a brother slips away

and a brother slips away
like a ship at dawn of day
a brother slips away
another brother gone

Amongst the hand-wringing, sword clashing, celebration and general brouhaha clamouring for people's attention this week, a quieter death was announced.

Whilst not as well known perhaps as his older brother Glyn, Andy Johns did work on many seminal releases. Whilst the list of albums he produced and/or engineered is impressive and is probably the soundtrack to someone's life. He engineered Joni's Shadows and Light which remains one of the great live albums. Anyway, he's presumably finished climbing the stairway to heaven now.

As the obituaries pile up for those we admire (as well as those we didn't) it gets more and more uncomfortable to realise that those fellow travellers moving on are of a similar age to ourselves.

That's quite a sobering thought.