I’ve been thinking a lot about suicide. Not my suicide, of course, but the suicide of Scott Hutchinson, lead singer of Frightened Rabbit.
We all know that I lie fairly on the alternative side of the music spectrum. The first time I heard a Frightened Rabbit song was in 2010 and the track was “Swim until you can’t see land”. What primarily got me about the song was the lyrics, some of which include:
“if I hadn’t come now to the coast to disappear
I may have died in a landslide of rocks, and hopes, and fears”
And…
“Let’s call me a Baptist, call this a drowning of the past,
She’s there on the shoreline, throwing stones at my back”
When I heard this song in 2010, I was working closely with my friend, let’s call him Thomas*, together we did the breakfast show on student radio station MFM. He’d rock up every morning at 6am, smelling strongly of alcohol (Stellenbosch is a student town after all, so I thought nothing of it) and I’d drop him back at his flat after our show at 9am, his flat which was in the same block as mine had been the year before.
Then on 6 February 2012, my friend had to take his body down from the balcony where he’d hung himself.
I cried so hard at his funeral. My fellow MFM’er, refused to let me see the body (open casket, but why??) and for months afterwards, about once a week, I’d have a recurring dream/nightmare pleading with him not to do it, to talk to one of us, his friends.
Finally, the nightmares stopped in October that year, when, at an MFM function, we’d celebrated his life, and I finally understood that we all felt his loss, that I wasn’t alone in failing to understand his grief, hurt and finally, his decision.
Weirdly, I never thought his suicide was selfish. So many people say it is, but I look at the Frightened Rabbit lyrics, which are essentially the internal thoughts of someone who committed suicide, chronicled over a ten year period, and I can’t feel that way. Losing someone to suicide is tragic, but when I hear Scott Hutchinson write about death in the same way he writes about romance, I can’t help but think that some people are just too good to be here, people like Thomas*.
The reason I’ve been thinking about Scott Hutchinson in particular is because this week, I thought I’d take a listen to some other Frightened Rabbit songs, not just those on The Winter of Mixed Drinks. I discovered their 2016 album, and listening to it knowing the outcome has been an overwhelmingly emotive, powerful, and I even want to say, creative experience for me.
I tried explaining this to a fellow music lover over the weekend. His story is tragic, but also beautiful. Time and again, first in “Floating in the Forth“, and later in “Swim Until You Can’t See Land” and numerous other songs he talks about the power of the waves pulling him under, the peace he’ll find there, and most blatantly, “I think I’ll save suicide for another day”.
And in May last year, Scott Hutchinson went missing overnight, and his body was found in Port Edgar the following day. He’d drowned in the Forth, like he always said he would. In his own way, he lived his truth, and no one could say they didn’t see it coming. As his brother Grant said in an interview with The Guardian, he never expected to grow old with his brother. Scott’s ending, it seemed, was always inevitable.
For me, it makes the band’s last album that I’ve had on repeat since last Friday, The Painting of A Panic Attack, all the more meaningful, and the subsequent non-tribute by fellow musicians, Tiny Changes, A Celebration of Midnight Organ Fight, all the more beautiful (Scott new about the album before his death, and had worked alongside the featured artists).
I know most people won’t understand how this music makes me feel, I’ve been saying that line over and over in my head “I can’t express how this album makes me feel,” or “You just can’t understand what this does to me”.
Maybe the fact that I can find poetry and beauty in the death of another human makes me fucked in my own way. But I’m writing this blog post to get the feelings out, just as Scott did, to deal with both his depression and his substance abuse. For me, they’re not feelings of sadness or despair, but, in my own humble way, to give tribute to his life, his music, and the power of his words, that live on long after he did.
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