03/08/2026
I never knew him but saw The Frames supporting Bob Dylan in 2007 and they blew the place apart with their music and spirit. So much heart and connection with the crowd. Glen Hansard could read a room like not many others and it was a big room, the now demolished Sydney Entertainment Centre.
So it’s been a funny year. A lot of my friends have died in it. Clearly this is universal for people of my vintage but it’s got me thinking.
Thinking the sudden departure of this man has put me over some kind of edge and uncovered some previously undetected third pulse under my skin, now grievously interrupted.
The phrase ‘the ways things are’ is now irrelevant as there is or never was any such thing, or hold sway or represent this evolving and at the same time unravelling planet.
But here we are. Bereft.
What do we do with all this paralyzing grief? How can it be harnessed and turned into something useful and un-paralysing? Is there some learning in it, these tough hardships that lift the spirit higher to maintain a precarious balance between dark
and light. Otherwise, it’s all chaos and wallowing, a mammoth in the tar pit.
In these times we could turn to Beatle George’s words ‘Beware of darkness it can hit you, it can hurt you, make you sore and what is more it is not what you are here for.’ The song contains admonitions rooted in Vedic concepts of overcoming illusion to find true divine consciousness which was George’s spiritual journey I suppose.
We have to take the lesson of the lives of these departed passionate and marvellous people, these powerhouses. Rob, Bones, Andy, Nadya, Chon, Maudie, Glen and others, so many now, and the negative space around where they once stood which now defines them, and absorb it into our beings so that that very passion is not lost to the indifferent winds circling world. And that ability they had to communicate laughter, their music, contagious enthusiasm and love to others. It could be a new law of physics, the law of conservation of a person’s spirit. Reincarnation, but for others. For us.
It’s a magic that cannot die. It just takes another form and pops up mischievously in another place, in another person, in another way.
And we must take much comfort in that as we try to make sense of what happens around us.
