Reflections on Mortality, on the Death of One of My Oldest Friends, Nick Parsons (1962-2017)

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Reflections on Mortality, on the Death of One of My Oldest Friends, Nick Parsons (1962-2017)

I’m thinking about mortality today, with the passing of one of my oldest friends, Nick Parsons, who has died aged 54. At New College, Oxford University, in 1982, it was Nick who introduced me to musicians who had a profound effect on me — Neil Young, Van Morrison, and, in particular, Bob Dylan, whose influence has been enduring. We used to listen to music in his room in the college during our first year (in the so-called ‘New Buildings’ — they weren’t very new, but nor was the college, which was founded in 1379) and by the ‘Bridge of Sighs’ on New College Lane, where Nick’s room was in our second year.

It was also Nick who, one day in June 1983, insisted that he and I and other friends (Rupert and Hugo, you know who you are) get in Rupert’s car and drive down to Stonehenge for the Stonehenge Free Festival, an eye-opening, psychedelic, anarchic jamboree that led, eventually, to me writing my first and second books on Stonehenge and the counter-culture, which, in turn, led to me writing a third book, about Guantánamo, and devoting the last 11 years of my life to getting the prison closed down.

That first visit was wonderful, on a personal level, like our own “summer of love,” and in terms of seeing how an alternative to mainstream society could actually exist. We returned again, in 1984, for what was to be the last festival, before its violent suppression in 1985 at the Battle of the Beanfield, but by then it was clear that, in what was one of the darkest years of Margaret Thatcher’s horrible rule, any coherent belief in a brighter future was unravelling under duress, and, sadly, also under self-inflicted wounds.

Nick and I also shared a flat when I first moved to London in 1985, at 1 Tulse Hill, opposite the George Canning pub, at the start of what was, for me, a giddy decade of ups and downs in SW2 and SW9, and it was there that I learned to play the guitar, and first started writing songs, hooking up with another friend who died many years ago, Glyn Andrews, and performing as The Rebel Soldier, sometimes with other musicians, including, on a few occasions, Vivian Weathers, a legendary bassist who played with Linton Kwesi Johnson, and who taught me all I know about reggae bass, but who, I fear, is also no longer with us.

In memory of Nick, here’s my reggae reworking of an old folk song, ‘Rebel Soldier,’ which I recorded with my band The Four Fathers in 2015, but first came up with it in 1986, while living with Nick in a flat in Brixton. I think it says something about both of us.

Love and War by The Four Fathers

Also in Nick’s memory, here’s another song I wrote at the time, ‘City of Dreams’, a countryish lament for the London being destroyed by Margaret Thatcher and the greed she was unleashing in the City:

Love and War by The Four Fathers

I wrote ‘City of Dreams’ in 1987, when I wasn’t living with Nick, although I still saw him regularly at this time, with my girlfriend at the time, Alessandra, and we spent some time wth him in Herne Hill, on the North Kent coast, where he was housesitting, in a cottage right on the seafront, and where, in general, I think, the isolation of living in a seaside town that had the oldest population in the UK, and whose newspaper, as he once noted, featured only adverts for funeral directors, may not have been particularly helpful for his mental health, although our visit seems, in retrospect, to have had something of ‘Withnail & I’ about it.

Our lives continued to intersect in the decades that followed. I spent time with him in the early 2000s, when he was overcoming long-term addictions, but lost him again as he headed out to the far east on what turned out to be the last self-destructive phase of his life. Last year we re-established contact once more, and met on a few occasions. He had been very ill but was in a flat in Battersea, and on one occasion he came to a gig by my band The Four Fathers — unfortunately arriving just too late to hear his favourite song, Bob Dylan’s ‘Tangled Up in Blue’, which I had us rehearse especially for him.

Below is Bob Dylan performing ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ during the extraordinary Rolling Thunder Tour:

At the end of last year, Nick became very ill again. I had tried on several occasions to contact him, but I was unaware that he was so ill, and I only managed to speak to him one last time on the phone before his passing — one time that I will, of course, remember now that he is gone forever.

Cherish your lives, my friends, and be good to those who love you, and those who you love — and rest in peace, Nick. You influenced me perhaps more than you ever knew, and your sense of humour and your intellect always counteracted the darkness that threaten to engulf you, although I am sorry that your life was so often so hard for you to bear.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album ‘Love and War’ and EP ‘Fighting Injustice’ are available here to download or on CD via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).