RIP Tailz

[davethedrummer]

Tailz was a wonderful man.
We will miss him deeply

I met him the first time in Edinburgh in about 1997 when I was playing at a club called “Purple Moon” in the cow gate area of Edinburgh
It was pretty empty, apart from the smoke!
That’s all I can remember, the dry ice and the black-lights , and the smoke!
it was everywhere, so thick you could barely see your drink!
And out of this smoke this huge bloke appeared !
He had all this day-glo make up all over his head and his bare-chest and he was dancing like some crazy florescent nightmare.
He came up and said “ **** me ! a ****in’ DJ that dances !”
And gave me that famous toothless grin I’ll never for get as long as I live.
I have to admit, I was attempting to dance a little on the dance-floor, and Tailz mercilessly made me look like a complete amateur.
(a situation I endured many times, about many things, after that!)
we got on famously.

A couple of months later I get a call
asking me to come and play in Edinburgh again, for someone’s birthday.
Of course, it was Tailz’ birthday, and we filled up a club in the centre of town with all his mates and many more people and had a wild time!
Tailz danced the entire night on the stage with his mad day-glo make up on and our friendship was sealed from that point onwards.

Tailz soon started coming down to London to party with all of us in the Stay Up Forever collective, the record label with a name that was synonymous to Tailz’ life and which was full of the music he loved so much.
At the time I was living in a big place in North London with Stay up Forever’s main acid techno DJ’s who all new the Irascible Tailz well
He would drive down at a million miles an hour, In the car, sound system pounding with soul mate Gypsy at his side, come to the party, play some records (Henry man!!! I’ve got some great new German Hardcore!!) , pierce anyone who wasn’t careful enough and then disappear back up north in a cloud of smoke, with the music blaring.
Heady days indeed.

I also got to know the softer side of Tailz over the years
And although much of our time together was taken up partying
and playing music, I learnt that he was kind, generous and big hearted, intelligent and staunchly independent, and after learning something of his past with his bike club I realized that he was quite guarded about that side of himself in case he was thought of as a bit soft.
To be honest he never had me fooled for one minute, and I don’t think he fooled anyone else either, and that, of course, is why we all loved him.
As soon as we got together we would be laughing about all kinds of stupid stuff, playing music, watching movies, and the hard man side of Tailz would just dissolve into laughter and fun and that famous grin.

I always enjoyed going out to his place in the hills, where it was quite and calm.
The absolute opposite of him, you would think, but in reality, there was a man in Tailz, who needed the calmness of the countryside, appreciated the sunrise and the sunset and the movement of the seasons and understood the natural world around him.
Sure, it would all get tossed aside as “ hippy shit! ”
Or “ thats something that gypsy’s into” but you could see he was happier outside the big city and away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life, and
especially he was glad to be away from the intense everyday life of his world famous piercing clinc.
With a line out the door most days, tails was responsible for pushing little pieces of metal into people for many years
And his stories could be shockingly gory, but what would you expect?

I have so many fond memories of Tailz
That it’s hard to know where to stop writing about him.
So I’ll leave it here.

With the deepest respect and Sympathy
Henry Cullen