NO MORE SAD SONGS
The life of Epic Soundtracks - Shindig Magazine February 2019
by Fergal Kinney
In 1992, Epic Soundtracks – real name Kevin Paul Godfrey – released the album Rise Above. Despite featuring musicians from Sonic Youth, the Bad Seeds and Dinosaur Jr, this haunted baroque pop masterpiece would vanish on release into obscurity. Two albums and five years later, Epic would be dead – dying alone in his London flat in circumstances that remain unexplained.
This year would mark the 60th birthday of Epic Soundtracks. Though his previous band, the post-punk pioneers Swell Maps, became a key influence on American grunge and British indie, Epic’s solo work – the towering Rise Above, as well as Sleeping Star and Change My Life – have gone without appraisal or rediscovery.
On its release, if it was covered at all Rise Above seemed to be viewed as a curio from a relic of the early years of post-punk. Those who came to it intrigued by its US rock guest musicians would be surprised to find an album of lushly arranged chamber pop, totally off-kilter from the prevailing grunge mainstream. Following Epic’s death, artists like John Grant, Rufus Wainwright, Belle and Sebastian and Father John Misty would find international acclaim with lushly orchestrated, 60s and 70s inspired confessional singer-songwriter albums. But success never came for Epic.
“As with Nick Drake” explains the music writer Pete Paphides, “he wasn’t even a cult artist when making his best work. Not enough people liked him for him to be a cult artist, he wasn’t even that. He just had no traction and it was incredibly sad.”
Formed in his native Leamington Spa with brother Adrian Godfrey – known better as Nikki Sudden – Swell Maps released two albums on Rough Trade in the aftermath of punk. “We always had a really good relationship with Swell Maps” says Rough Trade boss Geoff Travis, “and Epic was one of the first people I heard talking about CAN. Even then there was always an air of melancholy around him.” After Swell Maps’ split in 1980, Epic remained close to Rough Trade, working in the store and collaborating with Rough Trade artists like the Raincoats’ Gina Birch.
“Epic and Nikki were really into the music before punk” says fan Stephen Pastel of the Pastels, “the flash point of punk wasn’t year zero for them and I think that Epic was just really into great music and not so fussed about where it came from or anything.” Epic and his brother remained close following Swell Maps’ split – Sudden formed the Jacobites in London, whilst Epic would oscillate between London and, increasingly, Berlin.
1980s’ West Berlin became the base for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and a coterie of associates like Rowland S Howard and brother Harry Howard; motivated by dissatisfaction with London and the city’s relatively cheap heroin. Epic would begin orbiting this world and join Howard’s group Crime & the City Solution, and later follow the brothers into These Immortal Souls. It would be in the former band that Epic would brush with cinema history – making a brief cameo appearance drumming in a nightclub scene for Wim Winder’s 1987 masterpiece Wings of Desire.
Though he would drift out of that circuit, this loose Berlin underworld would prove catalytic on Rise Above – Howard would play guitar on the record, Martyn P Casey of the Bad Seeds would play bass, and Cave’s then producer Victor Van Vugt produced the record with Epic. Even the sleeve was shot by photographer Bleddyn Butcher, who has worked extensively with Nick Cave across decades.
Back full time in London, Epic was a memorably brusque presence at Notting Hill’s Record and Tape Exchange, where he worked during the early 90s. The writer and musician Max Decharne says “the first time I met him, he spent most of the time we were talking looking down at the record on the counter. If he did look at me, it would be through his fringe.” Describing Epic, one colleague said “he could be incredibly diffident; he could be incredibly rude actually to customers. He was quite moody, but he was funny and had a dry sense of humour”. The music journalist Pete Paphides did a few days’ work at the store: “I remember someone pointing at this person and saying, that’s Epic Soundtracks. I was thinking he didn’t look like he wanted anyone to approach him.”
An interplay began between the music Epic played in the store and the songs he was tentatively writing at home – Epic would fill the shop with the sounds of Carole King, Laura Nyro, and crucially, Big Star and their songwriter Alex Chilton. The key influence, however, was always Brian Wilson. James Endeacott, who worked on the release of Rise Above for Rough Trade even recalls a trip with Epic to the 1993 ‘Beach Boys Stomp’ Convention at the glamorous location of Greenford Parish Centre, Middlesex. “I don’t actually like types of music” explained Epic of his influences in an interview with Twister fanzine, “I like individuals. I couldn’t say I like rock’n’roll or soul or blues but I like individuals who do those things. Sometimes I make the influences obvious.”
In May 1991, Epic found himself over in New York helping out Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo on a project at Fun City Studio. Finding themselves with extra time on their hands, Ranaldo generously asked Epic if he had anything he wanted to record or do. “I had this one song” explained Epic in 1992, “but it wasn't finished and I said I didn't have the confidence to sing it. Lee said "Just do it". So I did. The encouragement I got from that made me want to carry on."
That song, Fallen Down, would become the first track on the album. Buoyed by how well that recording had turned out (this would be the recording used on the finished album) Epic returned to the UK and worked extensively on demo-ing, finalising lyrics and working out arrangements to have an album ready to record. In April 1992, work on Rise Above proper would begin at a now defunct studio overlooking West London’s Paddington Old Cemetery.
“It was quite a miracle that we pulled it off” explains the album’s producer Victor Van Vugt, “the studio was about the size of two cupboards put together, you could just squeeze a drum kit in there. It was a tiny budget, a couple of grand, and I paid for the studio out of my own pocket and it took a long time to get reimbursed.” Rise Above would be Epic Soundtracks’ masterpiece – a stark, gorgeously crafted collection of meticulously realised songs packed with references to Epic’s West London haunts.
Richard King, the former A&R man turned historian of British independent music, explains “it felt like an elegy for a life that a lot of people could live in the 80s, of being in the middle of London on the dole or in a record shop, living a kind of bohemian life that obviously no one can anymore. There’s that sense of drifting through the day. Saint Etienne did that too, but in a very different way without heroin or guitars or long hair.”
Some of the album’s beauty lies in the conflict between Epic’s ambition and the constraints of his limited budget. With no money for a string section, Van Vugt drafted in his girlfriend – a cellist – and another string musician and spent days laboriously tracking their performances until it created the effect of an orchestra. Listen to the gorgeous, Bacharachian pop of tracks like She Sleeps Alone or the gothic bombast of Big Apple Speedway and it’s impossible not to marvel at how effective that feat was. Much of the record, however, is marked by a sonic minimalism – some tracks just Epic and piano. Indeed, the minimalism of the album’s production is echoed by the starkness of Epic’s lyric writing. Words rarely contain more than two syllables, and there’s very little metaphor or poetic allusion. Instead, it’s conversational, direct and highly effective. Epic was not a natural singer, and friends talk of how much coaxing it took to get him to begin singing his compositions. At points on Rise Above, he rubs up against the limits of his own vocal technique, but again this disparity is endearing – indeed, occasionally moving.
There had been an understanding between Epic and Geoff Travis that the record would be released on Rough Trade. Though the label honoured this commitment, Rough Trade were going through bankruptcy at the time and were operating at skeleton capacity.
Geoff Travis explains “He worked in the shop, he did his time, did his service. We didn’t have high expectations but thought it was a really good record. I think he was not in the best frame of mind during those years, so there was a certain amount of redemption in him having made this great record.” James Endeacott remembers Epic driving the label to amused distraction by his insistence on securing the exact typeface from the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds for the record’s sleeve.
Richard King says “Rough Trade was more or less non-existent after the collapse, and the record just limped out. I couldn’t get hold of a copy in Bristol and had to go to Soho. Rise Above was made on a budget of nothing, on a label that was non-existent, and the whole thing was doomed – the tragedy is that he was in love with that sense of doom anyway.”
“I thought it would do really well” remembers Pete Paphides, “how could this not succeed? Look at the personnel on the record, and what the songs sound like, it’s just a dream. It felt like a potentially canonical piece of work.”
At the Record and Tape Exchange, colleagues noticed Epic’s mood shifting, with one colleague explaining “lots of other people in the shop were making records and he saw other people getting moderately successful and felt that he was being overlooked. In retrospect, he was absolutely right. I went to see him do a solo show somewhere off Old Street and there was like thirty people there. A lot of his moodiness stemmed from that.”
The record did find an ardent fan in the Lemonheads’ Evan Dando, who would perform with Epic live. Another fan of the album, though not immediately upon release, would be Bernard Butler – the former Suede guitarist turned Duffy and Libertines producer. “Fallen Down, is the song I’m obsessed with” he explains “I play that song probably once a week and have done for years. It’s not an optimistic start to an album, I love the fact it’s quite pessimistic and it’s quite resilient and it’s just about clinging on. It connects with me in a very personal way. It’s just littered with beautiful lines like ‘get out of London, you know it’s killing me’, that’s a huge lyric for me. I’m a Londoner and I’ve never left and I constantly fantasise about getting out – you’ve got Big Apple Graveyard, there’s this yo-yo across the record between London and New York. Great songs don’t tell you about the artist, they tell you about you. If I met him at this stage in my life I’d be drawn to magnetically to make a record with him and I’d give anything to do that. It’s a very unfinished record, it doesn’t feel like the finished product and I would have been dying to do slightly that bit more. Some of them feel finished but a lot of it feel like he’s just getting through the words, almost like he’s making it up, and I love that feeling of just hanging on, it really works.”
Epic left Rough Trade, and in 1994 joined the new Bar/None Records for the release of Sleeping Star. That record would depart from the minimalism of Rise Above in favour of a more full band approach – bringing in Epic’s close friend Kevin Junior on guitar. It may lack the vision of its predecessor, but songs like There’s Been a Change and Emily May (You Make Me Feel So Fine) show a songwriter still at the top of his game. Unfortunately, the album’s release would be hampered by poor management and the label would fold the following year.
By this point, not only were many of Epic’s former associates like Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, the Lemonheads and Sonic Youth enjoying crossover mainstream success, but the rise of Britpop saw younger artists than Epic find fame with derivative takes on much of the music that Epic loved. Success becoming more elusive, Epic seemed like yesterday’s man. 1996’s final album Change My Life would be the most patchy of his releases – at points it suggests a songwriter unsure what anybody might want from his work. Painfully for a collector such as Epic, the album would get no vinyl release.
Again, Epic’s luck was worsening. A European tour was shelved the evening before departure. A small US tour resulted in Epic being detained at Minneapolis airport – no work visa had been approved, and he fainted at being given the ultimatum to face a US ban or return immediately to the UK.
Bad luck and bad management was taking its toll on his already fragile mental health. Though a private individual and no party animal, some of Epic’s friends suggest that harder drugs may have also began to enter the picture – certainly many of Epic’s friends and associates were committed heroin enthusiasts. “We’d always be bumping into each other at various things” explains Van Vugt, “but Epic got more and more introverted, went out less and stayed at home more and more. He was always a pretty tortured soul, that comes out in the songs, but I don’t think anybody knew he was as tortured as he ended up being.”
In October 1997, Epic had a whistle stop tour of his old stomping ground of Germany booked – including a London warm-up at Highbury Garage, and a handful of Austrian dates. He would be accompanied by Kevin Junior. The tour had sold poorly, and was preceded by Epic’s relationship with his girlfriend ending.
Often, audiences would be thirty to forty people – one particularly talkative audience provoked the usually mild Epic to open rage, venting at the audience and refusing to continue with his set. He was booed and the show limped onto a premature finish. Even the tour’s relative successes brought their own challenges. One well-received German show climaxed with the audience shouting for an encore. Kevin Junior recalls coming off stage to find Epic backstage breaking down - “I just wish she was here to see this” Epic told Junior.
On returning to London, things were growing ominous. Writing in 2004 of the end of that tour, Kevin Junior observed “the black clouds began to arrive. The mood inside Epic’s flat was solemn. We waved to him from the taxi, he looked as though he had just been dropped off and left on a deserted planet as he waved back.” Later that day, Epic phoned Junior and thanked him warmly for their friendship. That would be the last time that Junior would hear from Epic. Epic had told friends he would be seeing them at a concert, but he didn’t turn up. After days of unreturned calls, Junior grew worried and phoned Nikki Sudden. Before Junior could speak, Sudden frantically asked him whether he had heard anything from his brother.
Epic’s landlady arrived at Sumatra Road, and was the first person to find Epic lying dead in his bed. He was thirty-eight years old. The coroner’s inquest ruled the cause of death as inconclusive, and it was estimated that he had passed on 5th or 6th November – his body had been in the flat for around ten days before discovery. Empty packets of antidepressants were found around his bed, but few think that overdose on these could prove fatal, and no suicide note nor drug paraphernalia was found.
“We don’t know why he died and we will never know” explained Sudden following the death, “my mother thinks Epic died of a broken heart, and I and all his close friends agree."
This is confirmed by author and musician Max Decharne, who accompanied Sudden at the flat. “Nikki rang me up to tell me what had happened to Epic and he said he was going to Epic’s flat to basically pack up. Epic’s front room was a ground floor of a two-up-two-down, and it was every wall floor-to-ceiling just thousands of LPs. We stayed up all night packing up the collection. His piano was there, you’re surrounded by the man and he’s no longer there, it’s very very emotional.”
Curiously, after Epic’s death a meeting was arranged at Notting Hill’s Intoxica Records to sell Epic’s collection to one Noel Gallagher, who had heard that the famously vast collection was up for sale. After inspecting the collection, Gallagher duly wrote a six-figure cheque to Epic’s parents. Unfortunately, the name was misspelt and the cheque was returned to him with a note explaining the situation. The family never again heard back from Gallagher, the collection was broken up and sold incrementally.
Epic’s parents survived not just to suffer the death of Epic but also of Sudden, their only other son, who died aged 49 in 2006. Kevin Junior would later die in 2016, aged just 46.
There’s a contemporary debate about the responsibility that the music industry has to its artists – both in the pressures of success and the costs of failure.
Geoff Travis reflects on this, explaining “I think we were learning then how to behave with our artists and where that line should be drawn.” For Bernard Butler, Epic Soundtracks’ experiences echo some of his own observations: “There was no respect or even interest in (mental health) at the time. If you had issues around anxiety you were put down as a junkie and told to stop fucking moaning. It’s great to celebrate these characters in music who came to a sorry end and we can absorb the wonder of what they created but it’s easy to forget that somebody died, that’s a fucking shame and that shouldn’t have happened. You just think how has this person gone? How did this happen? Someone died here.”
With special thanks to Chris Coleman for access of Epic Soundtracks’ archive. Thanks to Pete Paphides, Richard King, Victor Van Vugt, Bernard Butler, Stephen Pastel, Gina Birch, Geoff Travis, James Endeacott, Max Decharne, Kirk Lake, Nick Brown and John Robb.
The life of Epic Soundtracks - Shindig Magazine February 2019
by Fergal Kinney
In 1992, Epic Soundtracks – real name Kevin Paul Godfrey – released the album Rise Above. Despite featuring musicians from Sonic Youth, the Bad Seeds and Dinosaur Jr, this haunted baroque pop masterpiece would vanish on release into obscurity. Two albums and five years later, Epic would be dead – dying alone in his London flat in circumstances that remain unexplained.
This year would mark the 60th birthday of Epic Soundtracks. Though his previous band, the post-punk pioneers Swell Maps, became a key influence on American grunge and British indie, Epic’s solo work – the towering Rise Above, as well as Sleeping Star and Change My Life – have gone without appraisal or rediscovery.
On its release, if it was covered at all Rise Above seemed to be viewed as a curio from a relic of the early years of post-punk. Those who came to it intrigued by its US rock guest musicians would be surprised to find an album of lushly arranged chamber pop, totally off-kilter from the prevailing grunge mainstream. Following Epic’s death, artists like John Grant, Rufus Wainwright, Belle and Sebastian and Father John Misty would find international acclaim with lushly orchestrated, 60s and 70s inspired confessional singer-songwriter albums. But success never came for Epic.
“As with Nick Drake” explains the music writer Pete Paphides, “he wasn’t even a cult artist when making his best work. Not enough people liked him for him to be a cult artist, he wasn’t even that. He just had no traction and it was incredibly sad.”
Formed in his native Leamington Spa with brother Adrian Godfrey – known better as Nikki Sudden – Swell Maps released two albums on Rough Trade in the aftermath of punk. “We always had a really good relationship with Swell Maps” says Rough Trade boss Geoff Travis, “and Epic was one of the first people I heard talking about CAN. Even then there was always an air of melancholy around him.” After Swell Maps’ split in 1980, Epic remained close to Rough Trade, working in the store and collaborating with Rough Trade artists like the Raincoats’ Gina Birch.
“Epic and Nikki were really into the music before punk” says fan Stephen Pastel of the Pastels, “the flash point of punk wasn’t year zero for them and I think that Epic was just really into great music and not so fussed about where it came from or anything.” Epic and his brother remained close following Swell Maps’ split – Sudden formed the Jacobites in London, whilst Epic would oscillate between London and, increasingly, Berlin.
1980s’ West Berlin became the base for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and a coterie of associates like Rowland S Howard and brother Harry Howard; motivated by dissatisfaction with London and the city’s relatively cheap heroin. Epic would begin orbiting this world and join Howard’s group Crime & the City Solution, and later follow the brothers into These Immortal Souls. It would be in the former band that Epic would brush with cinema history – making a brief cameo appearance drumming in a nightclub scene for Wim Winder’s 1987 masterpiece Wings of Desire.
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| Epic Soundtracks (far right) in 'Wings of Desire' 1987 (Wenders) |
Though he would drift out of that circuit, this loose Berlin underworld would prove catalytic on Rise Above – Howard would play guitar on the record, Martyn P Casey of the Bad Seeds would play bass, and Cave’s then producer Victor Van Vugt produced the record with Epic. Even the sleeve was shot by photographer Bleddyn Butcher, who has worked extensively with Nick Cave across decades.
Back full time in London, Epic was a memorably brusque presence at Notting Hill’s Record and Tape Exchange, where he worked during the early 90s. The writer and musician Max Decharne says “the first time I met him, he spent most of the time we were talking looking down at the record on the counter. If he did look at me, it would be through his fringe.” Describing Epic, one colleague said “he could be incredibly diffident; he could be incredibly rude actually to customers. He was quite moody, but he was funny and had a dry sense of humour”. The music journalist Pete Paphides did a few days’ work at the store: “I remember someone pointing at this person and saying, that’s Epic Soundtracks. I was thinking he didn’t look like he wanted anyone to approach him.”
An interplay began between the music Epic played in the store and the songs he was tentatively writing at home – Epic would fill the shop with the sounds of Carole King, Laura Nyro, and crucially, Big Star and their songwriter Alex Chilton. The key influence, however, was always Brian Wilson. James Endeacott, who worked on the release of Rise Above for Rough Trade even recalls a trip with Epic to the 1993 ‘Beach Boys Stomp’ Convention at the glamorous location of Greenford Parish Centre, Middlesex. “I don’t actually like types of music” explained Epic of his influences in an interview with Twister fanzine, “I like individuals. I couldn’t say I like rock’n’roll or soul or blues but I like individuals who do those things. Sometimes I make the influences obvious.”
In May 1991, Epic found himself over in New York helping out Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo on a project at Fun City Studio. Finding themselves with extra time on their hands, Ranaldo generously asked Epic if he had anything he wanted to record or do. “I had this one song” explained Epic in 1992, “but it wasn't finished and I said I didn't have the confidence to sing it. Lee said "Just do it". So I did. The encouragement I got from that made me want to carry on."
That song, Fallen Down, would become the first track on the album. Buoyed by how well that recording had turned out (this would be the recording used on the finished album) Epic returned to the UK and worked extensively on demo-ing, finalising lyrics and working out arrangements to have an album ready to record. In April 1992, work on Rise Above proper would begin at a now defunct studio overlooking West London’s Paddington Old Cemetery.
“It was quite a miracle that we pulled it off” explains the album’s producer Victor Van Vugt, “the studio was about the size of two cupboards put together, you could just squeeze a drum kit in there. It was a tiny budget, a couple of grand, and I paid for the studio out of my own pocket and it took a long time to get reimbursed.” Rise Above would be Epic Soundtracks’ masterpiece – a stark, gorgeously crafted collection of meticulously realised songs packed with references to Epic’s West London haunts.
Richard King, the former A&R man turned historian of British independent music, explains “it felt like an elegy for a life that a lot of people could live in the 80s, of being in the middle of London on the dole or in a record shop, living a kind of bohemian life that obviously no one can anymore. There’s that sense of drifting through the day. Saint Etienne did that too, but in a very different way without heroin or guitars or long hair.”
Some of the album’s beauty lies in the conflict between Epic’s ambition and the constraints of his limited budget. With no money for a string section, Van Vugt drafted in his girlfriend – a cellist – and another string musician and spent days laboriously tracking their performances until it created the effect of an orchestra. Listen to the gorgeous, Bacharachian pop of tracks like She Sleeps Alone or the gothic bombast of Big Apple Speedway and it’s impossible not to marvel at how effective that feat was. Much of the record, however, is marked by a sonic minimalism – some tracks just Epic and piano. Indeed, the minimalism of the album’s production is echoed by the starkness of Epic’s lyric writing. Words rarely contain more than two syllables, and there’s very little metaphor or poetic allusion. Instead, it’s conversational, direct and highly effective. Epic was not a natural singer, and friends talk of how much coaxing it took to get him to begin singing his compositions. At points on Rise Above, he rubs up against the limits of his own vocal technique, but again this disparity is endearing – indeed, occasionally moving.
There had been an understanding between Epic and Geoff Travis that the record would be released on Rough Trade. Though the label honoured this commitment, Rough Trade were going through bankruptcy at the time and were operating at skeleton capacity.
Geoff Travis explains “He worked in the shop, he did his time, did his service. We didn’t have high expectations but thought it was a really good record. I think he was not in the best frame of mind during those years, so there was a certain amount of redemption in him having made this great record.” James Endeacott remembers Epic driving the label to amused distraction by his insistence on securing the exact typeface from the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds for the record’s sleeve.
Richard King says “Rough Trade was more or less non-existent after the collapse, and the record just limped out. I couldn’t get hold of a copy in Bristol and had to go to Soho. Rise Above was made on a budget of nothing, on a label that was non-existent, and the whole thing was doomed – the tragedy is that he was in love with that sense of doom anyway.”
“I thought it would do really well” remembers Pete Paphides, “how could this not succeed? Look at the personnel on the record, and what the songs sound like, it’s just a dream. It felt like a potentially canonical piece of work.”
At the Record and Tape Exchange, colleagues noticed Epic’s mood shifting, with one colleague explaining “lots of other people in the shop were making records and he saw other people getting moderately successful and felt that he was being overlooked. In retrospect, he was absolutely right. I went to see him do a solo show somewhere off Old Street and there was like thirty people there. A lot of his moodiness stemmed from that.”
The record did find an ardent fan in the Lemonheads’ Evan Dando, who would perform with Epic live. Another fan of the album, though not immediately upon release, would be Bernard Butler – the former Suede guitarist turned Duffy and Libertines producer. “Fallen Down, is the song I’m obsessed with” he explains “I play that song probably once a week and have done for years. It’s not an optimistic start to an album, I love the fact it’s quite pessimistic and it’s quite resilient and it’s just about clinging on. It connects with me in a very personal way. It’s just littered with beautiful lines like ‘get out of London, you know it’s killing me’, that’s a huge lyric for me. I’m a Londoner and I’ve never left and I constantly fantasise about getting out – you’ve got Big Apple Graveyard, there’s this yo-yo across the record between London and New York. Great songs don’t tell you about the artist, they tell you about you. If I met him at this stage in my life I’d be drawn to magnetically to make a record with him and I’d give anything to do that. It’s a very unfinished record, it doesn’t feel like the finished product and I would have been dying to do slightly that bit more. Some of them feel finished but a lot of it feel like he’s just getting through the words, almost like he’s making it up, and I love that feeling of just hanging on, it really works.”
Epic left Rough Trade, and in 1994 joined the new Bar/None Records for the release of Sleeping Star. That record would depart from the minimalism of Rise Above in favour of a more full band approach – bringing in Epic’s close friend Kevin Junior on guitar. It may lack the vision of its predecessor, but songs like There’s Been a Change and Emily May (You Make Me Feel So Fine) show a songwriter still at the top of his game. Unfortunately, the album’s release would be hampered by poor management and the label would fold the following year.
By this point, not only were many of Epic’s former associates like Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, the Lemonheads and Sonic Youth enjoying crossover mainstream success, but the rise of Britpop saw younger artists than Epic find fame with derivative takes on much of the music that Epic loved. Success becoming more elusive, Epic seemed like yesterday’s man. 1996’s final album Change My Life would be the most patchy of his releases – at points it suggests a songwriter unsure what anybody might want from his work. Painfully for a collector such as Epic, the album would get no vinyl release.
Again, Epic’s luck was worsening. A European tour was shelved the evening before departure. A small US tour resulted in Epic being detained at Minneapolis airport – no work visa had been approved, and he fainted at being given the ultimatum to face a US ban or return immediately to the UK.
Bad luck and bad management was taking its toll on his already fragile mental health. Though a private individual and no party animal, some of Epic’s friends suggest that harder drugs may have also began to enter the picture – certainly many of Epic’s friends and associates were committed heroin enthusiasts. “We’d always be bumping into each other at various things” explains Van Vugt, “but Epic got more and more introverted, went out less and stayed at home more and more. He was always a pretty tortured soul, that comes out in the songs, but I don’t think anybody knew he was as tortured as he ended up being.”
In October 1997, Epic had a whistle stop tour of his old stomping ground of Germany booked – including a London warm-up at Highbury Garage, and a handful of Austrian dates. He would be accompanied by Kevin Junior. The tour had sold poorly, and was preceded by Epic’s relationship with his girlfriend ending.
Often, audiences would be thirty to forty people – one particularly talkative audience provoked the usually mild Epic to open rage, venting at the audience and refusing to continue with his set. He was booed and the show limped onto a premature finish. Even the tour’s relative successes brought their own challenges. One well-received German show climaxed with the audience shouting for an encore. Kevin Junior recalls coming off stage to find Epic backstage breaking down - “I just wish she was here to see this” Epic told Junior.
On returning to London, things were growing ominous. Writing in 2004 of the end of that tour, Kevin Junior observed “the black clouds began to arrive. The mood inside Epic’s flat was solemn. We waved to him from the taxi, he looked as though he had just been dropped off and left on a deserted planet as he waved back.” Later that day, Epic phoned Junior and thanked him warmly for their friendship. That would be the last time that Junior would hear from Epic. Epic had told friends he would be seeing them at a concert, but he didn’t turn up. After days of unreturned calls, Junior grew worried and phoned Nikki Sudden. Before Junior could speak, Sudden frantically asked him whether he had heard anything from his brother.
Epic’s landlady arrived at Sumatra Road, and was the first person to find Epic lying dead in his bed. He was thirty-eight years old. The coroner’s inquest ruled the cause of death as inconclusive, and it was estimated that he had passed on 5th or 6th November – his body had been in the flat for around ten days before discovery. Empty packets of antidepressants were found around his bed, but few think that overdose on these could prove fatal, and no suicide note nor drug paraphernalia was found.
“We don’t know why he died and we will never know” explained Sudden following the death, “my mother thinks Epic died of a broken heart, and I and all his close friends agree."
This is confirmed by author and musician Max Decharne, who accompanied Sudden at the flat. “Nikki rang me up to tell me what had happened to Epic and he said he was going to Epic’s flat to basically pack up. Epic’s front room was a ground floor of a two-up-two-down, and it was every wall floor-to-ceiling just thousands of LPs. We stayed up all night packing up the collection. His piano was there, you’re surrounded by the man and he’s no longer there, it’s very very emotional.”
Curiously, after Epic’s death a meeting was arranged at Notting Hill’s Intoxica Records to sell Epic’s collection to one Noel Gallagher, who had heard that the famously vast collection was up for sale. After inspecting the collection, Gallagher duly wrote a six-figure cheque to Epic’s parents. Unfortunately, the name was misspelt and the cheque was returned to him with a note explaining the situation. The family never again heard back from Gallagher, the collection was broken up and sold incrementally.
Epic’s parents survived not just to suffer the death of Epic but also of Sudden, their only other son, who died aged 49 in 2006. Kevin Junior would later die in 2016, aged just 46.
There’s a contemporary debate about the responsibility that the music industry has to its artists – both in the pressures of success and the costs of failure.
Geoff Travis reflects on this, explaining “I think we were learning then how to behave with our artists and where that line should be drawn.” For Bernard Butler, Epic Soundtracks’ experiences echo some of his own observations: “There was no respect or even interest in (mental health) at the time. If you had issues around anxiety you were put down as a junkie and told to stop fucking moaning. It’s great to celebrate these characters in music who came to a sorry end and we can absorb the wonder of what they created but it’s easy to forget that somebody died, that’s a fucking shame and that shouldn’t have happened. You just think how has this person gone? How did this happen? Someone died here.”
With special thanks to Chris Coleman for access of Epic Soundtracks’ archive. Thanks to Pete Paphides, Richard King, Victor Van Vugt, Bernard Butler, Stephen Pastel, Gina Birch, Geoff Travis, James Endeacott, Max Decharne, Kirk Lake, Nick Brown and John Robb.
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| RIP Epic Soundtracks 1959-1997 |
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