Dear Fern.

Dear Fern,

This month I went to see that singer who we loved so much in our youth. I have kept up with him since, because he has kept up without trying too hard, not striving, burning out or getting buff or disappointing us all like so many others. No, he hasn’t gone that route. He has held onto his paisley and stayed unutterably himself, his words getting slightly less weird, slightly more silly (like, every fifth song now is about balloons, whereas that used to be way rarer) still just as twisty-turny but nevertheless ever-earnest. So it was a surprise and delight this time to see him pay tribute to a singer from his youth, whose twisty-turns songs are more foundational psychedelic and whose story has long since ended, sadly and in crazy shambles. 

That night, at first, I was taken aback by the size of the line outside of The Chapel — what a perfect venue for this invocation — and the age of the persons in it. He is, of course, a singer from our youth, which was quite a while ago now, and his music just has not much changed with the times so his live audience (which I have been among ten times or more) is usually a decade or so around our graduating class, which is old enough that we are largely well-behaved but not so old that we forget how to be at a gig. This time the crowd was even older, grayer, milder, slower. I didn’t think much of it until someone said: Pink Floyd. 

“If It’s In You”

Of course, the singer from our youth was paying tribute to a singer from his youth. He was playing songs he didn’t write but, as he said in his intro, “these songs wrote me.” And so once drinks were procured and coats checked, we made our way to the front where Jenny was saving our place. As she is full of sly smiles and she had brought her teenage son, everyone was being extra nice and we squoze right through and plugged in shortly thereafter. Gray hairs were forgotten.

Our singer’s hair, of course, is now all white. He narrated the songs of the singer from his youth, keying us into the insight that young Syd had seen himself losing himself, had narrated his own descent into madness from first the outside, then the inside. Our singer peppered these insights with jokes about the monarchy (not mine, I don’t have one as you know) and, of course, songs. A keyboardist joined him about six tunes in, followed eventually by a drummer and a bassist. All the while Robyn was telling us about how Syd had been letting him in, letting us all in, using camera metaphors and opening the aperture until you could easily see the flow of music from one dead singer to the living one in front of us. 

“Gigolo Aunt”

As someone who has followed our singer since our youth, I know his songs and his first band’s songs, but at some point that night I really could not tell whose song I was hearing, even though it was “Octopus” so everyone was singing along. We had jacked in and the line was direct and Syd was there. He was most definitely in that room. And for days and weeks the songs have been in my head, the whirligig madness and aching cries of beauty and goodbye. So I had to sit down and write this letter to you,

With love,
Your Agapanthus

“See Emily Play”

Promo poster image by Fez Moreno. Videos and emotional reporting by me.