Chris Cornell management team member Clare O’Brien recently re-posted her first interview with Cornell on her blog to mark the six month anniversary of his death. Below is the introduction she wrote:
It’s a cold, rainy winter’s afternoon, and I’m listening to music while I strobe between working on next month’s social media calendars for my day job, and adding some of my old press cuttings to this website. I’m also wondering why I can listen to so much David Bowie with so much pleasure, despite his being just as dear and just as departed as my late employer, Chris Cornell.
It’s six months since Chris made his tragic and unexpected exit, and somehow I still need to do my job, picking my way through the wreckage he left and the internet vermin that swarm through it. I’ve only done it, I think, by shutting the door firmly on any normal expression of grief and barricading the doorway. I can just about hear what I ought to be feeling as it screams and smashes its alien head against the wall, but I daren’t let it out. Quarantine allows me to function, but everything connected with the good man who was once my friend has become contagious. Looking at pictures and videos is bad enough; listening to the music in any sustained way is impossible. When it’s unavoidable, I hold myself back, handling it through imaginary gloves and breathing apparatus. I dare not inhale.
So as I leafed through old box files of clips, it was a bit of a shock to find my first interview with him, from almost exactly ten years before his death. I’ve told that story already, but reading through what I’d made of our two long conversations made me remember exactly how it felt to be free and clear and at the beginning of something. It was a stark and cruel contrast to how the tale ended, and that made me obscurely angry, but putting it back online [see below] feels like a positive step. Maybe one day, my incarcerated grief will emerge, and I’ll be able to deal with it properly. In the meantime, I’ll carry on listening to Bowie, whose music had protected me since childhood, but whose loss left me human.
