Olaf Tyaransen On Aiden Lambert: “He Was My High Priest Of Forgiveness”

They say that a friend is someone who'll help you move, but a great friend is someone who'll help you move a body. Thankfully, I never had to ask Aiden Lambert – who passed away on December 20th, following a losing bout with a particularly aggressive cancer – to help me move any bodies, but I suspect he wouldn't have hesitated if I'd made that call. Though he might have respectfully told me where to go if I'd asked him to assist me in digging a hole in the ground.

Truly, Aiden was one of my greatest friends. Throughout the 23 years I had the pleasure and privilege of knowing this charming Dubliner, we never once had a falling out. In the sometimes murky pools of rock 'n' roll, media and politics, in which we both often swam, that's really saying something.

Handsome, quick-witted and blessed with the gift of the gab, Aiden worked in the Hot Press advertising department in the 1980s, which was a few years before my time (he later moved to The Phoenix). However, we still met through the magazine. In October 1992, at the tender age of 21, I was despatched by Niall Stokes to New York to cover the misadventures of then-unsigned Dublin pop/rock outfit Blink, at the CMJ Seminar.

Aiden was the elder brother of Blink frontman Dermot Lambert, and also their manager. I flew from Dublin with the band. The first time I laid eyes on him – a friendly, welcoming face, grinning like a Cheshire cat – was in the arrivals hall in JFK. Totally attuned to our needs and desires, he had organised the limo, the hip hotel, and all the other things he knew we'd enjoy. We couldn't have asked for a better guide to Manhattan.

From the very moment I shook his hand, we had an instant bond. It soon transpired that we were both born on February 10th, albeit in different decades (he was born in 1959; I arrived in 1971). Generally I'm sceptical about astrology, but we were very much typical Aquarians with mostly matching personalities. Despite our 12-year age-gap, we had a lot in common. It wasn't until Dermot mentioned it at his funeral that I remembered that we both shared Paul as a middle name. Makes perfect sense.

We were firm friends forever after that New York meeting. In the years that followed, we had many wonderful conversations and adventures in Dublin and NYC. I can't recall ever meeting him anywhere else. And mostly we met at night.
We have both always led ridiculously complicated lives, usually through our shared insistence on living life on our own terms, but at least we entertained each other with our various woes. There were defeats, but there were many victories, too.

Genuinely, I think that Aiden may well be the only human being I've encountered to whom I never once had to explain myself. We totally got one another. No matter what I'd done, or how badly or misguidedly I'd behaved, he always made a reasonable excuse for me ("Look, Olaf… you're a man at the end of the day. What the fuck did she expect you to do?"). He was my high priest of forgiveness. I mean no offence to Dermot or any of the rest of his many Lambert siblings when I say that I considered him a brother.

Witty, wise and incredibly well-connected, he was always something of an international man of mystery, regularly flitting between Ireland and the US. He manged Blink and Mark Geary, and had various managerial dealings with all sorts of other bands. He promoted gigs, freelanced, moonlighted, wrote occasional articles, rented real estate.

He was the kind of guy who always had something interesting happening. He and Dermot once bought the wood of the old Ha'penny Bridge and attempted to sell it piece by piece in America, along with certificates of authenticity. That one didn't work out so well (most of the bridge is still rotting in Dermot's back garden), but other business schemes were more successful.

I last saw him on November 28th in his sister Collette's house in Dublin, where he was, in palliative parlance, "actively dying" in a downstairs bedroom. He didn't look so great, but still had his hair – and his eyes were still shining bright. At the time, the doctors reckoned he probably had only a few days left, but he hung in there for another three weeks.

Carlsberg don't do fond final farewells, but if they did, it couldn't have been as good or heartfelt as ours. We chatted for a while about different things – initially his adult son, Danny, and Danny's mother Susan, and my own young children, Jack and Layla, and their mother, Leigh. He spoke about his beloved ex-wife Natalie. I'd bumped into his old girlfriend Rachel in Grogan's some weeks earlier and told her to get in touch with him. She had, and he was grateful for that. So was she.

I'd been having some personal trouble, which he was well aware of, and he had some great advice for me. Aiden always had great advice. He also had an interesting take on the Web Summit moving to Lisbon. Aiden always had an interesting take on everything.

He was totally accepting of his impending death. Our relationship being what it was, I was able to ask him, "So… what do you reckon happens next?"
"You mean after I die?" he replied. "Well, there's no deathbed conversion happening here, but I'm holding out for something. And if there's nothing, I won't know about it."

We talked about the possibilities of parallel universes, heavens, nirvanas, hells and all the other stuff. Our conclusion? Who knows? But he was definitely going to find out before me.

I'd asked the very same question of Mr. Nice author Howard Marks – another old friend with terminal cancer – at our public interview at the Metropolis Festival in the RDS, a couple of weeks earlier.

Howard had said that, while he didn't think his personality would survive, a small part of him would remain existing as a part of the universe. Aiden seemed happy enough with that possibility.

There were no tears when we hugged goodbye, just sadness at a long and happy friendship coming to its conclusion. One of the last things he said to me was, "Keep an ear out for a tap on the window on our birthday. If there's something there, I'll try to let you know."

His well-attended funeral, held in Churchtown just a couple of days before Christmas, was like a who's-who of the Irish music and media industries. A good number of them had last congregated at George Byrne's funeral. Another good man gone too soon.

At Danny's request, which I was very grateful for, I did the offertory commentary as various friends brought up significant items to symbolise Aiden's interesting and eventful life. Damien Corless brought newspapers and an encyclopaedia to symbolise his impressive knowledge of, and curiosity about, this mad world we live in. Gill Duffy brought up his favourite Chanel cologne to symbolise his innate sense of style.

Ian O'Doherty brought up a photograph Aiden had taken of his beloved Manhattan, where he lived for so many years. Arthur Mathews offered a Father Ted DVD in a nod to Aiden's quick wit and wonderful sense of humour. Muriel Clinton brought up a psychotherapy textbook to acknowledge his skills at listening, conversation and advice (Aiden was in the final stages of training as a psychotherapist when he first became ill six months ago).

Ironically, his brother-in-law Tom Mangan was supposed to bring up a Blink CD, but the copy of 1998's sophomore album The End Is High had gone missing. So Tom came up apologetically holding his hands in the rectangular shape of a CD. I said something along the lines of, "An invisible album? Well, that pretty much sums it up." Dermot was facing me in the front row and I could see him laugh.
Aiden would have laughed too. A week after The End Is High was named Billboard's ‘Pick of the Week', their American record company went bust. All that hard work for nothing. An invisible album. Same old rock ‘n' roll story.
Bittersweet stuff. If that hadn't happened, things could have been very, very different for Aiden and Dermot, and it's quite possible that we wouldn't all have been glumly gathered in a Dublin church on a cold December morning last week. But such is life. Sometimes your planets align, and sometimes they don't. Blink and you can miss them.

Aiden Lambert was a genuine once-off. But only just. His son Danny looks, sounds and acts uncannily like him. He described Aiden as a wonderful father in his emotional eulogy… and nobody in the congregation doubted it. He was a father-figure to a lot of other people, but he was always a proper father to Danny.
I consider myself lucky to have known him. I loved him like the February 10th brother he was. And I'll be keeping an ear out for a tap on the window on our next birthday. Whether I hear it or not is irrelevant. If there is a guarded gate to an afterlife, I already know that Aiden will have left my name on the door. Probably plus two.
RIP, brother…

AIDEN LAMBERT, 1959-2015. RIP.