JOHN DOUGLAS: 1963 – 2026

Another day, another death notice, another fine musician lost overboard far too soon.

I’ve had a long-running philosophical debate at home about the abundance of stuff that’s gathered in boxes or on shelves in various places around our house. Like many men in middle-age, I have accumulated an unhealthy number of records, books and various pieces of memorabilia over the decades that I am loathe, for many reasons, to dispose of. To my mind, a collection of music in its various physical forms and shapes is far more than what it outwardly purports to be: in those bundles are the sketches of a life, or lives.

Reminders, because we now need constant reminding, of the way we were, where we were and with whom. And then there are those, on the other hand, for whom Marie Kondo is a literary titan.

The various posts assembled here over the last number of years are just extensions of that same discussion. Most of our first-person pieces aren’t really about music at all: they’re long diary entries from a life played out to a soundtrack that’s always been evolving. So, with that party political sermon out of the way …

Waste enough time and you’ll find many references here to a small Scottish band that, way back, landed into our lives at a time when we were struggling badly for direction. Quietly and modestly, they showed us what – with a little imagination and an angular approach to words and melody – was possible. The odd, infrequent bubble-up notwithstanding, they’ve stayed largely on the margins since, but foremost in our thoughts. Trashcan Sinatras is that band.  

John Douglas – whose death at the age of 63 was announced this week – was one of the group’s founders, songwriters and arguably its spiritual heartbeat. In the middle of what seems like an endless procession of people checking out, his death comes as a genuine shock. John was a real favourite of mine and, from my handful of personal experiences in his company, a thoroughly decent man.

I’ve derived an enormous amount of joy from his music over the years and, in the worst traditions of these things, the Trashcans only last week released a new elpee, ‘Ever The Optimist’. Their first album in a decade, its already assumed a status as the most uplifting memorial card in history.     

We had an excellent English teacher up in the old school, a man whose ability to help us make sense of the great poets and writers was matched only by the sharpness of his tongue.

But he was fair and open-minded with it. He mightn’t have completely appreciated what Paddy McAloon was attempting to do on those first, magisterial albums but he saw how this sort of thing at least engaged us with the written word. Prefab Sprout, REM and The Smiths made his life easier because they forced us into a place where we read unprompted and then considered, however clumsily, what it was we’d just consumed. He was a serious operator.

Which was how we spent ages poring over Among School Children, a poem by W.B. Yeats in which the poet, then a prominent fixture in Irish public life and over 60 years old, visits a school. In scanning the classrooms and the long corridors, the nuns and the religious iconography, he begins to contemplate his past. It’s a magical piece of work, the closing lines of which are among the most profound and routinely mis-quoted in the history of Irish literature:

‘O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?’

I was reminded of these lines when I’d heard of John’s death: he was an avid reader and, with a family line to Donegal, was long aware of the thump of great Irish literature. Closing in on 60 myself now, and routinely scanning the many corridors in which I play out the various elements of my life, the questions posited by Yeats over a hundred years ago have never been so prescient.

I can’t claim to have known John Douglas [the dancer] but knew his work [the dance] intimately. Is his work inseparable from the life he led? Or the person he was?

I met John on a handful of occasions over the years and he was always affable, gracious, engaged and incredibly humble. That he was a gifted and rounded writer, musician, performer and film-maker with a wide frame of reference goes without saying. But, for the record, it’s worth repeating that he leaves behind him a considerable body of work, much of which is magical in aspect.

That work has been well and truly parsed in a number of previous pieces here, and so I’m not going to re-trace old steps now. John’s music speaks for itself and I have no doubt will be a real succour to his family and friends as they come to terms with his loss.

But apart entirely from his work with the Trashcans – and latterly with his wife, Eddi Reader – he forever had a camera with him and shot a variety of original clips for the band over the years. One of which was a lo-fi promo for ‘The Genius I Was’, from the band’s third album, ‘A Happy Pocket’, that he made specially for the No Disco series on RTÉ television back in 1994. We put that one on heavy rotation years before the track was available commercially, just because they wanted to and we could oblige them. Were the series still on air, we’d have been playing the promos for recent cuts like ‘The Bitter End’ and ‘Bad Husband’ to death.

I last encountered John ten years ago, on the night in November 2016, when a few of us bumped into him in the narrow hallway in The Workman’s Club on Dublin’s quays after The Trashcans played a terrific live show there. He told us that he’d thoroughly enjoyed the night, loved the venue and would have certainly hung around were it not for the fact that the band had a ferry to catch and another show in London the following night. And with that he went back to lugging equipment out of the venue and into the tour van.

After years of playing to general disinterest around Ireland, the group had belatedly found appreciative crowds in Dublin, a fact that wasn’t lost on him. Or on that small cohort of us who, for decades, has preached the gospel of John to largely deaf ears.

‘Among School Children’ is ultimately a celebration of life, of course: one reading of it suggests that the real beauty in life is in the way in way that it constantly evolves.

John Douglas long knew that, I think, and many of his songs are flush with allusions to nature, time, the changing of the seasons and the natural world. He found real pleasure in the most simple – and beautiful – of things.

And we, loyal forever, took real pleasure in how he went about articulating that in words and in music.

It was an honour to know the work and he will be sorely missed.