The poignancy of the old school photo album…

As the Not-the-30th Reunion Reunion beckons, you can’t help but look back at the old class photos to remind yourself who was in the room at the time. We’ve all seen them: the old school photo from when we were 5, 15 or 25 with all our friends ancient and modern, remembered and forgotten. What’s amazing is how common those types of photos are across the world: rows of faces stare out at us straight at the camera, arms folded, some kneeling, some sat, some stood. Hair parted, clothes neat and tidy, expressions ranging from vacant to bored to quizzical; postures shifting from angular to argumentative to aggressive.

What’s touching about those photos looking at them decades later is the recognition that year on year, names get forgotten, bodies merge into the background scenery and faces disappear. And yet this is not easy: we trouble over the missed and the missing faces as if this is the first time it has ever happened in the history of humankind. Anno domini my mum calls it – the knowing that our years are limited and slowly but surely we are all fracturing, fading and fragmenting away. It started when we were conceived, it continued when we were born, it seems to accelerate as we get older. We’re staring it in its face all the time and we continually shy away from it, won’t look at it straight on and continue to think we are immortal, invisible, god-only wise.

LIPA photos hold the same sense of reassurance and dread in equal measure; we see faces and people who have faded from view and, unless reincarnation becomes a recognisable treatment on the NHS, are not to be seen ever again.

Chris Thompson is a case, a very special case. He was a Community Arts graduate from LIPA who died in 2006: but some of his images have stayed with me ever since: images which suggest a powerful, creative, expressive artist who didn’t pay much attention to the rules, who didn’t know when to stop, but who did  know intuitively and compulsively how to capture, thrill and entertain an audience.

Watching Chris in rehearsal or on stage, you always had the sense that he was about to take you on a roller coaster of theatrical  thrills and spills – he’d tear off your safety harness, lock you into the front seat – and then, like a figurehead at the bow of a ship, perform to blazes, completely fearless in his imagination and shameless in his performance.

As a 1^st year student wielding a large kitchen knife borrowed from the LIPA canteen one Friday afternoon;  as an actor pleasuring himself in the window of the college library during performances of The Tin Drum; and as film actor in My Life as an American, Chris’s muse and inspiration – Frank Zappa – was always close to hand – and we, his audience, were privileged to see our very own extreme Geordie artist in action: and we will miss that energy, imagination and vivacity. As Zappa said in the International Times in 1970 once he’d dissolved the band which took him to international prominence – and as Zappa might have said of Chris himself: The Mothers of Invention, infamous & repulsive rocking teen combo, is not doing concerts any more. Frank – you’re in good company with Mr. Thompson – make sure he’s still riding that roller coaster when we join you both and when it’s our time to leave the funfair.