Tony
Tony is a senior commissioning officer at a county council.
He wrote the album ‘The Lost Loss’ in his 40s after losing his mum at the age of 4.
““When I start recording, a light goes on.
I sit in the garage and make as much noise as I like. I press record and just play.
Sometimes I’ll be doing something mundane like peeling the potatoes for tea listening to a recording I’ve made. Then I’ll start whistling a melody. I’ll record it on my phone and carry it with me for a few days. Work out whether it works.
The production process is just as creative. When I was a kid, you’d record on a 4-track tape machine. Now it’s like editing a Word document - you can cut things out, paste things in.
I just mess around at first making sounds I like. I’m not trying to represent anything.
But then I play it back and I realise, oh, that drum’s a heartbeat.
And there’s some washy guitar stuff going on with the heartbeat.
And then the heartbeat stops. And she’s gone.
Once you sit down and start making something, anything can happen.
“I’M PAINTING THIS MEMORY THAT I DON’T HAVE. THERE’S DISTORTION AND FEEDBACK; AMBIENCE AND MELODY”
The album began during counselling. I said to my therapist, “Ruth, I have a lost loss. I’ve got no connection with my mum.”
I don’t have any emotion. There’s no sense of grief. I don’t know where it is.
Somehow our conversations unlocked this human being. She was a real person. There I was, 48 years old beginning to experience emotions about my mum.
It was kind of mystical. You know when you can see something in your mind’s eye? It felt like she could be in the room.
It wasn’t sadness; it was more like seeing her for the first time.
And I realised, I can explore this discovery through music.
The whole journey of making The Lost Loss was as profound as it was creative.
It begins with my first breath and ends with my death and being reunited with my Mum. There’s music in Part I that represents my mum’s diagnosis and treatment and dying.
I don’t remember what that felt like. I’m painting this memory that I don’t have. There’s distortion and feedback, ambience and melody.
That ‘potato melody’ became a core part of the album. Four-year-old me asking ‘Mummy, where are you?’ As Part 2 ends, she replies, ‘I am here, I am here.’
At the end of Part 1, another memory appears: going to the cinema to see The Empire Strikes Back and five-year-old me snuggling into Lynn’s fake fur coat.
Mum died in October 1978 and Dad married Lynn in November 1979. She’s always been ‘mum’, never ‘step-mum’.
Our family was given a new beginning. I had two younger brothers who I loved. We were surrounded by wonderful people and other wonderful families.
But that lost loss was always there.
Making this album has helped me connect with the fact that this happened. It may well be that, over time, my emotions catch up.
There’s an ongoing journey. I rang my older brother just before I released it and we spoke for two hours. We’d never really talked like that before.
At some point, we’re going to drive round all the different houses that she lived in and the hospital where she died.
That conversation was the beginning of a new journey of discovery for both of us. Something we can do together. It’s amazing, isn’t it?
I’ve made a memorial to her - but that feels almost too serious.
It’s something really full of life.”