RIP Natty Brooker

[James T]

Sad news, Natty has passed on.

[ro]

...on it goes.

thank you for posting.

[spzretent]

Sad. Sleep well Natty.

[BzaInSpace]

Cheers and Goodbye Natty.

[toomilk]

Sad news. RIP.

[davedecay]

bummer.

may his friends and loved ones find peace.

[runcible]

How sad. The Sweet Tooth print I have by him is one of my favourite things. RIP.

[olan]

Bugger....sad start to a beautiful day. RIP.

[Huxley123]

RIP indeed.

[Bull Lee]

So it goes.

R.I.P.

[purespace]

sad news indeed, godspeed Natty.

[Dreamweapon]

Indeed very sad, even more so when you bear in mind he was still posting the night before - see the Britpop thread.

RIP.

Thank you for your postings here, for the music, and from what I know from the board, being an all round gentleman.

[Shinesalight]

Very sad news indeed. RIP Natty.

I always wondered if the Natty who posted on here was the one and same. A shame I had to find out this was the case in this manner. I will always have a special memory of him as we had the LGM album cover on the top table at our wedding last Thursday as part of our classic albums themed seating plan (the dancing devil and angel originally used on the Anyway That You Want Me single that he did was obviously later adapted for the LGM cover).

Also, the benefit concert held for him in Hoxton a few years back was probably the closest I'll ever get to seeing Spacemen 3. Wish I'd even able to afford an original copy of his work.

[mc]

Sad news. RIP Natty. Your artwork (not the prints alas, I could never afford those) covers the walls of my "family room" and stairs

I don't think our "natty" is/was actually Natty Brooker. Being stalkerish and all, I searched natty's posts and his first says:

"The thing I liked about the old board was the 'backwards' way the posts were listed. I'm sure I'll get used to this new one pretty quickly though. It is probably better I guess. It reminds me of Will's message board as well. Quite impressed by the fact that I now joined this board before I was born!"

I'd have assumed Natty B was older than having a 01/01/1970 birthday. Though I could be wrong...

[Dreamweapon]

Does anyone know if it is the same natty?

Other people also have the 01/01/1970 as their joining date on the board?

[Ian]

"Our" Natty isn't the late Natty Brooker. The date appears to be the default date of birth that was set when this board was set up and the old users were imported.

[natty]

Sad news. I'm obviously not natty brooker, although my name actually is natty IRL.

RIP the other Natty.

[burningwheel]

I figured it was 'the' natty on here. Oh well. Rip brother

[davedecay]

is Natty a nick for Nathan or some other name?

[natty]

In my case it's Nathaniel, but IIRC Natty's name was actually Nicholas.

[Dreamweapon]

As I understand it Natty has been ill for some time and the (sort-of) Spacemen 3 reunion a while ago in Hoxton, along with the art exhibitions that Will set up were to help raise funds for his treatment, as wel as to provide some income.

Now that unfortunately Natty's battle is over, is there some outlet for donations to either his family or a chosen charity?

[runcible]

As I understand it Natty has been ill for some time and the (sort-of) Spacemen 3 reunion a while ago in Hoxton, along with the art exhibitions that Will set up were to help raise funds for his treatment, as wel as to provide some income.

Now that unfortunately Natty's battle is over, is there some outlet for donations to either his family or a chosen charity?

Good call. Worth finding out...

[Dreamweapon]

Are you able to check this out Mark, given your contacts with band members?

Did Natty have any family?

[Laz69]

Will might have an idea...

[runcible]

Are you able to check this out Mark, given your contacts with band members?

Did Natty have any family?

I have asked. They were collecting for a charity at the funeral yesterday so if I can discover which one it is I'll post it here. Seems like an ideal opportunity to donate to a great cause.

[nogoodboyo]

Been a little out of touch of late and only just heard.
Many happy memories of Natty driving the Spacemen in small back rooms of pubs.
Top bloke.
Sleep tight.

[sunray]

Only just noticed this after been away for a week. Sad news indeed.

[runcible]

I am told that Natty's family have suggested donations to the Macmillan's Cancer nurses. Donations can be made here:
http://www.macmillan.org.uk/Donate/

They also added that they thought Natty would have liked donations to the Dog's Trust! So for all you pooch lovers you can donate here:
http://www.dogstrust.org.uk/default.aspx

I hope this might raise a few quid for some very good organisations. I've started the ball rolling and chucked a few quid in - please join in if you can...

[Dreamweapon]

Cheers for investigating this Mark - glad we could do something.

Will donate to Macmillan when I get home and can log on there.

It's great giving to charity but are Natty's family well looked after too?

[runcible]

It's great giving to charity but are Natty's family well looked after too?

I'm assuming so. Macmillan or the Dog's Trust was their idea so I'm sure they are happy with that. The Macmillan people are pretty amazing and I suspect they did a lot for Natty.

[toomilk]

Will posted a very lengthy tribute to natty on Facebook today. It's like a poem in some part, very stream of conscious. I can't copy it from my phone, but maybe someone else can post it here.

[natty]

Here it is. It had me welling up. It's really quite a beautiful bit of writing.


In Praise of the weird . I remember the first time I met Natty. He was sitting in the living room at spacemen headquarters . I had gone round drunk with my speed freak friends. We had gone to have a little fun with the artists. They were into different things than we were.
They played music and made art. Our pursuits were not quite so harmless.
In a larger town we would have never met, but Rugby was not a large town, so we did.
We were pissing in the front garden when Pete Kember arrived. He just laughed and waited at the front door with us waiting to be invited in.
Natty was sitting on the settee not saying very much.
I think the first thing he said was "What month is it".
Nobody really had an answer to that.
Natty was the high priest of high weirdness.
Guaranteed to raise a smile.
He didn't have to try.
It dripped off him. It wrapped itself around the rooms he inhabited and seeped into the souls of those who spent time with him.
His tendrils of weird wrapped themselves around my young brain and they have never let go ..thank God.
He was a burst of colour . Mr Mushroom . The cat in the hat. The weirdest of a weird bunch. None of us fitted in, but Natty made that not fitting easier by not fitting in so beautifully. Where was he ever going to fit ? He was a piece of the puzzle you'd never know where to slot .His was a beacon of largely benign strangeness.
The eyeball kid. beaming out over the grim eighties wasteland that sold us the yuppie dream and terrified conformity. The eighties was flash, cash and trash… Lots of shiny, hair sprayed trash, and not the good kind either. Natty was the antidote to all that crap. He was the cure that nobody cared for. Lobster boy. The fairground freak who knew more about why you goggled at him than you did.
He was the first drummer I ever stumbled along on bass with.
He was , as another old friend put it , an encourager.
I had no idea why he did whatever he did and I don't think he did either. I guess he had no choice.
He was born under a weird moon and he just had to walk under it.
All the way from Daventry to Rugby every night with found and indecipherable things tied in his hair .
Old hopalong with his old man's cane on the moonlit mushroom fields of the midlands. Walking circles round the straight roads to turn up in the town centre pubs and recite poetry to the bemused customers swigging lager and dreaming of dumber things .
Cooking up pots and brews to turn his friends on and bend a pliant mind to the wise .Back to the woods, with his bag of spells that smelled like old socks twinkling with stars and skulls and beaming out colours you'd forget you'd seen last night .
Cackling and bug eyed, grumpy as a scrap yard dog. He always seemed old to me. Even when he was twenty three. Like an old man poured into a raggedy rawboned frame for a while to ramble and lope across the concrete and carparks to find a starlit night under the grateful boughs of some forgotten tree on some forgotten hill and dream up the tangle of the wild .He looked like he had always been there, Mr.Natural in the hedgerow and nobody knew him . He had jobs but mainly his job was weirdness. Good, old fashioned, honest to goodness weirdness, and he didn't take any days off. Barefoot drummer , hooper of the glide and rattletrap orchestra , crackling grin and that old weirdo tooth poking out of nowhere and probably going right back again if you watched it long enough.
We hitchhiked down to London once, me and him. We had no money for a train. We stood by the M1 in the drizzling rain, he in his scarlet huntsman's coat and me with my shaggy mutt hair, neither of us looking right to the unrighteous eyes fixed on the dismal grey at the fag end of the industrial estate. Near the slaughterhouse with a pocket full of liberty, to take to one of Genesis p Orridge's early acid parties and see the fabled spacemen he had left and I was yet to join. We waited there for four hours in the rain with no lift even tickling a stop for our thumbs. We both started blaming each other for the way we looked.
"It's your bloody hair " , he grumbled , as he grumblingly did, with half a hint of smile and his old poke-out tooth, shaking his head in disbelief and howling a cackle up at the drizzle . .
"It's that fucking jacket ", I laughed.
To be fair , it was both of us.
We were obviously weird.

In the end we gave up and grumbled back across the fields to Kilsby to try and catch a bus back to town. Half way across the fields he said .
"And it's my fucking birthday".
We both laughed at that. HAHAHAHAHA
In the pissing rain and at the pissing predicament .
I never even got him a card
hahahahaha
I didn't make it to his funeral. I am somewhere up in the Golden triangle, dragging the happy memories I have of him through the sorrow of his passing. Even that sorrow has a double edge. He was done. I know that . He was done a few years ago, but he was too stubborn to give up. Old dogged, raggedy, patchwork man of fused joints and replacement bits, clanking along like a bag of rusty bolts. He was never made for hospitals. Never made for the sterile environments he bore like a moaning stoic.
So , no funeral but the comfort of distant emails from friends and the recalling of him from this jungle with a little Townes Van Zandt for comfort on my wild ride up the mountains and over oceans looking for love. A hopeful romantic. …with my dead friend laughing in my memory, cold in the ground, warming the flowers and me wondering how the funeral was and why I couldn't do more . It can't have been as it should have been. It would be impossible. They should have lit the town in blob wheels. Fired a salute of weird rock and howling through the lorry park while every dignity stripped and tripped out ,walking Daventry to Rugby on a jazz dirge with rubbish in their hair. The trees should have sung. They should have painted the town hall in vibrating colours that'd shake for a year and call the onglomerous spirits to a new fangled, old fashioned shindig. The ugly people should have been crowned beauties, and every snaggle tooth dog in town should have had steak and meat grog on tap.
Should.
I was talking to Jason Pierce once .He said to me that of all the people we knew, he would most like to have seen Natty rich . A RICH Natty !!!
What a mansion that would have been …. make John Lennon's rolls royce look like a dull penpushers runaround. I can't imagine . None of us could, because that is what Natty did . Think it up and pluck it from nothing because that is what he got beyond the getting by.
People like their real artists dead . They are less trouble that way
Maybe he'll get his just rewards in the last blast of the leaving of it. Who cares ?

I am not sure he really did, though he could surely, sorely, grumble about it.

I don't know why .
I don't know why all the boring people get the money .
Must be a reason I suppose . Truth is , he was probably just as rich in poverty and more so himself.
One night he was off on some floral deep slumber after the brew had hit and the house smelled like a backstreet in old Siam . I hit him with a beanbag and we started some crazy fight that never hurt anybody yet involved a lot of clattering kruffuffle and no small amount of loud, disgusting and good humoured insults . Next thing there was a knock at the door . Some fucking fun killer who couldn't sleep for the hate of the job he thought he needed .
"TELL THEM TO FUCK OFF ", Squawked Natty as he gently battered me with his pillow of choice .
There was the sound of breaking glass from the front door.
We stopped mid whack.
Natty and me went out into the corridor and saw the late and irate neighbour in his dressing gown, reaching through the front door he'd broken looking for blood.
He started shouting at Natty .
He grabbed Natty's boney arm and tried to drag him out into the street.
I grabbed Natty's other arm and pulled him back.
It was a tug of war and Natty was the boney rope.
Angry neighbour was growling and things were looking grim.

Stroke of genius time. Natty stops struggling and says to the man whose ill intent was trying to do him in , "Mate , watch your feet on all the broken glass ."
Natty looks down at the shattered front door glass, both arms out like Jesus and the neighbours bare feet searching for grip in the temper of splinters he'd lost..
Hmm ?
That did that . Situation averted .
Go home fun killer
We peace queers love you.

His visionary world was, by turns, the stuff of sweet dreams and nightmares. The night before the morning after, in which devils and angels linked arms to dance the night away and where even your worst fears might leave you with a wink and a smile

His was a world in which flying saucers attacked out of innocent confections and where a simple hairdressers sign became crowned with night glown stars, and wore a smile whose mystery evoked every femme fatale from Mata Hari to the Mona Lisa.

.

So,step in and taste the colour of dreams. There is a riot in brain cell no.9 and that kaleidoscope of faces is leading straight to the centre of your mind and who knows what you are going to find there .

Curiouser and curiouser .as another citizen of Rugby once had it , because here , at the mad hatter's tea party , everybody is shouting "off with our heads ", and if it's two thirty five in the afternoon , and you said you'd be coming home by two, well, maybe ,there's a shortcut down that rabbit hole over there, and maybe there's a chance you'll arrive before you even left.

It feels weird as Willy Wonka to be changing all this into the past tense.

Write poetry . Play music. Make art. Be art .Arrange these disney spaghetti shapes in tomato sauce onto this piece of paper. Bake a watermelon. Why not ? .You wanna be rich or you wanna be free? What price soul ?

Fucking Natty .

i AIN'T GONNA MISS HIM .
i AIN'T SORRY HE'S GONE .
i AIN'T GONNA MISS ANY OF YOU FUCKERS I LOVE AND NEVER SEE.
i'M JUST GLAD .
glad I knew him and you
glad I got to know the world a bit better through him .
glad i learned to love the weird in me
glad I learned that ugly is far from the worst thing you can be .
glad for the colours he helped me find
glad that i could sit all night and tell you stupid shit about him that makes my little heart glad with sorrow .
GLAD .
there is more to write of the past but i've things to do and life to live .
hold onto the weird things that do no harm and keep you sane while they drive you half barmy.
One day you'll know what they were .

Natty,
Maybe the world could've been better to you but it was certainly the better for you.
See you later Mr.Ugly . Thanks for the memories .
You were beautiful .

[sunray]

Wow. Beautiful and touching.