How MY DYING BRIDE created something beautiful from the most difficult of circumstances.
When Aaron Stainthorpe’s daughter was diagnosed with cancer, his world fell apart, and so did his band. Now, finally, the future is starting to look a little brighter
T hey look, once more, like brothers in arms. Sitting in the spaciously modern bar of an upmarket Kings Cross hotel, My Dying Bride frontman Aaron Stainthorpe and guitarist Andrew Craighan trade quips and anecdotes with the fluency you’d expect from two men whose fates have been entwined for three decades. That they’re here today at all, however, with a still-functioning band, a 14th album (The Ghost Of Orion), and spirits unbroken, if not entirely unscarred, is a triumph in itself – an overcoming of the adversity that threatened to tear the band apart and leave a trail of tragedy in its wake.
In September 2018, with a number of festival appearances lined up, and work underway on the successor to 2015’s Feel The Misery album, Aaron announced that his five-year-old daughter had been diagnosed with cancer the previous year. Ask about the immediate impact, and the flow between Aaron and Andrew shifts into respectful co-existence, each listening intently, gazing just beyond the table in front of them, as the other says his piece.
“When she first got diagnosed, it was a total sense of unreality,” says Aaron, tuning into an internal frequency, as though he’s still trying to process the experience. “I kept asking: ‘Why us? Why is this happening? She’s five years old, for fuck’s sake!’ I had headaches all day every day, because it’s like trying to work out a mathematical equation where someone has told you that there isn’t an answer, but you’ve still got to work it out.
“So there was no way I could write anything. There was no room for any creativity at all. It was process, process, process: ‘What’s going on? Why are we doing this? That kid looks worse than our kid, I hope their parents are alright.’ Because when you’re in hospital, all the kids have got bald heads and tubes up their noses. My daughter was the oldest child on the ward, and you just think, ‘Fuck me, this is hard work.’” F
or Andrew, as a bandmate and a friend, that sense of powerlessness, if at a remove, instilled its own process of desperate soul-searching.
“It wasn’t the same, as you can imagine,” he says. “But the disconnection was weird because there’s a certain element of guilt that you feel guilty for feeling, because there is no help to offer. Aaron rang us and told us, and afterwards you process
what you’ve just heard and said, even though you really mean it, but you realise everything you said meant nothing ultimately. You really are helpless. But immediately after the dust has settled and the shock has become a reality, you’ve got to get a bit pragmatic about it. I thought, ‘How can we help?’ And the help that we could offer was to cancel all our shows for him. There were bad things happening internally at the time, but we just had to keep everything band-related from him as best we could.”
With Aaron’s daughter still undergoing treatment, and with Andrew holding the fort creatively as best he could, guitarist Calvin Robertshaw emailed Andrew out of the blue to say he was stepping down from the band, soon followed out of the door by drummer Shaun Taylor-steels. That left Andrew to write what would ultimately become The Ghost Of Orion by himself.
“It’s amazing what people will do,” says Andrew, still marked by the exasperation. “They have no fucking scruples or consciences, it seems. I still haven’t got full answers because, particularly with Calvin, it’s not as if we were having disagreements in rehearsals. Everything was fine before the email. I asked, ‘What the fuck for?’
And he wouldn’t respond to me. I think the pressure broke Shaun. We’ve spoken since; he said his piece, we’ve said our piece, and thankfully everything is OK, with Shaun anyway. I’ll never speak to Calvin again, but at the time I could not grasp what was taking place.”
Even though he “genuinely didn’t know if My Dying Bride was coming back”, Andrew started writing alone, arranging the tracks, picking away at them piece by piece until producer Mark Mynett suggested former Paradise Lost drummer Jeff Singer as a replacement for Calvin.
“He came in, no tears, no drama, and within a couple of weeks it was done,” Andrew recalls. “He revived our morale and our fortunes a bit, because suddenly we had drums to guide the guitar, and I could go back to Aaron and say we’ve got something, here’s something positive in his life at fucking last.”
or Aaron and his family, fortunes were slowly starting to turn around as well. “Andrew had been emailing bits of music while I’d been at the hospital, but I just wasn’t interested,” he recalls. “Then things started moving in the right direction. The first major operation took the mass out and that was great, but it burst all over the place so she needed another operation. But then she started to get a little bit of fuzzy hair back on her head. I photographed her every day, so you’ve got this animation of her hair going ‘Whoosh!’, which is brilliant!
“Then the tube came out of her nose and she took a first bite of solid food in about nine months. She threw it all up, obviously, but I was thinking,
“I DIDN’T KNOW IF MY DYING BRIDE WAS COMING BACK”
AARON STAINTHORPE