Day 23: "From the Choir Girl Hotel" - Tori Amos (1998)

A while ago, a friend on twitter posed the question "Name a run of 3 (or more) albums in sequence by a band or artist which are all classics", and a fun conversation ensued.  It wasn't until I took this album down from my pile that I realised that this represented the 4th album in a sequence of albums all of which I think not only are classics, but are the pinnacle of the career of a woman who's voice and musical style has been a bigger part of my taste in music than any other I can think of.

Listen to me here

It's pretty rare that I see an album and feel like I have several things I could talk about which relate to it;  in this case, Tori Amos in general, and this album in particular, are associated with two people I've spent a lot of time living with;  one is my long-suffering partner Catherine, the other my old housemate Dave.  Because I know I'll have other albums which will make me talk about Catherine, because I can't seem to see "Boys For Pele" on my Pile, and because this album generally is about loss, it seems appropriate to talk about Dave here.

I met Dave back when we were 15 or 16.  Him and his friend Ginger Matt, despite going to the posh Catholic school in Chesterfield and living in a small village some distance (about 9 miles or so) outside of the town had become part of the extended group of adolescent grunge nerds via the weird social network of outcasts we were all a part of.  I don't remember the first time I met him really - no doubt it was just a case of him turning up at some nerdy group activity, someone saying "this is Dave", and us just accepting him into the group without question.  

Dave was quiet, and perceptive, and held a worldview which always seemed slightly sideways to the way things seemed like they should be, but which worked for him.  Having spent his formative years in a school run by Nuns, Dave had a strong dislike of both religion and being told what to do - he was always happiest making his own rules, keeping the company of a select few, and being entirely comfortable living in his own space. 

I'd got along well with Dave straight away.  It was on Dave's kitchen table, with a hangover, where I first played Magic: The Gathering and descended down a card game rabbit hole from which I have not emerged to this day.  I went to my first music festival in 1997 because Dave was working there and could get us onto the staff campsite.  My love of Japanese horror films came from lying on our ratty couches in the house we shared, drunk and stoned and watching "Audition" at 1am on a Saturday night.

When the time came for our nerdy social network to start looking for places of our own to live, I went to Dave.  His parents had already helped him buy a house when he came back from University, but he wanted to sublet to help cover the mortgage.  I needed a place to stay, and his house was walking distance from the town centre train station, so I could easily head into Sheffield where I was working.  It was an ideal arrangement.

In it's heyday, living with Dave was great.  Our house, by dint of its location, became the default gathering point for our social group, being equidistant from a lot of other people's homes at the time, and made even more convenient when my oldest friend Jamie moved into a flat literally across the road from us.  There would be Sundays when we would make coffee in our house, and then troop across the road carrying our mugs, Dave in his dressing gown and slippers, to Jamie's flat to play Mortal Kombat on his PS2.  We got on well, having enough separate interests so we weren't always in each other's hair, but still loved enough of the same things to enjoy hanging out together.

Dave was also a huge music fan, and it was through Dave I was introduced to bands like Portishead, Massive Attack, DJ Shadow, Jurrasic 5 and The Pharcyde, all favourites of mine to this day.  In addition, Dave had an uncanny knack of being able to see the spark of genius inside albums which I, at the time, had thought inaccessible.  I remember hating both "Kid A" and "Boys For Pele" (and this album) when I originally bought them - it was Dave who convinced me to give them more time, listen to them more, until I started to see in it what Dave had already seen.

I have to acknowledge now that was far from the ideal roommate though.  Twenty years on, my partner calls me a messy slob and it's a criticism that I have to own up to, but I am orders of magnitude better than I was back in the day.  It was also towards the tail end of my time living with Dave that I began to make the stupid decisions which would send me into a debt spiral it would take me over a decade to recover from.  I'm absolutely sure that there were time's when living with me made Dave's life actively miserable, and when I eventually moved out of his house to go live with The Girl That Broke My Heart, relations between us were strained to say the least.

However, once that pressure of living together had eased, so too did the tension.  Dave had a great love of his own space, and having the house to himself, with the mortgage now paid off, allowed him to make the place his own little haven.  A Dave-n, if you will.  Never one for social occasions, I'd still see Dave, but infrequently - he was always more comfortable in small gatherings of people he knew, and as I moved away from Chesterfield to Sheffield, I saw him less and less.  He came to our very first housewarming BBQ when me and Catherine bought our own house, and brought with him a can of Marrowfat Peas and a Flan Case, a tribute to the same two gifts we'd been given when we had our housewarming, where we'd hung the flan case on the wall in our living room and just left it there for years and years.  

The last time I saw Dave was at Jamie's house in Chesterfield for New Year.  We got together, talked and drank, and had a great time.  

Later that year, I got a call from Jamie telling me Dave had been found dead in his house after suffering a haemorrhage caused by an unexpected and undetected flaw in his circulatory system.  He was 36 years old.  It was so sudden, so totally unexpected, it took me days to process it.  Dave's funeral was the first time I think it really sank in, seeing everyone we had known as teens in the same place for the first time for a long time.  I was a mess.

I still think about Dave a lot.  A lot of the things in my office as I am typing this owe some part of my legacy of interest in them to him.  One of the only pictures I have of him is from a different New Year, in 2008.  This will always be how I remember him.

Me, Jamie, and Dave, NYE 2008

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go be sad somewhere for a while.