Andrew Cox RIP

A year ago today, Andrew Cox died. I knew Andrew for nearly 30 years. I can still remember the day we first met, at univ in October ‘79. We shared a passion for weird music which led to forming a ‘band’ and recording our own stuff on-and-off throughout the ‘80s and a little beyond.

When not making music we would talk about literature & life, write stuff, and plan art projects together. The one about covering St Paul’s Cathedral in bread & butter springs to mind. It was meticulously worked out over numerous pints in the Black Swan in Pimlico. We even tested it out. Emboldened by booze we got on the central line, ordered a one-side slice of bread & butter and stuck it onto Wren’s masterpiece. That was in 1987. I’m ashamed to say that the stain is still there.

There was a spell when we were absorbed in automatic writing – taking it in turn to write words or sentences to lyrics, stories, even the first scene of an unpublishable play. We’d be so absorbed in this that I remember the bar staff in a Southend pub commenting that we must be gay. We jumped into a pond after a Hawkwind concert for no real reason. We sent 50 postcards to a friend bearing the words “Gareth Hunt”. Once I remember us carrying a rented ARP Odyssey to a friend’s house in Brighton (neither of us had a car). One of us had made a joke which provoked guffaws, howls of laughter and ultimately hysterical tears. God knows what passers-by must have thought of two blokes, weeping uncontrollably while carrying an expensive, heavy synthesizer up the Queen’s Road. I still can’t remember what the joke was. In another watering hole we would argue passionately about whether, for example, design was art, until an exasperated friend who had become a spectator to the ‘conversation’ told us to “Shut up!”.

After such events, we’d often get down to the business of recording some music, usually at Andrew’s place, wherever that was. We were the archetypal dodgy synth band from the Cassette Era that never grew up. Korg MS10, drum-machine, a portastudio, too many influences by half, and never quite the ambition to really make a go of it. That said, as MFH we released five cassette albums in the early 1980s, one LP as Pump in 1987, some concerts (sometimes with an audience) and a CD, also as Pump, in 1993. Actually, the last one didn’t quite happen, then at least, but I’ll come back to that.

Sadly, we drifted apart as our day jobs took over. Andrew was a computer programmer, a very good one, but he had his personal demons. Periods of depression turned to alcoholism, but he beat it off at the end of the 90s and I have happy memories of an outwardly contented, sociable Andrew at my wedding – just before my work took me to Japan and Thailand for most of the last decade.

Distance meant that we didn’t see too much of each other in the ‘00s but we would often meet up when I came back home on holiday or business. Sadly, the last few years saw Andrew revert to drink and the last time I saw him was in July 2008. He knew how perilous his situation was, yet seemed calm and almost optimistic. He died on 26 January 2009.

As an epilogue, Pump’s second CD, Sombrero Fallout, will be released in the Spring of this year on Plague Recordings. If not turning in his grave, I think Andrew would appreciate the irony.