Regarding Geoff Davis from Probe's funeral (by a 'poster' called nige):
I wrote this for a HMHB site about yesterday's funeral, for mates all over the country who would have liked to be there to pay their respects but couldn't [It's got gags, swearing and self-indulgence in it, but if you're wondering that was very much in the spirit of the day and Geoff would have been OK with it I'm sure... it was very Liverpool]
An impressive turn-out for Geoff Davies' moving farewell yesterday. I’m sure many of those in attendance will have had the same thought as me on entering the church – that Geoff himself might have made jokes about the missed opportunity for a merch stall at the back. But don’t worry, I come to bury Caesar, not to do a Geoff Dreadnought on him.
Every pew was well populated, with well over two hundred family and friends thronging the warm local sandstone interior of Ullet Road church, just around the corner from Geoff’s house. A Unitarian venue with all the fine trappings of late Gothic revival, with Morris & Co/Burne Jones stained glass above the altar, paid for, like the art galleries, by Henry Tate’s Liverpool-based sugar empire.
We stood as Geoff’s simple willow basketwork coffin was carried in to traditional church music, but then contemplated the fleeting nature of ‘Happiness’ – to Molly Drake’s haunting, wistful, song of that name, the wonderful version recorded by Eliza and Martin Carthy.
“You can try to make him walk beside you
You can say the door is open wide
If you grab at him, woe betide you
I know, because I’ve tried
Like a butterfly upon an April morning
Very quickly taking fright
Happiness is come and gone without a warning
Jack-O-Lantern in the night
I will follow him across the meadow
I will follow him across the hill
And if I can catch him I will try to bring you
Oh yes, happiness.”
Geoff might have quipped that he was just glad it wasn't Ken Dodd's song of the same name.
Unitarian minister Phil Waldron did a fine job of including believers and non-believers alike in his thoughts about the nature of existence and death, and then Geoff’s friend Chumki Bannerjee spoke of the joy Geoff’s friendship had brought her and many others, before and after her reading of RS Thomas’ Christian poem ‘the Bright Field,’ encouraging us to see the eternal in the everyday moments of enlightenment.
“Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.”
Mike Badger (the La’s, the Onset, author of ‘the Rhythm and the Tide’ ) read Robbie Burns’ wonderful ‘Epitaph on my own friend.’ Burns was 250 years ahead of his time as he summed up the spirit of this service with one of his greatest couplets:
“If there’s another world, he lives in bliss; If there is none, he made the best of this.“
Then the wonderful Geoff anecdotes and jokes flowed in richly entertaining, moving eulogies from Noel Burke (of St Vitus Dance, one of the Probe Plus bands that Geoff stayed so loyal to, and in 1990-91 a temporary replacement for Macca in the Bunnymen), Miles Holmes (Probe, Skeleton records, merch stall) and Gareth Jones (Probe, Probe plus, HMHB sound-man, merch stall, etc). I say “jokes,” but mostly we were left dangling, wondering what the rest of these fragmentary stories were (that was for the wake later, as the beer would start to flow). What did Geoff say when a punter came into the shop and asked “Have you got Little Feet?” “Have you got Stiff Little Fingers?” or “Have you got tubular b*lls?”
As the Probe shop stories unfolded, there were nods to pews containing so many former inmates of that establishment. The original Clarence Street 1971-76 line-up were there, including HMHB album covers designer Steve Hardstaff (in his Love ‘Forever Changes’ t-shirt), Dave Keats and Jake. Then there were later seventies Button Street staff like Pete Wylie (whose impression of a certain music writer at the wake was brilliant, by the way).
One story that was completed, and a fine collector’s item of saying “fckin” at a funeral, was Gareth’s story of how a band from Southport wanted Geoff to put out an album, but he wouldn’t do it with a particular track that he thought contained too much pretentious psychobabble.
“But it’s one of our most popular tracks” complained the singer.
“Granddad by Clive Dunn was popular, but it was still fckin shite” was Geoff’s rejoinder, and that’s how the proposed project apparently ended.
Noel Burke told how, when Geoff brought St. Vitus Dance over from Belfast and put him up while he was looking for digs, “I had thought until then that bohemians were a football team from Dublin, but Geoff opened my eyes about that one.” Then he listed myriad composers, writers, artists and directors that Geoff had turned him on to.
One of the trio told the tale of Geoff’s car, bumping into a neighbour’s new vehicle, due to the driver's habit of cutting off the engine before parking was completed. “That’s what bumpers are for. It’s a metal box, and it’s fine” insisted Geoff to the angry neighbour, who just kept saying “But it’s my new car.” Geoff offered the chap a chance for revenge by kicking his car. The annoying interlocutor refused. So Geoff kicked his own car for him, and the neighbour never, ever spoke to Geoff again, which Geoff saw as a perfect result.
After a prayer, one of Geoff’s very favourite Probe Plus recordings was played. I’m sure it would have been ‘Midnight Mass Murder’ if that track had been released on Probe, but no it was ‘Mersey Moon’ by Sonnenberg. I noticed an emotional Zinney in a pew ahead of me, getting a big hug from a band-mate at the end of that one. Hey, hey, my, my ...
Then we sang ‘Jerusalem,’ the minister summed up proceedings and the coffin was borne out to the dramatic strains of some of Geoff’s favourite film music by Ennio Morricone, ‘On Earth as it is in Heaven’ from ‘The Mission.’ Envisioning the most famous scene of that movie, some of us might have imagined a Geoff quip about his coffin being sent down river to a mighty waterfall for his closing credits. Instead, after contemplative conversations outside the church, he was carried in the hearse around the corner to Toxteth ceremony where Geoff has secured himself a place, not on the merch stall at the back of the great gig in the sky, but a prime plot near the entrance on Smithdown Road, and where hopefully we can continue to pay our respects in future.
After the ceremony I wandered off across the cemetery to pay my respects at my own great-grandfather’s final resting place in a less frequented corner. Wild flowers were in abundance in the bright sunshine, including the most vivid clusters of bright orange and red miniature marigolds. Within days they would wither in the autumn storms, so having to pass Geoff’s still open grave on the way back, I gathered a few of the flowers, and of other species on the way back across the lush grass, and left them on behalf of all music fans, amongst the fertile, creative earth of Liverpool that had been tossed onto Geoff’s coffin by the mourners. Behind me the grave-fillers waited for the last funeral of the day to finish, when they would recommence their duties.
After a walk back through Geoff’s local neighbourhood to the wake at the local cricket club, it was appropriate that the first song I heard on entering the bar was ‘Look Dad, No Tunes’ by HMHB. Not exactly a massive coincidence, but in fact it was the only HMHB track included on a play-list spanning Geoff’s career which seemed very much inspired by that ‘On the Wire’ interview about his life. As the beer flowed (Geoff’s heirs reflecting the generosity he always showed himself), so did the stories, from a fine gathering of musical luminaries: Peter Hooton, Jegsy Dodd, Half Man Half Biscuit and many more. Later a couple of us out-of-towners made our way back to the station via Geoff’s favourite pub, The Dispensary, and gave him one more hearty toast. What a day, what a man, what a life.
