My best friends have been in my favourite band for 11 years. I’ve been to almost every one of their gigs, including their very first - they’ve, individually and collectively, shaped my perception of not only music, but of love and existing in this mad fucking place we call home and what it means to care about someone and of art and joy and literature, lyrics and films and life and what it actually means to have an open mind. I’ve cried at them ending their set with their song Bury Me for 11 years, and last Friday they played their final gig. They are called Gardenback.
Toby said, when he saw them for the first and last time last week, that he’d always thought stage invasions were kind of lame (correct) - until he saw all of Gardenback’s friends and fans rush over the barrier to dance next to them on stage as they played Bury Me, sobbing and holding each other and screaming the words. He said it was so clear that Gardenback are our’s, they belong to and are shared by all of us. They’re the audience’s band, giving themselves n their souls to us when they play like so few people can or do. That they’re a part of our lives that we’ll never forget and that will never fade away (never be buried, if we wanna do it even more hammily than a Nirvana ref). I think there’s something so magic in that - you know when you watch documentaries about Factory Records (rly hitting my niche here) and the then-scene and you can actually see how a band had an impact on shaping the culture and people’s lives and what came after them. That’s really how I feel about Gardenback - they’ve affected so much and so many and it’s inevitable that whatever comes after them will be shaped by how they impacted the now. In his fond farewell to Gardenback, Dave Sweetmore wrote “When the day comes somebody writes a book about all the great bands that have come from Greater Manchester, Gardenback will no doubt have a good space of their own in it.” He is, undoubtedly, correct. They already changed Tobs’ pre-Gardenback opinion on stage invasions.
I was initially going to write this newsletter as one that draws a parallel between something hyper specific (end of the era of my best mates’ band) and something universal (life goes on and moves on even when it hurts, but it doesn’t mean it’s the end). As it turned out, when writing it through thick tears, it’s too personal to project it onto the universal. Gardenback are too personal to me. I don’t know if you’ve ever loved a band so much that it makes your bones sing and your smile ache, but if you have and if you know that physical sensation of being connected to the feeling by the very muscle of your heart, think of that sensation and imagine the same band who you love this way are your three best friends. Imagine then that you’ve known them since you were 12 years old and you’re 29 now, and one of them is moving away further than anyone else has, even anyone who they wrote the lyric “the only one who I can talk to is leaving town” about, and you went to their final gig and you cried on stage as they closed their set with your favourite song with all your best friends, all the way until the end, and you held on and you'll never be able to stop holding on and if you imagine all that, plus the pure, distilled teenage feeling of truly loving a band, then you might be some way close to imagining how I’m feeling right now.
Gardenback were and are and always will be my favourite band. If it wasn’t offensively obvious already - I will cherish all this forever, and I don’t know how else to say it. Thank you EJN for everything x