DRIFT AWAY

Oh, give me the beat, boys, and free my soul
I wanna get lost in your rock 'n' roll and drift away
Hey, give me the beat, boys, and free my soul
I wanna get lost in your rock 'n' roll and drift away

They say misery loves company but it also loves the blues when it's downtrodden and on its knees.

Chris sang the blues and toward the closing chapters of his life, genuinely lived the blues: his women had left him, his dog had been taken from his care, he'd even been evicted from his own home and in the end all he was left with (for the most part) were the 12 bar blues in a care home.

But with his laid back, Californian sounding voice pitched somewhere between Dobie Gray, Dennis Wilson and Jackson Browne it should have been a different song he sang, not the poison chalice of the blues with all of its miserable tropes. Perhaps back before he fully fell apart, he'd mostly avoid those minor chords, especially the familar progression between A minor to E minor that eventually became the musical pillars to his own slow, processional funeral march while he was still alive.

Music reflects your self esteem - what you listen to and what you play and that's why I always steered clear of the blues for the most part, although I had my moment obsessing as a teenager about Robert Johnson and his pact with the Devil at the Crossroads in the Mississippi, Delta. Maybe Chris tried to make a pact with angels but they didn't listen so he reverted to what a lot of blues musicians know best - the AAB pattern, otherwise known as the blues changes.

I'd already seen my second cousin, Steve, drink himself to an early grave singing the blues and it seemed pre-destined as the songs he sang often prophesised such an ending. For Chris it wasn't drink that finished him off, but poor health as a result of a broken soul and mind. Watching a man ravaged by madness is a sad sight to behold and not worthy of a musician and father who had so much more to offer in the light.

Chris even taught me some familiar blues riffs and bass lines when he was my guitar teacher. It was the passing on of a tradition and a culture that was a long way from Guildford, Surrey where he was born and Stroud, Gloucestershire where I was raised. Nevertheless, if he had been teleported from another culture other than Surrey, you might have said 1970's California because when we first knew him he had the air of a man who had been singing counter harmonies with the Beach Boys and hanging out in Laurel Canyon with the rest of the post hippy troubadours; he also had the look of a mid-career Jeff Bridges.

He often talked about his appreciation of Dennis Wilson to me and now when I think of Chris, I can't help but think that it is often the case you're attracted to things that reflect the energy of your own soul. Personally, I've always found Wilson's music too dark to listen to from a psychological point of view as if the shadow of death pervades his music and in some ways that's how I feel when thinking about Chris's life. There wasn't too much happiness in the second half of that ghostly life for it was routinely stalked by demons that took a grip of his basic personality and ability to function.

Nevertheless, as I cast my mind back I can remember fleeting glimpses of happier times - warm summer evenings playing football together and his great enthusaism at seeing me completing a good pass or crossing the ball a la Beckham toward a glancing head. He seemed happier playing sport than playing music. Maybe he found he didn't need to bear his soul in that context and could just switch off his overwrought mind whilst enjoying the cameraderie of belonging to a team. A keen cricketer also, I never saw him play the game but can just imagine him in his cricket whites slogging for a six across a well mowed green.

A fluent speaker of the French language having studied at the UEA, Chris often lent me books on the poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau which went over my head, as well as books on the Italian filmmaker Pasolini, but I always appreciated his thinking of me and my passion for film. Memories of his calling in his later years on the phone with offers to help me get a film to Cannes seemed always well intentioned if a little lacking in reality.

His car, fit to bursting with amps, guitars and snaking cables was like something from the Wacky Races as he journeyed from gig to gig in all seasons of the year, its spluttering engine like his spluttering mind always just about to break down but somehow, miraculously, always just about making it to its destination.

I once referred to him as The Bad Lebowski as he went rogue for a while and lost the good humour we'd grown accustomed to but I think that was more a consequence of his troubled mind than his overall innate good character.

But when the long, dark winter nights returned and the creative muse visited him in his terminal heavy sadness, it was music he truly belonged to. No matter my reservations about the blues and its siren harmonica wail, it was the medium in which Chris found he could express himself the best.

Sometimes the allure of our passion is greater than the toll it takes on our soul.

And though his song was sad, it was still better than it never having been sung at all.

Rest In Peace, Chris!