“This One’s For Liz Knowles!”

If you have heard the latest edition of Richard Herring’s Leicester Square Theatre Podcast with guest Neil Hannon – it’s here if you haven’t – then you might have noticed a dedication to Liz Knowles at the start. As well as being widely recognised as the world’s most ardent and devoted fan of The Divine Comedy, an indefatigable presence on the live comedy scene, a theatreland fixture who casually outdid the glitz and glamour of the entire West End with her default fashion choices and apparently able to communicate telepathically with cats, Liz was, more importantly, my close friend since way back in our student days and I miss her terribly. This is a slightly edited version of what I posted on Facebook once I had finally got my head around the news, and the fact that someone I had never met commented “This was Liz, yes” meant an enormous amount to me. So thank you to Rich, a shout out to Rob and while this may have little to do with what most people visit my website for, I make no apologies for posting it and hope you appreciate it. The photo above, incidentally, was taken when Liz suddenly decided from nowhere and for no apparent reason to go and see Graham Coxon ‘as a cat’. If you knew Liz, no further explanation will be necessary or, well, possible.

I’ve had to think quite a bit about what to say about Liz because, in some ways, I come from a different part of her life. Most of the tributes have been rooted in her love of theatre and comedy and her effortless ability to steal an entire group photo just by standing there and being herself. When we first met as students, though, she wasn’t quite the unfailingly glam social buccaneer we all knew and loved. She was shyer, more low-key and dressed quite hippyish if anything, but the signs were already there. I have a very fond memory of – and wish I still had – a letter that she wrote to me during the Easter vacation once taking issue with the logistics behind that McVitie’s advert with the slogan “you’d have to go a long long way to find a better biscuit”, which she found infuriatingly baffling and absurd and tried to explain why this annoyed her so much in pseudo-scientific terms. I also equally fondly recall one occasion when we went to see Sean Hughes at the Neptune Theatre; a load of my friends ‘from home’ were in the bar at the show and I was quite astonished when she suddenly came thrillingly and vividly alive in the middle of the massive cross-talking conversation, which was the first time I ever really saw the Liz we all knew and loved. I’m not going to take any credit for that, but I will take credit for one thing – it was me who introduced Liz to The Divine Comedy. I’d bought Liberation after hearing Damon Albarn enthusing about it on the Radio 1 Evening Session review of 1993, long before they had any actual hits, and insisted on playing it to anyone who would listen. I have no idea how true this was, but Liz always did claim that she still had the cassette that I did her of the Indulgence No. 1 and 2 EP‘s. I’ve no doubt there will be some people reading this who only ever knew Liz because of The Divine Comedy so in a roundabout way I’m touched to have given you all that too.

In fact, that’s what has been astonishing me over the past couple of days – the sheer number of different people who knew Liz entirely independently without realising that they did – every single status I’ve seen has had me thinking “…what?” every three or four names down the replies and reactions. As for us, we were close friends for pushing thirty years, and even on the occasions when she thought I was in the wrong – although she sometimes surprised me by taking my side even when I hadn’t myself – Liz was always prepared to at least hear me out even when it felt like nobody else would, and firmly believed that there was no dispute between people she liked that couldn’t be sorted out. Inevitably there are a lot of stories that aren’t for public consumption, but here’s one that I really do need to share, and I’m not sure that the other person involved even knows this. We were never exactly backwards in coming forwards about celebrating and commiserating over the highs and lows of our respective love lives, until one evening when Liz messaged me excitably reporting that she thought she might have caught the eye of ‘this guy Rob who’s always at all the comedy shows’. When it quickly became evident that in a staggering coincidence I also knew Rob, she replied “we can’t talk about that then… let’s just talk about everything else instead!”. And we did. So I’ll just close with my favourite memory – whenever Liz stumbled across a record she remembered me having pulled out of a charity shop all those years ago, she would send me a photo of it. So perhaps it wasn’t really a different part of her life after all. We were all just as important to Liz, in the absolute best possible sense.