It wasn t until the actual day of his funeral that I first heard the news that Derek Purple DJ, promoter, writer and mad-haired wizard of the Irish counterculture had been killed in a car crash in Galway on New Year s Eve.
I had called a friend to wish her a happy new year, when she expressed surprise that I wasn t in Cork. Why would I be in Cork? I asked, completely nonplussed. Well, for the funeral, of course she replied, as if I should know.
Before she actually said his name, I had already put the mental connections together and figured out that she could only be talking about Derek Purple (his real surname was Bruton but everybody preferred the surreal one). I asked the usual stuff you ask when? where? how? and then I asked her the same question that everybody I subsequently passed the bad news baton onto asked me: Was it before or after midnight that he died? It seemed very important to everybody that Derek Purple had made it into the new millennium. As it happens, he had, though not for very long. It was a small comfort.
I have wonderful memories of Derek. We used to hang out together in Galway, in the early 1990 s, when the city was still artistically and culturally vibrant, and its summers truly were summers of love. I can t recall the exact circumstances of our first meeting (though I can hazard a herbal guess) but I can vividly remember myriad other magical mushroom nights spent in Purple s haze. Witty, charming, musically literate and shockingly well read, you were never bored or stuck for something to talk about when you were in Derek s company (actually, Derek s court). He was hugely entertaining, a Cork charmer blessed with a character as colourful as his adopted moniker. I dedicated a poem in my first book to him. Derek wrote a lot as well thoughts, poems, stories but more for his own amusement. He was good, too. Funny. Trippy.
In 1993, Derek was instrumental in setting up WIPED one of Galway s first real dance clubs alongside people like Chris Orr, Shane Daly Hughes and Chris s girlfriend Una (I can t recall her surname). The night ran successfully for a couple of years (they used to bring up-and-coming DJ s like Sugarsweet s David Holmes and Ian McCready down to play) before becoming a casualty of Galway s Great Club War. In the mid-1990 s, Galway s alternative club scene managed to eat itself in an incredibly petty clash of egos, greed, begrudgery and general nastiness. Nobody emerged smelling of roses.
At the time I was editing The Word, a local freesheet, and so was caught in the middle of it all. It was horribly frustrating. If The Word gave one club a good review, all the other clubs kicked up like spoilt children, calling around to my office and demanding to know why they weren t being given the same attention. I used to tell them all to fuck off. It was pathetic. Eventually I quit the paper. Derek had already left town in disgust.
From then on, I read about Derek more often than I met him. He had set up some kind of dance collective called the Horny Organ Tribe with Tonie Walsh in Dublin and was making a bit of a name for himself as a DJ. Their Elevator nights in the Ormond Multimedia Centre were always jammed and magazines like D Side, Hot Press and the Dublin Events Guide often wrote features about HOT s activities and printed his picture. We d meet occasionally in Dublin, usually in The Globe bar, but the friendship wasn t quite the same. By the time I moved to Dublin, Derek had already upped sticks and moved back to Cork. I saw him less and less frequently.
The last time we met was just a few months ago, in Neachtain s Pub in Galway. Perhaps it was because it was Galway, or maybe it was just the good moods we were both in, but briefly it seemed like old times again. He slagged me off for having turned into a media whore. I told him to get a haircut. We argued about the merits of Alex Garland s The Beach (I liked it, Derek thought it ran out of steam towards the end) and various other books and albums. He was well up to date on everything.
We also spoke about our Millennium plans. Bah humbug! was his attitude, it s going to be an anti-climax. I m sure the irony of the date of his death would have greatly amused him (hopefully it still is and he s enjoying a cosmic giggle somewhere).
Derek is survived by his father Sean, his sister Linda and his daughter Athena. She must be about 12 or 13 now. I never met her but he spoke of her often and I know that he loved and missed her very much. I loved him too, as did Terry, Sara and their kids (his second family), Tim Murphy, and countless others. There really was nobody else quite like him. There was certainly no other hairstyle quite like his! Derek Purple may not have lasted long into this new millennium but his memory certainly will. n
Olaf Tyaransen