You say you've never been asked to groove ~ Paul Sykes Yesterday's Entries 2000: Jes' Chewin' the Fat TODAY's FOOD Breakfast: Kellogs Fruit
Harvest CURRENTLY READING The Elegant Gathering TODAY on DVD Adaptation
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A GIFT FROM PAUL 22 June 2004 It’s really creepy to open the mailbox, four years past Paul’s death, and find a package there for me from Paul Sykes. What’s even creepier is to open it and find out that it’s a copy of his latest CD. There’s a recording studio in the great beyond? Is this put out by Angel Records? Well, actually, no. This was a package I’d been expecting. Paul Sykes and I have this very weird relationship which started after Paul’s death. I have, over the years, engaged, as many people do, in "googling." It’s always a big ego boost to put your name in Google and find out how many times it comes up (80 times for "Bev Sykes" today...of course they aren’t all for ME, but that’s the number of hits that Google gives me). After Paul died, I made a memorial web site for him, just like I had done for David three years before. At some point I did a Google on "Paul Sykes" to find out if the memorial web site showed up yet. "Paul Sykes" is not exactly an unusual name, so it’s not surprising that I would find a lot of hits that had nothing to do with our family (there is apparently some business man in Yorkshire, I believe, named Paul Sykes and some UK footballer named Paul Sykes, just for starters). However, to my great surprise there were not one, but two web sites for guys named Paul Sykes, both of whom were musicians. One was a high school kid somewhere here in this county (I can’t find his site any more, so he may have disappeared). The other was Paul Sykes from Melbourne, Australia. (For someone who didn’t know which way the map of Australia went back in 2000, when I put it on a pie upside down, much to Peggy’s amusement, that country has certainly taken on importance in my life!) Anyway, I couldn’t help myself, I sent an e-mail to Paul Sykes in Melbourne. Lemme tell you, it’s very weird to get an e-mail from Paul Sykes! But we struck up a bit of an exchange several years ago. The main thing was that before Paul died, I had made some personalized CD labels for each of the kids, but I had never gotten around to giving Paul his. Well--here was this Paul Sykes in Australia who was obviously into music, since he was a musician, so I asked him if he’d like the labels. He said he would, and I sent them to him along with, I think, a Lawsuit CD. He wrote when he received the labels and thanked me for them. I wished him well with his career. Out of the blue recently, I received another e-mail from Paul Sykes. This time he was letting me know that he’d set up a web site and wanted to show it to me. He also asked if I’d like to have a copy of his new CD. I said that I would. In the meantime, I checked out the web site and learned some things about the Australian Paul Sykes. Ironically, he was born just two weeks before Paul, in the same year. He also has that same Don-Johnson look that our Paul Sykes frequently wore (how do they manage to keep a one-day’s growth of beard?) I will admit that the music of the Australian Paul Sykes isn’t something I would go out and choose for myself. But then I probably wouldn’t have gone out and chosen the American Paul Sykes’ music for myself either, if he hadn’t been my son. But I enjoyed listening to it, and it will probably spend some time in the car's CD player, as I learn it a bit more. I also don’t know enough about rock music to know what I’m hearing. I know that there were echoes of lots of performers and bands in the music that Paul and Lawsuit performed, so those same echoes probably show up in the Australian Paul’s music, but I hear it as the kind of music Paul might have written / performed.. Different enough to definitely be different, but similar enough to add to the weirdness of this strange friendship I’ve made with Paul Sykes. It’s kind of surreal. |
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Created 6/21/04
