Do androids dream of electric grief?
Being online in the early 2000s was a lot like standing in line for a rollercoaster. You had a sense of what was to come, but didn’t really know what was in store. The likes of Myspace, Facebook, and even Bebo were all still in their infancy so, if you wanted to overshare with strangers online, your choices were limited. But armed with enough determination and a 56k modem, there were ways to do it. So long as nobody else in your house wanted to use the telephone.
MSN Messenger was perhaps the easiest way. Think Twitter but where posting song lyrics replaced having a personality. Actually, it was a lot like Twitter really. But anything posted on MSN — outside of A/S/L?— was ephemeral. A series of ones and zeros that were as much a part of you as an empty crisp packed you sat on once on a train and never thought about again.
But message boards were different. There everything you wrote was recorded, archived, resurfaced to be used against you if you even had the thought to be a hypocrite at some point in the future.
My first experience of message boards was CLUAS, an Irish music website that specialised in indie bands and U2-bashing. It wasn’t quite the Williamsburg of the Irish internet but it had a gate-keeping vibe to it that would have embarrassed Walder Frey.
Around 2004, I was at the height of suffering from what can only be described as White Ladder-itis. Though David Gray’s album had been released — and purchased by me — some years earlier, it would prove to be a gateway drug into the world of singer-songwriters that autumn.
And it was chatting to others about this on the CLUAS message boards that eventually tipped me back in the direction of Damien Rice. I was aware of Rice having been to a Juniper gig or two, and knew how to play a couple of his songs on guitar because, of course, I was that guy at parties in college, but I’d never given his solo stuff a chance.
But one week in late 2004, two years after its release and everyone else, I discovered O.
This ‘discovery’ coincided with starting my first real job, one I was glad to have but which involved a long commute from Ballyfermot to Monkstown. But from the opening chords of Delicate to the last vestiges of Eskimo, I had a companion — stored safely in the monstrosity above — who could make the 78A and DART that bit less tedious.
One day, curious to see what others thought of Rice, and more than a little bored of the indier-than-thou nonsense over on CLUAS, I checked out the Damien Rice Message Board. I can’t remember my first post, but you can be certain it was some nonsense or other given the source. Whatever I said, I felt welcomed enough that day to come back the next, and the next, and pretty much every day for the guts of four years.
I was, at various times over the course of my Damien Rice Message Board life Edge of Reason, Edge, and — during a particularly deep dive into Elliott Smith — Idiot Kid. And while lots of users came and went, at the heart of the community were a dozen or so posters including, but not limited to,(deep breath) Fiji Mews, Jimbo, Pushmeifall, LA Woman, pjinpjs, ami, Ali, coolasacucumber, dawnwheetos, Brian L, Mat, Jellybaby, McKinney, empty_space, and mattatatat.
Eventually, we’d all share our real names, and the fact we were posting from Ireland, Wales, Scotland, England, France, and the US. We’d share big news like births, marriages, and deaths. We’d introduce each other to new music, books, and TV shows. We’d engage in nonsense like invading that other Damien Rice message board Eskimo Friends. We were, for all intents and purposes a group of friends. Just a group of friends who never met each other.
Eventually, like many groups of friends, the thing that brought us all together — in this case Damien Rice — became secondary to the friendship. Indeed, when his sophomore album 9 eventually dropped it barely made a splash. But that other thing that happens to adult friendships — the drifting apart for no reason other than living in time deficit — happened to us too.
But we did our best to stay in touch. Not on Bebo or MySpace as seemed likely when we first got to know each other, but on Facebook, Instagram, and email. One person I chatted to regularly was mattatatat, or Matt Edwards.
Matt was always impossibly cool. You could imagine that, as a teenager he was listening to Chelsea Hotel #2 when his classmates were learning Time of Your Life (Good Riddance). But, importantly, he wasn’t dickhead cool. He was always quick to share new music recommendations, never took himself too seriously, and was just as happy to join in the nonsense stuff as he was the serious conversations.
When I heard on Sunday that Matt had died suddenly, aged in his 40s, I cried. Cried for a man I had never met. Cried for a man I had never spoken to. But a man who was a daily part of my life for more than four years. A man who still got in touch about this new album he’d heard, or to ask how the kids were doing.
It’s the strangest grief. So hard to place where it sits in your heart. But it’s undeniably there
I’m looking at two pictures of him now. One is from 2007 when the Damien Rice Message Board was at its peak. He’s smiling. He looks happy. And I’m looking at a picture from New Year’s Day this year with his partner. They’re both smiling. They look happy.
The phenomena is ‘knowing’ people we’ve never met is a relatively new one. So it’s tough to define what is or isn’t real. And there are those who say what you post on the internet lasts forever like it’s a bad thing. And I guess it can be.
But it can serve as a memorial too. A place to visit in the absence of a grave. To say thank you for the laughs when times were tough. To say thank you for the new music recommendations. To say thank you for being a friend, mattatatat.
