I ran into Cedric again, this time doing a ‘percussion’ overdub on a keyboard at Falconer's; still with that feel and instinct he carves his own path. Blissfully funky, lost in a rapture and rap with himself; in the mid-stream of music as it flows through and around him his fingers dance on the instrument, with a multitude of sampled percussion sounds his fingers add the missing parts. The music becomes whole. I want to kiss him in his beauty. His skin, a luminescent coal, shines in the harsh and naked bulb light of Falconer’s second and cheaper studio; animated and liquid he glides through the keys.

We hugged and made respectful and reproachful noises at each other.

“Sounds great... ...where have you been all these years.. ...what are you working on now?’

He smiled and laughed and danced a little as his drums played back, and told me nothing of the time that had passed, but I knew that sometimes it had been less than kind; and I found the resilience hard to swallow.

‘You really don’t feel it do you; the pain of losing?’ I wanted to ask, disbelieving.

You don’t show it, I think, but I wonder what goes on in those silent moments, when alone in your room you listen to a final disc and then file it away in its sleeve. As you turn away you see once again that your recordings languish in a separate box, awaiting addresses to which you can send them. Your rejection slips are there too, carefully piled in anticipation of the day when you will be able to exhume them and laugh, saying ‘but I was so low then, look at me now’... ...but tonight that moment is yet to come. Now they stare accusingly, an indictment of all you haven’t done, the measure of everything you are not. You are not wanted, they say: invalid, irrelevant, out of time, out of touch, baby. I too know that moment, and cannot believe that when you arrive there, it treats you any differently.

Why should it? I believe the gulf of loneliness opens for you too, with the knowledge that your beautiful work is still not for the belonging in this world. You are alone with it. But then again, you are so imbued with the spirit of a music that you know is ‘true’, and as you showed me so often in the long ago youth-man past, bitterness is not your creed. You know your hand should have been better, ‘but in this world you cannot choose these things’ you tell me. Wait though: Your next project you say? I should just wait and see? Ah, you crack; this last boast reveals your desperation and sadness, your are human after all; only an angel can submit a healthy heart to the blade, then continue on unwounded.

I used to fantasise that you would change your name, meet a well known DJ walking on Clapham Common and become a star, but not no more….

NYC 1996