by
My friend Paul Anderson died in the early hours of January 1st 2024. He was a DJ. He’d been playing a set earlier that evening, seeing in the New Year with a few friends. So it was a blessing in a way. We all have to die. That’s inevitable. But to die with the echoes of the sounds you yourself have played still stirring in your heart, not long after communing with your friends through sharing what you love the most, completing your life’s mission as it were: that’s a sacred act, an act of honour worthy of a shaman or a warrior. Which is what Paul was really: a warrior of sound.
Paul liked all kinds of music. He liked jazz and r’n’b, thrash, hip-hop, rave and punk. Last time I saw him he was listening to psyche folk and laughing at himself for it. “Who’d have thought you’d find me listening to folk music?” he said, in his soft, Geordie accent. When I first met him, back in the late 80s, he had a reggae set on the go, but the defining music of his life, the music that he was renowned for, the music that made him who he was, was house music, specifically deep house.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot recently. That’s what Paul did. He built houses. He was famous for his free parties, parties held outside, in the open air, at sacred times of the year, when the Earth was turning and the spirits were stirring in the hedgerows. He was creating a kind of house in nature: a musical architecture, a building made of beats, with walls of sound, with pillars of rhythm, with a ceiling made of stars. To be outside, in nature, with those sounds cascading around you, raised up by sacramental forces, with the bassline beats running like rivers through the body of the earth, was to be welcomed back to yourself again, a creature of the earth, to commune with nature and with your friends in the spirit of loving kindness, the saviour of mankind.
Frankie Knuckles, one of the originators of house, said of the Warehouse club in Chicago, where the music was born, that it was like “church for people who have fallen from grace”. That’s us. The people who have fallen from grace. People lost in a sea of samsara, wandering, disorientated in the world. The music is where we find grace again. The grace of the gods, the grace of nature, the grace of spirit. Divine grace. The grace we find in ourselves.
Listening to Paul’s last set, as I am doing now, is like a revelation. He knew he was going to die. He left us this music as his statement of intent, as his last will and testament, as his legacy, to remind us that we will have to join him one day, and that we shouldn’t be afraid.
There’s a difference between grief and sadness. You can feel sad at a sad film or a song or a poem or a book, but you can’t feel grief at any of those things. You only feel grief at the loss of a loved-one, at the loss of someone you care about deeply, at the loss of someone you have loved. I realised my grief about Paul after Rick West rang me up and told me, sometime in the afternoon on New Year’s Day. He told me that Paul had died. I heard what he said, I but it didn’t register emotionally, not immediately. I heard the news like I might hear the news of a tragedy in some distant part of the world, something that is happening to strangers.
I was round a friend’s house. She saw me receiving the phone call and asked who it was who had died. So I said his name: “Paul Anderson.” It was at this moment that it registered with me, as I uttered his name with my tongue and my breath, as I articulated the words, and by that means invoked his presence into my life again, made him temporarily alive in the breath of consciousness, and by that sacred act realised his loss and felt the surge of grief rising up through my body like a wave.
So I feel grief at Paul’s loss, but I am not sad. I am not sad because Paul’s life was not sad. Paul was an enabler of human interaction, of human communication. That sound structure he created, it was meant to bring people together. He liked nothing better than to share: to share his space with others, to share his music with his friends, to share a pint down the pub or a meal around the table with a few bottles of wine and a dab or two for the cheer. To share conversation, to share companionship with his fellow mortals on life’s journey into the eternally unknown. It was all about enablement. It was all about giving. He was never interested in money. He was only ever interested in life, in making the world a better place, in his own way, in his own time, for the sheer joy of giving, for the pleasure of exchange.
There was a short-lived trend on Facebook recently for seeing what you would look like as a Viking. I never did it myself, but many of my friends did. If Paul had’ve done that his picture wouldn’t have changed. He would have looked exactly the same. He was a real Viking, born of Viking stock, from Northumbria, the land to the north of the Humber, where the Vikings had their own laws, and Viking kings ruled the land. It was that pagan spirit that drove him, the spirit of the Danelaw, the spirit of Odin, that most sociable of the gods, who liked nothing better than to carouse with his friends in the mead halls of Asgard. It’s what they put in the mead that matters. The Vikings came from the North, from the frozen lands, where the mushrooms grow. There is a dearth of sustenance in those climes and you have to eat what’s available. The Viking people, like the people of the steppes, are not afraid of mushrooms. They know how to use them, for their pleasure and their edification, for food and for enlightenment.
There’s a misunderstanding about the nature of the gods in contemporary paganism. The gods are not “out there”, separate from humanity. They are “in here”, in the mind, psychological forces that act upon us, autonomous presences who drawn energy from the psyche and who work their magic via the spiritual dimensions. We are not asked to worship the gods, but to stand by them, to learn from them, to become like them. They find their expression through us, by who we are and what we do. Gods of war, gods of peace, gods of love, gods of kindness, gods of creativity, gods of art, gods of land, gods of nature, gods of death and sex. They manifest themselves through us. They are made real by us.
So it was with Odin, the all-father. Odin was Paul’s secret mentor. He was the one-eyed god who sacrificed his mortal eye to see more deeply into the secrets of nature. Isn’t that Paul? Didn’t he lose an eye and, in that partial blindness, learn to see more deeply? “Odin” means “Lord of Frenzy”. He was the god of sensory derangement, of wisdom, of healing, of death, of knowledge, of war, battle and victory, of sorcery, of poetry, of the alphabet, of prophesy. He hung himself upside down on the world tree for nine days in order to divine the secrets of the runes. He presides over Valhalla, the sacred hall of Asgard, the realm of the gods, where the spirits of the warriors who die in battle go to spend their eternity.
It is not given to us mortals to see beyond the veil of life to what lies beyond. We can only imagine. But in our imagination lies our our creativity and our inspiration. So let us imagine Paul then, in the great rave-hall of Valhalla, whose walls are made of sound, drinking the mead of the gods, dancing with Odin and the warriors of the ages, waiting for the rest of us to come and join him.
Photos (click to enlarge):
Paul’s last set:
About CJ Stone
CJ Stone is an author, columnist and feature writer. He has written seven books, and columns and articles for many newspapers and magazines.
Read more of CJ Stone’s work here, here and here.
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This is a lovely piece, beautifully written. Thank you
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