YOUNG, ELLIOT (1969 – 2005) Musician. Spencer's collaborator until ‘artistic differences' and a fist fight outside a Glasgow discotheque caused them to go their separate ways. It's been established that on the night of December 22nd, Elliot guzzled a fatal combination of sleeping pills and vodka, wrote a semi-coherent letter (in which both Spencer and I were mentioned in passing) and then perished in the narrow gap between his bed and the wall. His body was so effectively cocooned that it wasn't found until one of his housemates, rummaging for cigarettes, noticed a scent that was alien and pungent even by the squalid standards of the residents. In the wake of the tragedy (and I don't hesitate in referring to Elliot's death as such), I caused offence by suggesting that other young people of a dramatic streak might consider this a cautionary conclusion to a life of flagrant attention seeking. This was someone, after all, who weeks earlier, tried to saw off his own thumb with a penknife, an attempt at self-mutilation that was aborted when he was reminded that that it was the pinkie that was expendable. Since adolescence Elliot had a pronounced martyr complex to which no-one who knew him even slightly could have been oblivious.

In retrospect, it was probably inappropriate to use my eulogy to draw attention to some of Elliot's less commendable traits. Frankly, I was taken aback to be asked to say anything. Spencer, I believe, intended to recite some meaningless lyric. When it became apparent that he wasn't competent to the task, I was forced to step into the breach and improvise. In the course of a well-received and heartfelt eulogy, I did briefly allude to the questionable sincerity of Elliot's death wish, but was diverted by my sister's simulated coughing fit. I only raised the subject because I was thinking of my niece sitting in the congregation. Muriel was at the outset of her own morbidly rebellious phase at the time. Apart from the suggestion, uncontested at the time, that Elliot may not have wholeheartedly wanted to die, the speech was, I think a success. A year on, of course, I'm confronted by aspersions that I hijacked the service in order to denigrate Elliot's character even as he lay stiff and cold two feet away. My recollections of Elliot as a youth elicited what sounded like genuine laughter and, if I cast him as a hysteric, I also paid tribute to the talent that might have blossomed had he applied himself. Anyone who's heard any of Elliot's songs will appreciate my generosity in referring in such terms to an oeuvre that really has little or nothing to recommend it.

 

Home

Glossary

Hamilton Live

Casebook

 

Contact