ON SUNDAY, JANUARY 29, JUST OVER 24 hours after Tom Verlaine passed away, Patti Smith posted a picture of some daffodils on Instagram. “This is morning thinking about Tom,” she wrote. And then, “Grief is not an affliction, but a privilege.” A few hours later, Smith sent out an email where she briefly elaborated her point: “words cannot express my sorrow for the loss nor the joy for having known him.”
These are sentiments, and rationales, that have been much in our minds these past few days, as we’ve remade this issue of MOJO three times to honour the memories of Jeff Beck, David Crosby and Tom Verlaine. It has been sad and necessary work, but also work which hopefully embraces the joy Smith alluded to. More than ever, it feels our job – our privilege – is to celebrate the creators of the music we love, even as we mourn them. To understand how their art and influence endures, too: a theme which also runs through our Depeche Mode interview, as Dave Gahan and Martin Gore come to terms with the loss of their bandmate, Andy Fletcher. It is Depeche’s producer James Ford, however, who best captures the spirit of where we are this month. “It was like the brush with mortality had brought about a paradigm shift in everyone’s outlook, their sense of what’s important,” he tells Danny Eccleston. “It’s a strange upshot of such a tragic thing.”