Behind The Music :: ‘In Memoriam’
August 25th saw me release my third music release this year, this one centred around and as a tribute to my dad who passed away just over five years ago. Despite keeping my musical life away from him and the rest of my family, he was still a huge supporter of it — most of the equipment I use to this day came from him as various presents. Even though I never played him anything directly, I still felt huge encouragement from him; in hindsight I like to think he could hear all I was playing and creating through the thin walls of the flat we shared. He even told me how his father used to play pub gigs as an accordion player, which made me start to think music does run in my blood.
As I’ve previously mentioned though, I find releasing music to be an incredibly vulnerable experience. Take the debut Vicky Leigh album for example, ‘Inner Mechanisms’, which has a lyrical through-line of my mental health experiences. Even though I use making music as a way to analyse and express my innermost thoughts and emotions, releasing it feels like letting I’m the entire online world into my internal thoughts and space. The biggest reason I’m doing so is to offer a helpline to those going through or with similar experiences to me, to feel as though they’re not alone, but it still opens an avenue for mean spirited people to potentially attack me.
It felt incredibly hard to acknowledge the five year anniversary of my dad’s passing, like it wasn’t true if I didn’t say it online. Now I’ve posted about it to my hubs of creativity, not only is it real, but anyone can see it. Anybody can know about what happened five years ago and my feelings become anybodies game. But above all that, through all that, I really hope I’ve managed to capture the feelings of losing a parent at eighteen. The heartbreak, the loneliness, the denial and yearning to see them again. The sitting by their side for hours on end, hooked up to medical equipment, waiting for their breath to inevitably fade. Above anything, I hope these songs can provide some level of comfort for those who’ve been through it too. You’re never alone when Vicky Leigh is around.
Don’t Delay ::
Was originally released on an album called ‘301118’, named after the day it was released, and featured me superimposed over Addenbrooke’s Hospital on the cover. A lot of the music I was writing and recording at this time had dad’s illness, fight and death at the centre. For a short while it also felt like hospitals were my home as I was constantly there with dad, hence the presence of one he was treated at adorning the cover. I used to hate hospitals as a kid, but this period made me fall in love with them. I found a strange comfort in their liminal spaces and, as a further result of it all, have even applied to work in the medical field twice.
I feel as though ‘Don’t Delay’ is a musical collage of various sounds being spliced together. There’s drinking at the start, verses with a few layers of instruments, keyboard sections with lots of delay and echoed breathing happening around it. There’s no doubt it’s a song, but it’s choppy and messy one. Perhaps a composition reflecting internal messiness of so much happening and not knowing how to navigate it? That definitely wasn’t the intention, but upon reflection it makes sense. Aside from the pulsing keyboard parts, I think my other favourite part is the electronic percussion.
There’s many bittersweet memories of being sat in hospital rooms from this period of my life. One of them, I think in A&E, was when I was focusing on the various beeps and boops of the machines surrounding us. Administering drugs, air, keeping track of heart rates. It sounded like they were talking to each other in a way, but there was also a good beat about them too. So once I got home I tried creating a synthetic drum track, echoing the beeps and boops of these hospital machines, to use as the percussive bed to build a song upon. ‘Don’t Delay’ is one of many examples of this technique.
House ::
In addition to hospital machines, the secondary inspiration for the percussive bed was St. Vincent and David Byrne’s ‘Love This Giant’ tour — specifically a performance where St. Vincent plays a drum pad solo partway through ‘I Am An Ape’. Talking Heads helped me get through this point in my life, offering a happier and hopeful soundtrack to one of the worst points in my life. St Vincent was also playing in Cambridge on August 26th 2018, with me and dad securing tickets to go. You can read my review of the concert, but having passed away three days prior, my dad sadly didn’t make it. Not in reality. I say that because, at some point during the week he passed and seeing St. Vincent, I had a dream where we both went to a St. Vincent concert. It was my first time seeing dad since he passed, and we finally got to attend the show where we planned to go together. He was full of life and smiles too, not laid up in bed and wasting away. It was my dad how he used to be, before he got sick, how he should be remembered.
This dream got me thinking though, and ignited the idea for ‘House’ — visiting my dad in heaven. It’s where he’s gone now his earthly body has transcended and, given the opportunity, it would be nice to join him again. To see and live with him again. After coming up with that concept for a song, I tried to create a song using some synths with a beautiful, relaxing yet melancholic dreamscape about them. The song is a sad one, but also a happy one too; I’d finally been reunited with the person I’d lost too soon and miss the most. Given the huge influence Talking Heads had on me during this period of my life, ‘House’ could also be considered the “antithesis” of their song ‘Heaven’. I never wrote my song to be that, but while David Byrne is singing “heaven is a place where nothing ever happens”, I’m visiting my dearly departed dad in my version of heaven.
‘House’ was originally released in 2019 on a double album called ‘at what point does a town become a city?’, the same (double) album ‘I Don’t Enjoy This Station’ was originally released on. While revisiting these songs made me sad and relive some difficult moments, something I genuinely didn’t anticipate, it did cast my mind back to this double album and how fond I was of it. In the coming years I hope to update it, trim it down into a single album, then release again as ‘Cityscape’. Rather than being a collection of ideas like its first incarnation, this new version will be more of a concept album with a through-line on death and the journey we make while dying — as an onlooker and while experiencing it first hand. I’ve had an early iteration of ‘Cityscape’ on repeat for weeks since first conceiving the idea and, without sounding too narcissistic, I think it could be my greatest album. A funny idea as I used to call ‘at what point…?’ my magnum opus. I guess some things never change.
Title & Artwork ::
I think the title is self explanatory with it being a musical memorial for my dad, but the artwork I particularly love. I’m stood in front of an illuminated stained glass art piece, a centrepiece at St Nicholas Hospice’s memorial room, the place my dad received his last treatments and departed from this life. The memorial room is perhaps my favourite room in the entire building, as you’re overcome with emotion as you step through the door, but instantly feel a strange calmness and peacefulness. Atop this post is a more recent photo of the same art piece, taken on August 23rd 2023, five years to the day after dad passed away as I went back to St Nicholas Hospice for the first time since he passed away. I felt as though part of his soul was still there and wanted to return to him. It may have been a place of horrible memories, but the afternoon — accompanied by my dear friend Amelia — was peaceful and bright.
My head is sporting a buzzcut as I stand before said stained glass, the first time I shaved my long hair off completely. This was half a “Britney moment” as a result of a dying dad and half a charity event as, on August 1st 2018, I shaved my hair for the Macmillan Cancer Support charity in dad’s name (I never realised how close it was to dad passing until now). At the same time I was studying A Level Photography at sixth form and had become infatuated with isolated colour, so a lot of photos of me from this time had me in black and white but the world around me still in colour. It’s how I feel 90% of the time, as though I live a black and white life, but everyone else’s lives were still happening as my own was falling to pieces. Something I don’t think I’ve recovered from, and probably never will fully.
The particular edit of the photo used for the ‘In Memoriam’ single cover was created July 16th 2021, and has an alternate edit of the same photo used for my ‘Aries Rising EP’ cover superimposed over it, which is what gives the photo so many brilliant blues and reds. I originally created the photo to use as the cover of a Spotify playlist called ‘Soul Sanctuary’, inspired by the atmosphere in the St Nicholas Hospice memorial room. Once I knew I’d be releasing ‘In Memoriam’, there was no doubt that photo would be the perfect cover. Much like ‘301118’ featuring the hospital dad was treated it, it was only right to include a photo from the place dad passed in. This is a single about death and grieving, after all.
Stream/purchase ‘In Memoriam’ on my Bandcamp :: click here.
[MY NEXT SINGLE WILL BE RELEASED ON SEPTEMBER 15TH]
