked me to introduce them on stage, and to do the interview for the video (yes, VHS video, one of the last before we all got DVDs).
I smile to this day when I think that within twelve months of my igniting what became a forest fire, that Stereophonics were performing at Steve Lamacq’s Christmas Party in BBC Maida Vale Studios, and Steve had conveniently forgotten his wayward prediction of how Stereophonics’ career would pan out.
Suffice to say, I got to meet, know, hang with Stuart and his wonderful family a lot in those days, and after he was sacked from Stereophonics. Stuart’s Mrs, Nicola, had just had their first child and he wanted to spend time with her rather than do a promo tour of the States etc – thereby causing Kelly to question his commitment. In retrospect, of course Stuart just had his priorities straight, family first, then work, such was his commitment to his family life.
We both subsequently produced TV programmes in the same building in south Wales, so I knew Stuart before he was famous, during the height of his fame, and afterwards, and here’s the point: in all that time HE NEVER CHANGED. Stuart was a colossal character. The embodiment of everything that is great about the Welsh. That huge, booming, baritone voice, the big smile, the cheeky banter, and the ability to light up a room when he entered it. He was a great hair-bear of a Celtic man-god. I was looking forward to him becoming a Welsh version of Brian Blessed; universally loved for his cartoon like character, positivity and ability to take life on with a lightness of heart.
But in all seriousness, the strength and breadth of a character can, in my experience, be best tested by showering it in money, success and fame. I have seen so many people fall, fail, turn, as soon as they come into contact with these things. I’ve seen men turn inside out, lose their friends, their loves, their sanity, all because of the pressure that comes with success. You see this with some Lottery winners. You know, those stories with headlines like “winning the lottery ruined my life”. When you chuck money and fame at a weak character, the cracks begin to show, they open up and before you know it, that person, who you thought was nice, has been shattered and replaced by some horrid, negative, paranoid, hideous shadow of their former self.
The fact that Stuart’s wheels never came off are absolute proof of the iron-cast strength of his character, and the fact that a total arsehole like Damon Albarn woke up this morning, but Stuart didn’t, is proof of what Richard Dawkins knows. There is no God.
I just chatted with Perry from Pendulum, who was a mutual friend, and the words that kept coming up were “lovely” and “nice”, (remember “nice” is Damon Albarn’s least favourite word). Stuart was one of the nicest guys on Planet Earth, and he kept it real. He’d headline a festival one day, then take his family swimming in the local pool the next. He was affable, and more to the point, approachable. If you see Albarn in the street, cunting around W10 on that ridiculously expensive looking bicycle he rides, the one that says “look at me, I’m a multi-millionaire”, and you ask him nicely for an autograph, I have no doubt he would ignore you, or tell you to fuck off nine times out of ten. Stuart, on the other hand, would NEVER show disrespect to a fellow human being, because he knows we are all the same when you take the money and the flash bike away. We bleed the same blood, we feel the same pain and we shed the same tears.
The entertainment industry is famous for being full of sharks, hyenas, snakes, vermin and pond-scum. Stuart was proof you didn’t have to follow suit. You could be, if I follow this animal analogy, a giraffe. Giraffes have the biggest hearts in the animal kingdom. Stuart’s was huge. He was a genuine, loving, lovable, huggable great galoot with comedy hair and a smile that could light up Wembley Stadium. That’s what he leaves behind, a legacy of niceness. Something to balance out the bitterness, aloofness and falsity of people like Albarn.
Keep smiling. Don’t lose your faith. That is the path to the dark side. Keep smiling. We have to keep the force strong for what Stuart represents. Stay approachable, be nice to strangers, don’t fuck people over on the way up, because you will see them again on your way down. Keep smiling. When news like this comes it’s hard, but we must keep our chins up and we must “live well… that is the best revenge”. I’m now taking the rest of the afternoon off, in memory of Stuart, and doing something he approved of more than anything else, something he would be wholeheartedly behind and encourage every person in a similar circumstance to do. I’m going to hang out with and play with my son. And we will smile together. Keep smiling.
Eddy xx
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