Kevin Price

On 5th February my friend, Kevin Price, died after a short illness. His passing has saddened a huge number of people. It hit us particularly hard. He was 74.

We walked extensively with Kevin and his partner, Linda, on the Lake District fells. Kevin had actually been a climber in his younger days going up Pavey Ark and Gimmer Crag.

I first met Kevin in 1972. At the time he was playing guitar for various bands and was known as one of the most proficient players in the area. One evening during the Spring of 1972 he came down to Derek Hook's basement cellar, in Blackpool, where I was rehearsing with a band. Derek had recently purchased Brian Eno's VCS3 synthesiser and Kevin learnt how to program it, having a huge interest in electronics. However, he brought his black Gibson Les Paul and Derek told him I was a King Crimson/Robert Fripp admirer. From then our friendship was sealed. Kevin sat and played the guitar part from Pictures of a City. It was impressive.

In 1977, after leaving music college, I briefly joined a new band called The Sensible Club. Kevin was one of the guitarists. It was really good but eventually I left. The band continued and performed at Radio City in Liverpool. The above photo shows Kevin - on the right - winning the Best Guitarist accolade at a competition held there. One of the prizes was a Gizmo: the Godley- Creme invention for creating a String ensemble sonority on an electric guitar.

When I was studying for my PhD, Kevin went to a great many contemporary classical music concerts with me. He sat through hours of fairly dry academic sounds, simply to be there. He felt I was denying my melodic gift in favour of something which could be 'made'. Although I initially disagreed, later it began to make sense: not everyone can write a tune off the top of their head. Kevin, and my friend and colleague Alison Prince, showed me that. I owe them a huge amount. One memory is an outing to the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival to hear John Cage in conversation with Richard Steinitz. We both thought it hilarious.

Kevin worked at the Land Registry in Lytham from the time he was 16 to retirement. He didn't attend university but was possibly the most intelligent and intellectually-grounded people I'll ever know. Having been brought up with a Marxist background he knew first first-hand what this pernicious ideology conveyed, and took twenty years to 'de-brief' himself from it. I listened carefully to everything he said about this and the state of the current world. I'd had experience of it myself in the educational world, particularly with the intense dumbing-down which had taken place since the 1970s onwards with John Major's Tories and Tony Blair's New Labour. With Kevin's premise that people had begun to rely on 'received information' rather than 'natural intelligence' it began to clarify that what was happening in all walks of life was a creeping indoctrination of the masses and, with the fall of Communism in 1990/91, an invisible infiltration of the establishment by the left. Marxist-Communism went underground to reappear in Blair's New Labour. Of course, Labour had always been left-leaning, but with New Labour (note the prefix) it became smiley 'have a nice day socialist-democracy'. One of the main things Kevin and I discussed was Globalism: neo-Marxism redefined, as the world has recently experienced with Bieden's USA, the EU and the WEF. In the latter case, a kind of Marxo-Fascism. The ideology centres on total control and the forced demise of free-speech through mainstream-media outlets. Precisely what George Orwell discussed in 1984. (Also see Mark Levin's book, American Marxism). The UK is currently in the grip of much the same with Keir Starmer's neo-Marxist Labour Party. (For a history see Peter Hitchens' The Abolition of Britain). It had even happened in classical music, mainly through the influence of Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School (note the various '-isms' which crept into the programming of music; how composers were driven towards what Anton Webern called 'the music of the future').

I owe a huge amount to Kevin. Being a huge King Crimson fan himself, he discussed the band and some of his ideas about it, some of which appear in my Musical Guide to King Crimson's In the Court of the Crimson King. Again, he helped clarify my thinking.

Thank you, Kevin, for your great friendship, your graciousness, and for taking time with me and a great many people. You will never be forgotten.