A Year With A Hex On It…

David Cavanagh on the departed of 2016.

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When UK hip-hop duo Mark B & Blade performed their song “Ya Don’t See The Signs” on Top Of The Pops in May 2001, it was supposed to be a breakthrough moment. Back then, in that pre-grime era, Mark B & Blade were many people’s tip to take British rap overground, into the charts. Arguments with their record label, however, soon halted the duo’s momentum and a disillusioned Mark B (short for Barnes) moved to Germany. Friends remember him as an unassuming guy, a talented beatmaker, a “real crate-digger”. Why the tributes? Because on January 1, 2016, Mark B died in his sleep of a suspected brain haemorrhage at the age of 45. hours into the new year, the first musician had fallen.

Musicians, along with retired golfers, elderly novelists, disgraced politicians and septuagenarian heiresses, die every week of the year. They’re mortal and they die. Last year, in 2015, more than 60 wellknown musicians departed the world, including BB King, Ben e King, Percy Sledge, Allen Toussaint, Andy Fraser, Chris Squire, Dallas Taylor, Daevid Allen, Scott Weiland, Ornette Coleman, Cilla Black and two members of Motörhead, Lemmy and Phil Taylor. They died in that strange order that people do: indiscriminately, asymmetrically, lumped into bizarre sequences of twos and threes, their names pulled from different genres in an irregular manifestation of musical egalitarianism. They died from January to December. And so when they started dying in January 2016, it was really no surprise.