“He’ll Always Be 23” – Why Today’s Date Is One That I’ll Never Ever Forget Until The Day I Die

In 2010, I was a temperamental, spotty teenager who was doing anything but studying for his Junior Cert.

I was only 15 but, like most teenagers, I thought I knew it all. I disobeyed my parents, argued with my sister and could be found either trying to drink two cans of cider in a field in Westport over the duration of 6 hours or listening to music.

I loved music, I still do of course but there’s some songs that I listened to so intensely in this period that I physically can’t listen to the first chord of them now without switching it over.

This was the year that I got into music in a big way. I had a guitar since I was 11 but 2010 was when I broadened my horizon and learned songs that weren’t just popular or in the charts.

I got into Oasis, The Beatles, Green Day, U2, Manic Street Preachers, The Who, The Stone Roses and Stereophonics in a big way.

One of the first new wave of songs that I learned (on the musical instrument that my parents had bought me one Christmas. I begged them to get it after my cousin said to me that it made girls like you more, oh how naive) was ‘Local Boy In The Photograph’ by Welsh rockers, Stereophonics.

There’s a simple chord progression that makes it easy to learn on guitar. It was inspired by a real life event in the area where they grew up.

A boy in the band’s area had committed suicide, he jumped on the tracks as an oncoming train approached.

Frontman, Kelly Jones said in a Sky Arts Programme in 2011 about the song that:

“I used to play kind of county football… and there was a kid that used to play right back. I got to know him pretty well.

“He was a really cool kid and he was a good looking kid. He was kind of one of those ones that you looked and thought, ‘He’s got it all.’

“And then few years later we found out he jumped in front of a train and we were all a bit shocked by it and we read about it in the local paper. There was a picture of him smoking a – which I think it was a joint actually. And that’s the picture [the paper] used and it said ‘local boy’ in the photograph.

“I’d never really known anybody our age to do that, to kind of end their life and nobody really knew why he ended his life. And when you’re 18 or 19 you’re quite naive and you just write everything down.

“And it was just more about a celebration of his life than was about his death, really, about the kid sitting on the bank drinking, and lots of imagery of the seasons and the clocks going back and I that’s when I found that descriptive writing is what people would stop and listen to really.”

Despite what this song is about, what happened in 2010 mixed with the fact that I’m very sick of certain songs from that era, the Stereophonics track and its lyrics is something that I still listen to from time to time.

“There’s no mistake, I smell that smell, it’s that time of year again. I can taste the air.”

10/10/10, such an easy date to remember but one that life made sure I would never forget.

Our home house got a phone call.

I answered.

I was in the height of puberty at the time which meant sometimes I’d answer and get mistaken for dad and other times I’d answer, voice would break and I’d get mistaken for mam.

Normally whoever was on the end of the phone would just pass the message on to me and I’d tell my parents but when I was told that they had something to say and to “put your father on the phone”, I knew it couldn’t have been a good sign.

I didn’t know my cousin well at all.

He was the closest other lad cousin in age to me on my dad’s side but I was just at that shitty age where you’re not old enough to be hanging out in nightclubs and pubs where you might bump into these people.

I always felt that if I was another year or two older or he was a year or two younger, we might have been closer.

We might have talked, he might have talked, I would have listened and I might have said something that would have made him see things in a different light.

The small word ‘might’ is just too big for this situation though sadly.

“And all the friends lay down the flowers. Sit on the banks and drink for hours. Talk of the way they saw him last. Local boy in the photograph.”

Like Kelly Jones had explained about the tragic death that inspired his song, the people who you think are the happiest in the world, are the ones that could really be struggling in real life.

Friends of my cousins spoke highly of him and shared stories about all the craic they had had with him and how it came as a huge shock.

At the time, I didn’t understand how this could be a ‘shock’, that surely the tell tale signs would be there.

But, more often than not, they aren’t.

Suicide and Mental Health is something that touches every person in some way. Whether its a friend, a family member or maybe even yourself.

Back then, I would have thought that you wait for the tell tale signs but as many incidents and episodes have taught me since, you don’t wait for the signs.