Off the Record - September Edition

Don is sleeping the big sleep.

Who’s Don, you ask?

He was a creative force I had the chance to meet some thirteen years ago. A musician first, Don was also a writer, a director, a teacher, and a father.
A few weeks ago, in Paris, Don’s heart stopped. He was 58.

58 is too young to go, especially when you have children.

Despite what you might be thinking, Don wasn’t a close friend of mine. At most, he was an acquaintance. Yet, his passing affected me more than I expected.
To unravel why, I started writing.

It didn’t take long to figure it out: without Don, I would be a very different person today.

Back in 2012, I was a lost kid trying to find a way into engineering music for a living. And like most kids, especially boys, I was stupid, arrogant and thought I had the world by the balls.

I didn’t.

I had failed at finding a studio that would take me in as an intern. At that time, you couldn’t knock on the door and start making coffee ten minutes later. You needed to be enrolled in a school, and most of them were private.

So, I went knocking on schools’ doors.

The public ones laughed at me: I didn’t have the required level in maths and physics. That’s when I learned both are irreplaceable subjects to learn audio engineering.

The private ones were not much better, and their price tag was frightening. Only one generously agreed to take me in, if I followed their refresher course in maths & physics (here we go again).
That course, an extra year no less, was charged the same rate as a regular year.

Considering I wouldn’t do maths for free, let alone for 8 grand, I politely told them to shove it (or maybe not so politely, I can’t recall).

I was on my way to quitting the dream. Fuck it, I thought, if it’s that much science anyway, it’s not for me. I’ll carry on playing music, and go back to work on construction sites.

That’s when I met Don.

A tall, imposing figure, he wore dark colours and had a scruffy beard and long hair. With his Mile High accent and eyebrow piercing, he was very much not a common sight in my tiny French seaside town.

I sat across from him, and knew he was the real deal. “So, what do you wanna do?”, he asked.

I managed a few brief sentences. He nodded, and then shared his own journey with me. Part of it at least. The highlight reel, you know. It was casual. He didn’t look down to me. It was just a couple of blokes sharing their passion for creative work.
A timid start for me, the thick of his career for him.

That’s when he dropped the bomb.

“I also teach directing at that school in Paris. I’m with the International department. The French one is not that good, to be honest with you. But I’ve heard great things about the sound department. They have a good team over there, some good people. Maybe it’s worth a shot for you.”

He had nothing to gain from this. It was only one kind, creative person trying to help a lost kid, in whom, I want to believe, he saw the fire burning.
The fire of making things out of thin air.

This was late August by the way, but Don said there was still one last admission session early September.

So back to Paris I went. I took the exam. I passed the exam. And later I figured out a way to pay for that school.

The school was alright. Not perfect, of course, yet despite the hiccups along the way, I have no complaints. Because between these walls I met some of the most important people in my life.

If I hadn’t enrolled into that program, there would be no Mirror Stories.

No Yoann.

No Lou.

No Laszlo.

No Tom.

No Nathan.

No Mehdi.

No Régis.

No Laureen.

No Karla.

No Mathilde.

No Natasha.

No Seb.

No Marca.

No PSP.

No Caverne.

No La Seine.

If it weren’t for that school, I would not have lived in Paris.

No Youssef.

No Franck.

No Jeremy.

No Thomas.

No Julie.

No Claire.

No Cravan.

No Fragments.

No Les Biscuits.

No master’s degree in couch crashing and parquet sleeping.

No Ernesto.

No Jules.

No Michel.

And if I hadn’t been to Paris, I wouldn’t have gone on to Northern England, chasing the music scene.

No Leeds.

No Manchester.

No noisy bedroom recordings.

No Cesca.

No clarinet.

No saxophone.

I would have travelled way less. I wouldn’t have visited the many foreign friends I made along the way. I wouldn’t even have gone to Croatia. I wouldn’t have met my life partner.

The chain reaction is seriously frightening. Without Don suggesting me this option, my life could have been very different. How different is not even possible to know.

What saddens me now is that I never even said thank you.

Because before his passing, I never stopped to think about this. We live our lives in weird ways. We do our best to get by and keep going. Yet we hardly ever look back to ponder “How did I get here”?

While I chatted with Don a bunch of times over the years, I never grasped how important a role he played in my journey. Today I wish I had – asked him to sit down for a drink and thanked him for his help.

He probably didn’t even think twice about it. I’m certain I’m not the only youngster he helped find a path towards the arts. As I grow older, I realise we creatives have that responsibility. To help each other out. And to guide the lost kids who are only starting out and wondering what if.

Life never pauses. We all get older by the minute, and more often than not, people check out without a warning. If you only get one thing from my story here, it’s that you shouldn’t wait.

Don’t make the same mistake I did.

Do the maths, and trace back your journey into this world. Understand who helped you out along the way, and buy them a drink. Or at least give them a call to say thank you, if you’re on the other side of the world by now.

They say it’s important to know your origins, where you came from. This is similar. You don’t build a house without foundations. And without Don in my picture, I might very well have been laying bricks in the south of France this morning.

It’s a waste of time to imagine what could have been. But now, I know very well what wouldn’t have happened.

And the very thought of it sends chills down my spine.

Thank you, big guy.

Mishima Closing

“No one you love is ever dead.”

Ernest Hemingway

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