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Artist News
Architects guitarist Tom Searle dies
By Andy Malt | Published on Monday 22 August 2016
Architects guitarist Tom Searle has died three years after being diagnosed with skin cancer, his twin brother and bandmate Dan Searle announced yesterday. He was 28.
“Many of you will be aware that Tom has been absent from various shows over the past fifteen months and I can now let you know that this was due to various surgeries that he had to have to treat the cancer”, wrote Dan in a Facebook post. “When we left for our European festival tour on 2 Jun, Tom was very unwell. He had been advised to stay in hospital to receive care but ultimately there was nothing that they could do for him and he signed himself out of the ward two days before we departed for Germany”.
He continued: “Some of you might view this as reckless but this is the way Tom wanted to do things throughout his last year because he never wanted the cancer to get in the way of what he loved. He got on stage and performed his last two shows at Rock Am Ring and Rock Im Park, which took him an incredible amount of strength but those are two shows that we will never forget”.
The rest of the European tour and a planned US tour were cancelled just a few days later when Tom was taken to hospital in Luxembourg and placed into an medically induced coma. Doctors said it was unlikely that he would ever wake up, but he did and was able to return home.
“He spent the last two months of his life fighting with everything he had to overcome the disease once and for all, and things appeared to be moving in the right direction”, wrote his brother. “But in the last two weeks it suddenly took a turn for the worse and finally he left us”.
The future of the band is now uncertain, he added, saying that “to pretend that Tom wasn’t at the heart of everything that the band created would be to show a complete lack of respect to the amazing talent that he was”. However, he said that the band would definitely proceed with planned tour dates in Australia, Europe and the UK.
“We want to carry on, that is important to say, and we will strive to do so”, he said. “But we will not release any music unless we truly believe that it is something that Tom would have been proud of. Whether or not we can achieve that is something that we will have to discover in time”.
Architects’ latest album, ‘All Our Gods Have Abandoned Us’, was released in May.
